While craft has had increasing influence on HCI research, HCI researchers tend to engage craft in limited capacities, often focusing on the juxtapositions of "traditional" craft and "innovative" computing. In this paper, we describe the structure and results of a six-week "experimental weaving residency" to show how HCI practitioners, engineers, and craftspeople perform similar work and can productively collaborate to envision new technological interfaces at early stages of development. We address both social and technical challenges of residencies and critically reflect on biases about technical and craft labor that we held prior to the residency. We share our experiences and lessons learned in the hopes of supporting future collaborations with craftspeople and broadening the techniques we use to address design challenges.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376820
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2020.acm.org/)