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[25] Digital hybridities: Theorising the ‘social’ and the ‘local’ of<br />
fabrication technologies in craft practice<br />
Matthew Holmes 1 Alejandro Veliz Reyes 1<br />
1<br />
University of Plymouth, Plymouth PL4 8AA, United Kingdom<br />
The digital design research community keeps moving towards increasingly techno-centric<br />
spaces. Largely development-focused, the evolution of technology<br />
adoption in our sector is often reported from performance and efficiency perspectives,<br />
instead of its efficacy – its implementation and adoption in real-world design<br />
practices and cultures. In that context, this paper presents a theory framework<br />
to investigate the adoption of digital fabrication technology among craft practitioners<br />
- emphasising the challenges among craftsperson’s activities protected<br />
by both heritage and cultural traditions developed outside authored and institutionalised<br />
contexts of digital design research. Through the coupling of theoretical<br />
strands originated in management studies (socio-materiality), media obsolescence,<br />
heritage, and crafts theory, our approach is demonstrated through the infusion<br />
of digital fabrication tools into the analogue world of letterpress printmaking.<br />
Through methods such as community engagement, codesign and prototyping,<br />
and graphic outputs, we reflect on issues emanating from uniting a technology<br />
that has already faced industrial obsolescence with newly developed digital tools,<br />
including the influence of heritage and cultural traditions, tensions around irreplaceability,<br />
the need for preservation, spatial and community manifestations, and<br />
knowledge transfer and translation across seemingly diverging ways of engaging<br />
with technology. The resulting approach challenges the standard hegemonic analogue/digital<br />
dichotomy and allows for the interrogation of a more ‘complexified’,<br />
nuanced field of hybrid practices encouraging a balance between preservation,<br />
tradition, and experimentation.<br />
Keywords: Socio-materiality, Digital Fabrication, Digital Craft, Letterpress.