In Residency programme: investigating the links between wellbeing and digital crafts

CNC Craft is a small business in North Cornwall run by founder Aaron Moore, a professional furniture maker. The business offers a range of training courses and maker sessions where local people can try their hand at 3D printing, laser cutting and wood engraving.

How did CNC Craft get involved with Smartline?

Aaron’s workshop is the only open access digital workshop for almost 100 miles, running monthly sessions for people in some of the most deprived communities in the UK.

“The sessions give people access to new technology, while promoting digital manufacturing, community resilience, and giving people the chance to be creative.”

“I noticed that people always seem happier when they leave compared to when they arrived, which got me thinking about the connection between digital arts and wellbeing. I contacted the Smartline Project to find out more.”

Smartline jumped at the opportunity to explore the wellbeing effects of digital crafts. The team also wanted to find out if people experienced increased digital confidence. CNC Crafts joined our In Residency programme to start a research study to find out more.

How have digital crafts improved wellbeing?

Our researchers found little existing research into the benefits of digital arts training. This surprised us due to the huge potential for digital design and manufacturing to improve employability and reduce the digital divide.

Smartline funded pilot sessions to carry out new qualitative research, and then continued to collect data over nine months, with 48 people taking part in total.

“We asked participants to complete two questionnaires, one before and one after the session, to rate out how confident, happy, included, skilled, hopeful and happy people felt. The survey also asked about people’s computer literacy and aptitude for creative activities.”

“Across the board we found improvements in people’s feelings of confidence, happiness, skilfulness, hopefulness, and happiness. All positive factors that can improve wellbeing. We found the largest increase in feelings of confidence and skilfulness, even for people who reported low confidence using computers.”

This research collaboration shows promising results that participating in group digital design and manufacturing sessions can be beneficial to both individuals and the community.

“It’s been a great collaborating with Smartline to gather the data we needed. It was a real revelation that it proved the concept and gave our work validation! We have a research paper being published soon with all of the results so watch this space.”

“I hope we can use this research experience and evidence going forward to investigate how our business could get involved with social prescribing, so we can keep supporting people into the future.”

Visit the website to find out more: www.cnccraft.co.uk/makerspace/