Making Core Memory: Design Inquiry into Gendered Legacies of Engineering and Craftwork

This paper describes the Making Core Memory project, a design inquiry into the invisible work that went into assem-bling core memory, an early form of computer information storage initially woven by hand. Drawing on feminist tradi-tions of situated knowing, we designed an electronic quilt and a series of participatory workshops that materialize the work of the core memory weavers. With this case we not only broaden dominant stories of design, but we also reflect on the entanglement of predominantly male, high status labor with the ostensibly low-status work of women’s hands. By integrating design and archival research as a means of cultural analysis, we further expand conversations on design research methods within human-computer inter-action (HCI), using design to reveal legacies of practice elided by contemporary technology cultures. In doing so, this paper highlights for HCI scholars that worlds of hand-work and computing, or weaving and space travel, are not as separate as we might imagine them to be.