The material practices of collaboration

Abstract

Drawing on a three-month bookbinding apprenticeship, this paper examines how people's coordination work is tightly bound up in material practices, the union of material arrangements and social relations. Through the construction of a book, I reveal how sensitivities to delicacy, flexibility and delay emerge through detailed engagements with the book, the binders and the workshop environment. From small adjustments of the hand, to the coordination and exchange of materials and tools, the accomplishment of each task rests on how digital and age-old resources are woven into everyday collaborative practice. This approach extends how CSCW frames and mobilizes the material to recognize materials as compositional elements, surfaces and flows. It also contributes to conversations on digital materiality by emphasizing the temporality of material practice. Thus, I use the bookbinding workshop as a resource for understanding the ways materials, techniques, and relationships are continually re-bound in a digital age.

Listening to unanimated objects' stories for treatment and repair: A computer vision approach

“…Under such perspective, we have here proposed an approach to two fundamental problems in the repair process: (a) how can objects be augmented with digital technologies so as to tell their stories to humans, and, (b) what an object should exactly say to humans to be repaired. As part of our proposal, we have also individuated the existing approaches that fall closest to the implementation of such ideas, for the development of future repair systems [6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. In this paper, fine gesture recognition algorithms have been used to capture all those manipulations to which objects were subjected, the idea being that of understanding the actions that are performed on them to capture those stories that can be then used for repair.…”

At the interface of biology and computation

“…Finally, the paper's arguments are set alongside a more general set of theory-oriented perspectives emerging in HCI in which interactive systems and the material interventions enacted by them-in practice-are being recognized as integral to ways of knowing and being [22,26,29,30,32]. Although the work we present is specific to science and biology, we see our arguments to be situated in this broader intellectual dialogue.…”

Material Tinkering. An inspirational approach for experiential learning and envisioning in product design education

“…It co-participates in the process and coperforms (Robbins, Giaccardi, and Karana, 2016) with the tinkerer. As Rosner (2012) states "Materials are collaborators in the craft process. "…”