Collaborating With Materials: Human-Material Design of New Technologies Through Fiber Crafts

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Learning With New Qualitative Methods in the Posthuman Turn

Abstract

Purpose and perspectives: The field of computer supported collaborative learning has a history of investigating high quality collaborative learning processes between people as well as how computational materials can support collaborative learning (e.g., Stahl, 2013; Yrjönsuuri et al., 2019). However, emergent posthumanist perspectives that view materials as active agents (e.g., Barad, 2003) and technology as being produced through routinized actions (e.g., Wajcman, 2010) offer an opportunity for an alternative theorization of the players within collaborative learning processes. A promising context for exploring these perspectives for CSCL are fiber crafts, which have historically been connected to technology advancements (e.g., Essinger, 2004) and show evidence of materials shaping crafting as computational doing (Keune, 2020). Our study explores these emerging perspectives and their implications for CSCL, illustrating ongoing human-material collaborative processes that produced technological newness.

Methods: Our qualitative study stands in the context of a larger study whose purpose was to examine the intersections of craft and math, with implications for more inclusive learning environments to support lifelong math learning. The present study expands this work by taking a fresh look at previously analyzed data from a new theoretical lens. We thematically analyzed 65 semi-structured interviews with adult crafters engaged in a range of crafts (e.g., knitting, crochet, quilting) to investigate how crafters report how they and materials work together to produce technology inventions. Additionally, we analyzed 397 pictures of artifacts and crafters’ workspaces, taken at the time of the interview, to reconstruct and further theorize the collaborative invention process over time.

Results: The findings included three themes that show how materials as much as crafters become active participants in human-material collaboration that produce technological newness: 1) Texturing described how crafters’ sense of touch and the tangible qualities of materials drove the production of new techniques. 2) Decorating described how crafter’s vision and the visible qualities of materials drove new technology. 3) Remixing described how crafters' sense of traditional techniques and characteristics of modern materials produce yet new crafting techniques. For instance, Diana (pseudonym) a 53-year-old quilter spoke about texturing as carefully attending to and working with the materials that then produced a new technique: “That’s called fussy cutting, when you’re paying attention to what the fabric is trying to do, and you’re using it to your best advantage to kind of achieve your design.” The surface composition of the fabric and Diana’s touch together textured “fussy cutting” into becoming, making it possible to paint with fabric (see Figure 1). Rather than being separate entities, the human-fabric collaboration became one unit that produced the technique.

Significance: The study has implications for collaborative learning in providing an additional lens to examine collaborative processes by considering the active role of materials in the collaborative process. Furthermore, if we think of collaborative learning in the way of people collaborating with materials, we can uncover some new ways of thinking about technological inventiveness and how tools and materials contribute to collaborative practice.

Authors

• Anna Keune, Technical University of Munich

• Kylie A. Peppler, University of California - Irvine