From Material Silos to Thematic Pillars: Designing a Virtual Community of Practice for European Craft Heritage

The European crafts ecosystem faces critical structural threats, declining practitioner numbers, weakening intergenerational transmission, limited digital literacy, and competition from industrial imitation. Existing online craft communities are narrowly material-specific and structurally illsuited to the cross-disciplinary dialogue required for systemic sector transformation. This paper presents the design, iterative development, and pilot evaluation of the Craeft Community, a multi-stakeholder Virtual Community of Prac-tice (VCoP) developed within the Horizon Europe CRAEFT project. Three research questions guided the study: how a multi-stakeholder VCoP should be structured to overcome disciplinary fragmentation; to what extent a stewarded digital forum can operationalize Situated Learning and Communities of Practice theory and what factors facilitate or inhib-it engagement and post-funding sustainability. Using design-based research, the platform evolved through four iterative phases, culminating in restructuring from a material-based architecture into five transversal thematic pillars, driven by survey evidence from 151 European craft professionals and systematic stakeholder feedback. The pilot phase yielded 86 registered members, 31 posts, and 27 interactions, with Transmission & Training as the most engaged pillar. Qualitative analysis reveals substantive cross-disciplinary discourse alongside a structural Effort-Engagement Gap, a persistent tension between forum partic-ipation demands and the gravitational pull of mainstream social media. The study demonstrates that a thematically organized, stewarded VCoP can meaningfully opera-tionalize apprenticeship-based learning in digital settings, advancing craft heritage preservation, economic resilience, and hybrid professional identity formation at the inter-section of craft and technology.