Crafting Material Interfaces

My reading concerns a project by Daniela Rosner and Kimiko Ryokai that attempts to weave something of the process of making a handcrafted object such as a knit into the fabric of the knit itself. More specifically, Rosner and Ryokai wants to weave the memories in the form of audio, visual as well as textual recordings into the pattern of the knit. In some ways, what Rosner and Ryokai has done is to see the knitted yarn as a linear temporal strand, a timeline upon which experiences can be embedded into.

The system setup

Called Spyn, the project employs a rotary encoder attached to the yarn basket, which tracks the amount of yarn being used. The yarn has been preprinted with dots of infrared ink spaced regularly apart. As the knitter knits, the rotary encoder tracks the number of dots pulled through per unit measure of yarn. The dots also provide a kind of trackable resolution onto the knitted surface. A IR enabled camera captures video, image and audio, which are stored in the core computing system attached to the rotary encoder. This system also stores data that is automatically collected, such as GPS.

How it performed

Each knitting session involved semi-structured interviews, a first-used trial in which the knitters familiarize themselves with the system, and a knitting session where the knitters make something. The users are also moved around from location to location to observe mobile knitting and collect location data points.

Some users collect data in a diaristic manner, using the sensors to record the lengthy knit process over a given length of time, using photographs. Another used Spyn to make connections between two disparate things, between baked cookies and a knitted scarf.

The data that is recorded onto the knit is accessed via a touchscreen, which displays a photographed image of the knit upon which points of data are highlighted. When the user touches these points with his/her finger, the specific recordings are brought up.

Additional Readings

Daniela K. Rosner. Mediated crafts: digital practices around creative handwork. CHI EA ’10 Proceedings of the 28th of the international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. (http://bit.ly/sU67fK)

Daniela K. Rosner & Kimiko Ryokai. Reflections on craft: probing the creative process of everyday knitters. C&C ’09 Proceeding of the seventh ACM conference on Creativity and cognition. (http://bit.ly/sqjYpC)

Powerpoint and PDF links

PDF (http://www.flipdrive.com/file/211d251832cdf37171127fd7d001.pdf)

PPT (http://www.flipdrive.com/file/06a0830ceabc5b82a53fb3b3cdc.pptx)