Social Fabric

Project author: Michelle Baggerman

The world of crafts is rich in meaning and depth. Crafts have a deeply social character and a firm position in culture and society. Learning from craftspeople about how they evolve and share their practice can help give similar meaning to smart textiles.

Social Fabric identifies ways to combine the skills and wisdom of craftspeople with the technology and ingenuity of engineers, creating new narratives for these new materials.

This research project sat within the CRISP STS project. In the context of PSS, which require designers to think of and work more broadly in response to large-scale societal changes, ‘just’ creating a smart textile is an insufficient response. This project aimed to explore ways to create meaning, contributing to the wider evolution of digital craft.

→ A publication on the project can be read on ISSUU