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Urban Knitters on Interweaving Craft, Technologies and Urban Participation

Published: 26 June 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Technologies are increasingly reaching areas of everyday life that were previously separated from the digital world, including traditional crafts. HCI work has explored hybrid craft as activities that manipulate smart materials for interactive physical outcomes. This however, excludes the ways in which traditional crafts become hybrid through other related uses of digital technologies. This paper discusses how urban knitting, a collaborative textile craft augmenting public space, incorporates various online practices to facilitate urban participation. We conducted a survey with 40 urban knitters to identify the roles technologies play in their practices. The results illustrate how the participants use digital tools for personal inspiration, global collaboration, individual self-expression and collective meaning-making around their craft. Through discussing how technologies can re-contextualise creative craft practices, we contribute insights into how a wider understanding of hybrid craft is needed to embrace new design opportunities within this hybrid realm of urban citizenship.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Traditional Crafts. A Literature Review Focused on Sustainable DevelopmentCulture. Society. Economy. Politics10.2478/csep-2022-00022:1(10-27)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2023
  • (2023)Tangible, Public, and Miniature Creative Exchanges: What HCI and Design Researchers Can Learn From the Free Little Art Gallery MovementProceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition10.1145/3591196.3593433(413-428)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
  • (2023)Bamboo Agents: Exploring the Potentiality of Digital Craft by Decoding and Recoding ProcessProceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3569009.3572746(1-13)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2023
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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    C&T '17: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies
    June 2017
    345 pages
    ISBN:9781450348546
    DOI:10.1145/3083671
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    • CNRS: Centre National De La Rechercue Scientifique

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 26 June 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. Crafts
    2. guerrilla knitting
    3. hybrid craft
    4. social media
    5. technology integration
    6. urban knitting
    7. urban participation
    8. yarnbombing

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    • Research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

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    C&T '17
    C&T '17: Communities and Technologies 2017
    June 26 - 30, 2017
    Troyes, France

    Acceptance Rates

    C&T '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 34 of 66 submissions, 52%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 183 submissions, 44%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Traditional Crafts. A Literature Review Focused on Sustainable DevelopmentCulture. Society. Economy. Politics10.2478/csep-2022-00022:1(10-27)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2023
    • (2023)Tangible, Public, and Miniature Creative Exchanges: What HCI and Design Researchers Can Learn From the Free Little Art Gallery MovementProceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition10.1145/3591196.3593433(413-428)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Bamboo Agents: Exploring the Potentiality of Digital Craft by Decoding and Recoding ProcessProceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3569009.3572746(1-13)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2023
    • (2022)Learning with Stitch Samplers: Exploring Stitch Samplers as Contextual Instructions for E-textile TutorialsProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533488(949-965)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
    • (2021)MelodieACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/344469914:1(1-30)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2021
    • (2020)Dowry Patterns: Re-thinking the Collective Digital Craft-making as a LanguageCompanion Publication of the 2020 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3406865.3418324(215-219)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2020
    • (2018)Knitting Feminist Politics: Exploring a Yarn-Bombing Performance in a Postdisaster CityJournal of Communication Inquiry10.1177/019685991775341942:2(138-165)Online publication date: 18-Jan-2018
    • (2018)A Schnittmuster for Crafting Context-Sensitive ToolkitsProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3173725(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018

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