Craft, Making + Computation

Craft and Making

This research examines the embodied, socio-cultural, and technological forces that impact craft and making practices, the building trades, and their communities through grounded approaches that include ethnography, engagement, and other qualitative methods. We address critical problems, including the loss of craft skills and knowledge, fragmented communities, changing practices and education, and new conceptualizations of skill amid technological shifts. Questions that drive this work are:

  • How might computational ideas, methods, and technologies repair craft and traditional practices?
  • How might craft repair making and computation?

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Heritage & New Technologies

Heritage

This research explores how computation and new technologies can archive, restore, and reconfigure tangible and intangible heritage knowledge and practices to facilitate new understandings, modes of expression, and presentation for preservation, reconfiguration, and access, as well as new forms of engagement. Some questions include:

  • What new computational tools and methods might we develop to study heritage?
  • How might we use AI to archive, restore, and reconfigure tangible and intangible heritage?

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Critical Computation

Critical Computation

This work examines and reveals social, political, and historical entanglements of computational systems and technologies developed and used in design and the built environment. Methods, frameworks, and concepts are informed by embodied, situated, and computational ways of knowing. This work draws on critical theory; science technology society studies (sts); history; cultural studies; political studies; and the social sciences. Some questions include:

  • What critical tools, theories, and processes might we make part of our practices, pedagogy, and research to consider questions of justice?
  • How are computational design tools, infrastructures, and practices implicated in systems of oppression?
  • What new approaches, tools, and frameworks can repair computational design such that it refuses to remain ignorant of the structures that shape our theories and technologies?

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