Sign up for our workshop Exploring the value and significance of bringing a craft ethos to debates around the IoT/connected things

Call for Participation

Join us for a one day workshop to explore how a craft practice and ethos can help us to respond to privacy, trust, bias and the Internet of Things.

“How healthy is the internet?”  As more and more things become internet-connected (i.e. become part of the IoT) questions of trust, privacy, security, data ownership, data bias, and the commercial abuse of data, become ever more pressing. This reflects a recognition of a wider problem with the internet alongside the rapid developments in machine learning (i.e. AI) and how it is being unreflectively ‘put to work’ in an ever-increasing range of applications. This workshop will explore these tensions and concerns through the lens of craft, both as a practice and a conceptual ethos.

This studio will use embroidery as a craft-oriented communal/social practice activity to scaffold a discussion framed by our craft ethos characteristics, involving notions of; subjectivity, bespokeness, localism, embodiment, provenance, authenticity, and care-full-ness. Embroidery is an appropriate craft-oriented method which we believe encourages flavors of conversation that are distinct from other forms of participatory workshops. Whilst these activities will likely enable mindful stitching, we are more pointedly using this method as a dialogical activity where the acts of communal stitching will enable us to direct conversation to certain aspects of craft characteristics beyond the literal objects participants are making. Through this embodied making activity, you will create a bespoke embroidered badge based on a set of provocations and take a deep dive into the issues with IoT we have highlighted.

Through making together in small groups, supported by experienced researchers working in the field, we hope to provide an environment for rich discussion and material speculation on alternative visions of ‘healthier’ connected futures. The studio will use the embroidered outcomes as well as a range of predesigned props and design resources to not only discuss entanglements of living well in a digital culture, but also to help us collectively and individually envision stories/scenarios which encapsulates vision/s of an alternative, healthier, digitally connected future. At the conclusion of the workshop we will explore the possibility of setting up a special interest group that takes our thinking forward into the future.

More information and Sign up here