A Year of Interaction Around Town: Gathering Traces with an Interactive Knitting Machine and Community Stitch Markers

Devices for digital fabrication are becoming increasingly smaller and more portable, enabling digital fabrication research to move into new environments. In this exploratory research-through-design project, we aimed to physicalize data on-the-go using a portable digital fabrication device, and gathered community annotations and traces of the journey the machine went on with “stitch markers”. We describe the development of The Life of a Small Town, a portable knitting machine that was adapted to knit rows of stitches in response to sensor data. The machine travelled throughout a small town and “popped up” at local art events to sense and physicalize social gatherings held by an arts organization over the period of one year. Individuals participating in events could also decorate their own “stitch markers” to annotate and pin to the data. In this paper we discuss the insights from an analysis of the stitch markers and traces of the year-long journey.