Combining Practices in Craft and Design

Abstract

Combining practices of craft and tangible interaction design opens up new opportunities for both domains. But structuring cross-domain collaboration between the two poses challenges. How can we set up a crafter-designer collaboration to utilize the different fields of expertise and include separate practices? We address this question through a co-design research approach that stands in context with existing work discussed. We propose a design perspective that builds on an initial distinction between the collaborators, repositions the construction of the brief, and culminates into a collaboration through the shared object. This perspective is described in a collaboration between an interaction designer and a ceramic artist. The resulting collaboration model is presented through this co-design driven collaborative case study in pottery and interaction design that exemplifies collaborative practices to improve tangible designs.