Hand in Hand: A Situated Reflection About Knowledge Mobilization Between Textile and Digital

摘要

Mobilizing knowledge between textile crafters and engineering students had a transformative power that made us reflect, recognize, and open up to other ways of doing, knowing, engineering, and designing; rethink ourselves with others; and reconfigure how we design and how we teach and learn design in HCI. The times of the textile crafts intervened with the immediacy of the digital. The students recognized that, like textiles, the digital also requires undoing, mending, and starting over; this coming and going is what gives value, beyond the functional, to the designed artifacts. The crafters got involved, designed interfaces with digital textile materialities, recognizing the value of their knowledge and the not so expected closeness between the computational and the textile. From an academic perspective, we discovered that it is also possible to design and engineer speculations, fictions [5], and fabulations [6] without necessarily seeking to solve problems but rather through reflective, critical practice.