Digital Craftsmanship: HCI Takes on Technology as an Expressive Medium

Traditional HCI goals like efficiency and ease-of-use, while important, are not sufficient for digital technology to function as an expressive medium. This digital craftsmanship also requires diversity, risk, personal taste, mastery, and respect for materials. We discuss how digital tools can support expressive practices and highlight multiple strands of relevant HCI research. This workshop brings together tool developers, practitioners, ethnographers, and others engaged with digital technology as an expressive medium. It highlights digital craftsmanship as a distinct domain for HCI research and seeks to distill insights and best practices for the HCI community.

[1]  Kimiko Ryokai,et al.  Being the Machine: Reconfiguring Agency and Control in Hybrid Fabrication , 2015, CHI.

[2]  Jie Qi,et al.  Microcontrollers as material: crafting circuits with paper, conductive ink, electronic components, and an "untoolkit" , 2013, TEI '13.

[3]  Casey Reas,et al.  Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture , 2010 .

[4]  Leah Buechley,et al.  Handcrafting textile interfaces from a kit-of-no-parts , 2010, TEI.

[5]  Leah Buechley,et al.  Do-it-yourself cellphones: an investigation into the possibilities and limits of high-tech diy , 2014, CHI.

[6]  Mark D. Gross,et al.  Interactive fabrication: new interfaces for digital fabrication , 2010, TEI.

[7]  Ryan Schmidt,et al.  meshmixer: an interface for rapid mesh composition , 2010, SIGGRAPH '10.

[8]  Malcolm McCullough,et al.  Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand , 1996 .

[9]  Philip J. Guo,et al.  Two studies of opportunistic programming: interleaving web foraging, learning, and writing code , 2009, CHI.

[10]  Eric Paulos,et al.  MetaMorphe: Designing Expressive 3D Models for Digital Fabrication , 2015, Creativity & Cognition.

[11]  Joseph A. Paradiso,et al.  FreeD: a freehand digital sculpting tool , 2013, CHI.

[12]  Steven J. Jackson,et al.  Digital Entanglements: Craft, Computation and Collaboration in Fine Art Furniture Production , 2015, CSCW.

[13]  Leah Buechley,et al.  Crafting technology: Reimagining the processes, materials, and cultures of electronics , 2012, TCHI.

[14]  Amit Zoran,et al.  Hybrid Practice in the Kalahari: Design Collaboration through Digital Tools and Hunter-Gatherer Craft , 2015, CHI.

[15]  J. G. Tanenbaum,et al.  Democratizing technology: pleasure, utility and expressiveness in DIY and maker practice , 2013, CHI.

[16]  Leah Buechley,et al.  Codeable objects: computational design and digital fabrication for novice programmers , 2013, CHI.