Justin Marshall

Exploring the boundaries/edges of analogue and digital making practices, Hand Thought is a hybrid making research project that originated from an ongoing interest in investigating the aesthetic opportunities that digital design and production technologies holds for the craftsperson. Alongside this motivation this project seeks to explore and demonstrate how a disruptive craft-based approach to engaging with digital making tools can act as a stimulus to reconsider the relationship between hand and machine, and our wider relationship with technologies and how we assess their role and value. Through challenging the rational instrumentalist industrial design engineering understanding of what digital technologies are ‘good’ for, I propose a Digital Craft Ethos that aspires to: fidelity not accuracy, sensitive making not efficient manufacturing, affective not effective technologies, augmenting existing practices not replacing established ways of working, uniqueness not infinite replicability, and continual ‘hands-on’ interaction with tools not full automation.

Alongside the benefits of a world in which more and more things are internet connected (i.e., the IoT), scaffolded by increasingly powerful AI systems, there is a growing recognition of a flipside to this vision of the future. Issues associated with privacy, transparency, legibility and trust have been widely recognized – which the Mozilla Foundation has encapsulated in their Internet Health Reports [13]. This workshop will explore these tensions and concerns through the lens of craft, both as a practice and a conceptual ethos. We will use embroidery as a craft-oriented ‘thinking through making’ activity as the foundation for discussions of our craft characteristics of which consist of; bespokeness, localism, embodiment, provenance, authenticity, and care. Participants will gain a rich understanding of debates around IoT while being engaged in a ‘thinking through doing’ embodied approach to gaining new insights and leave with their own hand embroidered badge.