Abstract
Building on craft’s material, narrative, and embodied dimensions—well established in design research—this study explores how textile-based making can foster playful engagement with personal data. As data practices shift beyond performance-oriented dashboards toward more expressive and situated forms, textile craft offers an alternative mode for materializing data through hands-on interaction. We conducted three workshops with participant groups of varying expertise in craft and data—crochet hobbyists, data-science students, and community organisers—with each workshop employing textile techniques tailored to their backgrounds. Our findings show that participants creatively negotiated material constraints and affordances to engage with their data in ways aligned with the playful data engagement framework proposed by Jacob and Buur. We argue that the symbolic flexibility, improvisational ease, and material expressiveness of handcraft-based methods make textile techniques well-suited for providing playful experience with data. We contribute to the design research community by offering design considerations to guide the development of textile-based data physical is ation workshops across diverse participant groups.
Keywords
Textile; Workshop; Data physicalisation; Playful engagement; Personal data
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.784
Citation
Li, C., Zhao, J., Zhu, X., Sato, C.,and Nohara, K.(2025) Crafting Playful Data Engagement: Designing Textile-Based Workshops for Participants from Diverse Backgrounds, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.784
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 11 - Culture and Craft Design for Regenerative Practices
Crafting Playful Data Engagement: Designing Textile-Based Workshops for Participants from Diverse Backgrounds
Building on craft’s material, narrative, and embodied dimensions—well established in design research—this study explores how textile-based making can foster playful engagement with personal data. As data practices shift beyond performance-oriented dashboards toward more expressive and situated forms, textile craft offers an alternative mode for materializing data through hands-on interaction. We conducted three workshops with participant groups of varying expertise in craft and data—crochet hobbyists, data-science students, and community organisers—with each workshop employing textile techniques tailored to their backgrounds. Our findings show that participants creatively negotiated material constraints and affordances to engage with their data in ways aligned with the playful data engagement framework proposed by Jacob and Buur. We argue that the symbolic flexibility, improvisational ease, and material expressiveness of handcraft-based methods make textile techniques well-suited for providing playful experience with data. We contribute to the design research community by offering design considerations to guide the development of textile-based data physical is ation workshops across diverse participant groups.