Digital tufting bee: expanding computational design boundaries through collective material practice and social play

ABSTRACT This paper questions design priorities in computational systems and proposes that social aspects of material practice are overlooked in existing computational design practices. An interactive fabrication system designed for this project: Digital Tufting Bee centres on machine tufting, an adaptation of the handcrafting technique for making voluminous folds of yarn. The word ‘Bee’ refers to a quilting tradition in which a group comes together to quilt; I use this term to emphasize communal effort, shared decision-making and collective meaning-making in computational design processes. Building on literature in Science and Technology Studies, I argue that collective material practice and social play deepen human engagement in making processes and further challenge existing orders of computational design processes. By collecting and analysing qualitative data from three tufting workshops, I observed that uncertainties of yarn, conversation during making, tendencies to leave space for others, and exchange of crafting skills brought valuable meaning to interactive tufting. This paper concludes that as long as researchers involve communal aspects of making to connect makers, tools, materials and their communities, computational making could challenge the dominant design paradigm. Based on these findings, promising areas of further study include rituals of gift giving and collective textile repair in material practices.