No Paper, No Pencil, No Tape Measure: Situated Craft Practices, Computation, and Automation

Abstract

Our panel seeks to create a space to examine situated hand-making practices occurring within social, cultural, and physical environments, alongside current trends in computation, digitization, and automation. Our purpose is to examine craft practices (hand, mind, and material), computation, and technology through intersecting STS lenses of feminism, post-colonialism, and indigeneity (Banu Subramaniam et al. n.d., 407–33). In conversation with the 2019 4S theme of Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations, we hope to engage in critical discourse around casting analog making practices as, “dirty, [messy], and repetitive,” while casting automation as an innovative means to “better knowledge, insights, and outcomes” (“Autodesk University 2018” n.d.) We ask: How might automation “interrupt” knowledge, participation, and sociality when it comes to craft practices, and the historically marginalized? What methods and conceptual frameworks might we and marginalized communities employ in design and technology to avoid “stripping clean [the] history and culture” of these vulnerable groups? How might these making practices inform new conceptions of feminism, post-colonialism, and indigeneity? We invite works that explore theories, histories and projects around craft, computation, and technology – from education to practice (Risatti 2007; Sennett 2012; Dormer 1997). How might situated practices be a form of resistance against colonialism, automation, their ordering, and their violence toward vulnerable communities? What unique challenges and opportunities do we face as we imagine co-production between craft and automation such that their intertwined histories of power and violence are acknowledged and repaired? Our goal is to develop new perspectives and re-conceptualizations of craft, computation, and automation.

Individual Presentations

• Beyond Representation: Performance in the Craft Practice of Wire-Bending in Trinidad & Tobago - Vernelle A Noel, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Learning CNC Milling: A Gendered Account on "Everyone," Skill and Expertise in DIY Digital Fabrication - Yana Boeva, Nuremberg Institute of Technology

• Vitruvian Hands: A Historical Perspective to the Relationship between Invention and Production - Hayri Dortdivanlioglu, Georgia Institute of Technology

Session Organizer

• Vernelle A Noel, Georgia Institute of Technology