(Re)collecting Craft: Reviving Materials, Techniques, and Pedagogies of Craft for Computational Makers

This paper examines craft’s foundational relations to materials, techniques, and collaborative modes of teaching and learning, and these can be called upon to strengthen and extend computational craft as practiced in fields like CSCW and HCI. Drawing from literature in HCI, craft studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), we explore craft’s modern formation at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution across three formative sites: Scandinavian Slöyd, British Arts and Crafts, and Japanese Mingei. From this review we identify three key (and still evolving) features: craft’s accountabilities to natural materials and local ecologies; craft’s holistic ways of making with ‘head, heart, and hand’; and craft’s distinctly collaborative and embodied styles of teaching and learning. We then show how these lessons can be applied to contemporary practices and pedagogies of computational making. We argue that doing so can help to rebalance computation’s ecological ties and relations, recenter its practice on a sensorially rich and ‘whole-self’ concept of making, and support more collaborative modes of teaching and learning that are inclusive, relational, and heterogeneous.