Digital tufting bee: expanding computational design boundaries through collective material practice and social play

ABSTRACT

This paper questions design priorities in computational systems and proposes that social aspects of material practice are overlooked in existing computational design practices. An interactive fabrication system designed for this project: Digital Tufting Bee centres on machine tufting, an adaptation of the handcrafting technique for making voluminous folds of yarn. The word ‘Bee’ refers to a quilting tradition in which a group comes together to quilt; I use this term to emphasize communal effort, shared decision-making and collective meaning-making in computational design processes. Building on literature in Science and Technology Studies, I argue that collective material practice and social play deepen human engagement in making processes and further challenge existing orders of computational design processes. By collecting and analysing qualitative data from three tufting workshops, I observed that uncertainties of yarn, conversation during making, tendencies to leave space for others, and exchange of crafting skills brought valuable meaning to interactive tufting. This paper concludes that as long as researchers involve communal aspects of making to connect makers, tools, materials and their communities, computational making could challenge the dominant design paradigm. Based on these findings, promising areas of further study include rituals of gift giving and collective textile repair in material practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Interactive fabrication
• tufting
• social engagement
• crafting
• social play

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://processing.org/

2 https://glitch.com/

3 I reflect on the current culture of knowledge ownership in academia where researchers need to claim their achievement to prove their self-value even if the work is built on collective effort or traditional knowledge.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Rackham Graduate Student Research.

Notes on contributors

Yi-Chin Lee

Yi-Chin Lee is a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Yi-Chin's research focuses on computational design and textile fabrication. She developed knitted material systems and social participatory design frameworks for building a playful and sensory environment. Her doctoral research aims to reimagine the computational design process as one that invites community engagement.