Abstract
Combining practices of craft and interaction design opens up new opportunities for both domains but structuring such cross-domain collaboration poses challenges. How to set up a crafter-designer collaboration to utilize the different fields of expertise and include separate practices? We address this question through a co-design research approach. First, we present an overview over existing approaches. Then, we propose our perspective that builds on an initial distinction between the collaborators, repositions the construction of the brief, and culminates into a collaboration through the shared object. Finally, we describe a successful collaboration between an interaction designer and a ceramic artist to support our model. We present a collaboration model that builds on distinct expertise, evolves through a design-based brief, and realizes through a shared dialectic object. We present this through a case study in pottery but we argue that the model is not tied to a particular craft technique and transferable to other collaborative settings in this field.
Keywords
craft; physical computing; design collaboration
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.537
Citation
Nitsche, M., and Zheng, C. (2018) Combining Practices in Craft and Design, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.537
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Combining Practices in Craft and Design
Combining practices of craft and interaction design opens up new opportunities for both domains but structuring such cross-domain collaboration poses challenges. How to set up a crafter-designer collaboration to utilize the different fields of expertise and include separate practices? We address this question through a co-design research approach. First, we present an overview over existing approaches. Then, we propose our perspective that builds on an initial distinction between the collaborators, repositions the construction of the brief, and culminates into a collaboration through the shared object. Finally, we describe a successful collaboration between an interaction designer and a ceramic artist to support our model. We present a collaboration model that builds on distinct expertise, evolves through a design-based brief, and realizes through a shared dialectic object. We present this through a case study in pottery but we argue that the model is not tied to a particular craft technique and transferable to other collaborative settings in this field.