Collaborative Research: FW-HTF-RM: Expanding Rural Ceramics Craft and Computational Fabrication: A Synergy

The aim of this project is to synergistically create new career opportunities for rural craftspeople by blending long-standing craft traditions with new computational fabrication technologies, and to develop new computational fabrication techniques inspired by craft traditions. Craft businesses keep vital cultural traditions alive, contribute significantly to regional economies, and provide communities with a sense of identity and purpose.

Craftspeople and their businesses play significant roles in rural areas, where employment options are limited, and communities have a strong sense of identity and pride that is rooted in local craft traditions. Computational fabrication combines computational design, (using computer programming and algorithms to create digital designs), with digital fabrication.

Computational fabrication has, thus far, been explored primarily in contexts of academic research and industrial manufacturing. However, as the availability of fabrication machines diversifies, computational fabrication grows compatible with small to medium volume manufacturing craft practices. This project will introduce computational fabrication to new constituents and broaden the development of computational fabrication technologies to represent diverse community cultural forms, values, and needs.

It will engage several hundred rural craft practitioners in NM and CA with new opportunities to grow their businesses and creative practices through engagement with computational fabrication and a unique co-development process. It will also engage diverse, rural, middle- and high-school students and teachers in computation, design, fabrication, and entrepreneurship through a series of outreach activities.

The team of researchers will partner with rural craftspeople, in New Mexico and California, to co-develop new software, construction techniques, and business strategies that integrate computational design, digital fabrication, and traditional craft. The project will focus on ceramics, while working to ensure that research findings are generalizable to other craft domains.

Through a methodology of workshops, interviews, and co-design residencies, the project is expected to develop transformational research contributions–involving practices, methodologies, techniques, and theory across fields–by (1) developing new forms of computational fabrication inspired by craft traditions; (2) investigating new syntheses of ceramic craft practices and traditions, community economics, HCI theory, and computational fabrication technologies; (3) exploring how the co-design and co-development of technology can integrate cultural, economic, and technological concerns; (4) applying Value Chain Analysis to ascertain the economic and cultural viability of new forms of rural production that blend traditional craft and computational fabrication; (5) developing deeper understandings of the unique challenges and opportunities facing rural craft businesses to contribute to studies across a range of fields–including developmental economics, international management, geography, and sociology–which are concerned with the increasing segregation of and inequalities between rural and urban communities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.