Abstract
Craft traditions have motivated recent scholarship and projects by practices and pedagogies with diverse research agendas in digital fabrication. In this work, the technical complexity of a traditional craft is explored through a conceptual lens such as automation, software development, or knowledge encapsulation. Despite the varied research landscape, many of these projects focus on the craft artifact itself and disengage from the broader ecologies in which it is traditionally creat-ed. In this paper, we establish a positioning framework for craft-based digital work and introduce new terminology to define its theoretical boundaries and to disambiguate the increasingly crowded space of “digital crafts.” We present and apply our framework to an architectural scale project based on bobbin lace that demonstrates an alternative to the artifact-centered approach to using tradition-al crafts in contemporary digital practices.
Keywords
digital craft; material culture; textiles; fabrication
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1057
Citation
Elberfeld, N., Tessmer, L., and Waller, A. (2024) Beyond braiding: Transcending artifact-centered conceptions of craft in digital fabrication, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1057
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Beyond braiding: Transcending artifact-centered conceptions of craft in digital fabrication
Craft traditions have motivated recent scholarship and projects by practices and pedagogies with diverse research agendas in digital fabrication. In this work, the technical complexity of a traditional craft is explored through a conceptual lens such as automation, software development, or knowledge encapsulation. Despite the varied research landscape, many of these projects focus on the craft artifact itself and disengage from the broader ecologies in which it is traditionally creat-ed. In this paper, we establish a positioning framework for craft-based digital work and introduce new terminology to define its theoretical boundaries and to disambiguate the increasingly crowded space of “digital crafts.” We present and apply our framework to an architectural scale project based on bobbin lace that demonstrates an alternative to the artifact-centered approach to using tradition-al crafts in contemporary digital practices.