With rapid economic growth in countries across the world, people’s lifestyle and mindset have changed accordingly. An increasing variety of folk arts and traditional handicrafts are vanishing, eroded by modern industrial civilization and replaced by massively produced cheap goods. Many traditional handicrafts are declining and dying, and superb craftsmanship encapsulating wisdom of humanity is lost due to the deteriorating living environment. This is an irreversible huge loss of wealth shared by humanity. Our civilizations are the creation of our minds and hands. Handicrafts represent an exhaustible source of human wisdom. It is our urgent task to preserve traditional handicrafts and pass them on to future generations.

The UNESCO Chair on World Traditional Handicrafts: Inheritance and Innovation is an active response to the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as well as the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The institution hosting the Chair works with other institution of higher learning, governments, trade associations, professionals, practitioners of traditional handicraft and designers among others to build an international training network with the theme of the inheritance and innovation of traditional handicraft worldwide as well as new creativity and new practices. The Chair aims at providing a cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary, and diversified high-quality education platform for creative design, transformation and development of traditional handcrafts.

The Chair revolves around the inheritance and innovation of traditional handicrafts worldwide. It aims at building the creativity, competitiveness and original design capacity of crafts inheritors and practitioners (particularly women) in modern society, and at facilitating the application and transformation of traditional handicrafts in contemporary settings. For this purpose, cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary, and diversified forms of training are employed. The Chair incorporates modern expressions of creative design and consumption ideas, builds an effective training mechanism and teaching system, shares academic and education achievements, and provides good practices through the application of research results and greater efforts in capacity building.