Beyond the Screen: Examining the Participatory Challenges of Computational Crafts for DIY Youth Communities

Yasmin Kafai, Kylie Peppler, Leah Buechley, and Mike Eisenberg

Recent research on new media has focused on understanding how young people are adopting sophisticated tools and methods for responding to media through creative production, including youth’s playing and making of video games, creating videos and animations, and contributing to and participating in massive virtual communities. While these activities have received considerable attention, current research tends to overlook dimensions of digital media that impact youth’s activities beyond the screen: namely, those aspects of media construction and design that dovetail with hands-on crafts, physical construction and design, and material play.

This relatively new landscape in the physical world suggests a vast extension of the traditional notion of digital learning — an extension that can enrich youth's expressive and intellectual lives by combining the affordances of the virtual world with those of tangible media designs and creations. We argue that as today’s notions of "media texts" are expanding beyond print to encompass dress, speech, drawing, and dance, we need to consider how engagement with digital media can include tangible media texts.

Our working group will focus on one particularly promising application of tangible media texts called computational crafts and examine electronic textiles (e-textiles). These include young people's design of programmable garments, accessories (such as jacket patches), and costumes. Such designs incorporate elements of embedded computing (for controlling the behavior of fabric artifacts), novel materials (e.g., conductive fibers or Velcro, etc.), sensors (e.g., light and sound), and actuators (e.g., LEDs and speakers), in addition to traditional aspects of fabric crafts.

We have chosen this topic for several reasons, the most obvious being that fashion holds particular relevance for youth to indicate group membership, express choices, and engage with media as illustrated in the Cosplay community of media-informed costume design. Most importantly, textile crafts have long since been considered the exclusive domain of females and have not been associated with technology developments. In recent years, however, this aspect of textile production and design has changed considerably and new materials and forms of production have become accessible and prominent in Do-It-Yourself or DIY communities. Accordingly, these types of applications have the potential of pulling girls and other members of historically underrepresented communities into the participatory culture, helping to respond to the participation gap facing today’s society.

To develop these ideas, we propose to conduct a series of working group meetings with expert advisors that will help us to map out the dimensions of these "new media texts" for youth communities by consulting with leading experts in the field of computational textiles, design, literacy, DIY youth communities, fashion, and gender issues. We are driven to move the research focus from understanding and supporting youth production that has been purely "virtual" or screen-based in blogs, videos, and games to actively promoting developments in the design and engagement with computational crafts. A continuing theme in our discussion will be to imagine ways in which the blossoming landscape of "professional" or "industrial" materials in the DIY culture can be safely and creatively incorporated into the world of youth's design. By increasing the expressive range and accessibility of digital materials for learning, we anticipate the potential expansion of youths’ interactions with their media environments. Thus the focus of our working group discussions will be investigative and anticipatory at the same time, which is unique in the field.

The goal of our working group discussions is to address issues of differential participatory competencies in the larger media culture. By blending digital media and youth's crafts, it is possible to interest a much larger population of youth in the creative use of digital media. Generally, those young people who may once have felt disinclined to experiment with technology–those whose tastes ran toward constructing in physical materials–could now have a motivating reason for exploring digital and computational media. Finally, traditional youth's crafts are often local, or culturally specific. Our proposal presents the opportunity to blend the local traditions with technology offering promising opportunities for studying how youth in distinct local settings or cultures combine digital media and homespun crafts.

We propose three working group meetings. While each meeting has a particular concentration emphasizing either the creative, critical or technical aspects of e-textile design, we will mix in local participants to facilitate a rich discussion between the groups from different fields. We also note that in some instances, we will invite doctoral students or recent graduates as experts given that the field of e-textiles is relatively new.

Creative Working Group Meeting 1 (Indiana University) will focus on the role of the arts in computation, design, and fashion in both the professional fields and K-16 settings, with an emphasis on creative aspects. Questions we plan to address are: (1) What is the future of e-textiles in professional and education arenas? (2) What is the role of the arts in our understanding of computationally enhanced materials? And (3) What kind of connections can be formed between e-textile work in fashion and design to the traditional K-16 schooling curriculum? We plan to invite groups of professional artists such as Kate Hartman, a video and new media artist who has been embedding computational materials in her recent work, and Leslie Sharpe who works with Mobile and Wireless Technologies. Additionally, we plan to invite arts educators such as Nichole Pinkard who has been involved with the Digital Youth Network (DYN) and YouMedia in Chicago, as well as academics who have been studying Cosplay and the role of computational textiles in non-Western cultures, including Marjorie Cohee Manifold and Shaowen Bardzell.

Technical Working Group Meeting 2 (MIT Media Lab) will bring together a group of scholars, designers, and engineers who are involved in craft, media, and electronics do-it-yourself (DIY) communities. This meeting will examine how crafting knowledge can be documented and shared with others via online tools and will also explore user-friendly techniques for constructing e-textiles. Questions we plan to address are: (1) What tools are currently available that enable people to construct e-textiles and what additional tools are needed? (2) What are the best digital formats for documenting and conveying crafting expertise? (3) What are the differences between adult and youth DIY communities? (4) How can we build DIY e-textile communities targeted specifically at youth? The meeting will involve scholars of online communities, craft and DIY, including Cristen Torrey whose work examines how craft knowledge is documented online, Daniela Rosner whose research focuses on DIY communities, and Maggie Orth, one of the founders of the field of e-textile. In addition, local experts such as Edith Ackerman will contribute to discussion.

Critical Working Group Meeting 3 at University of Pennsylvania will bring together researchers and designers that have been concerned with media literacy practices in youth communities. Questions we plan to address: (1) How do youth groups use different clothes and objects to signify their membership to other groups? (2) What are youth’ experiences with crafts, in particular textiles? and (3) What do youth DIY communities look like and how do they engage in media literacy practices? We plan to invite Barbara Guzetti from Arizona State University author of a forthcoming book on digital DIY activities among high school youth and Elizabeth Moje from University of Michigan who has studied literacy practices in marginalized youth. Heidi Schelhowe from the Universitaet Bremen directs a European initiative that has conducted e-textile workshops with hundreds of youth in six different countries. We will also invite the current outreach coordinator of the Fabric and Textile Workshop in Philadelphia who has set up education workshops on textile design and craft with inner-city youth.

We will ask invitees to prepare essays that contribute to different aspects of learning with computational crafts and e-textiles. After each meeting, the essays, summaries and commentaries of the discussions plus questions for further research and discussion will be posted on the DML web blog. In addition, the leads will generate a book proposal that will provide the foundation for the first edition on computational craft for youth learning and to outline the general parameters and research issues of this fields and invite working group members to expand their essays.