Crafting Material Innovation

When designing material interactions using digital and other technologies, ideation and development timelines can go out of sync. In this paper we discuss how a crafts-driven approach to wearable technologies can sensitise researchers to novel ways of moving forward when faced with such a challenge. We identify 'no-tech' prototyping as a powerful paradigm for ideating wearable technologies when the technologies are not yet specified or available; and we describe four craft-based conceptual lenses - an approach, expression, dialogue and language - that support the development of no-tech prototypes at a range of resolutions. The Poetic Kinaesthetic Interface project (PKI) serves as our case for study. PKI aims to support material innovation in the context of wearable technologies for enhanced embodied interactions. At a crucial point in an early phase of PKI we were stopped short by a delay in data delivery. Faced with an impasse, we turned to our crafts to find a way forward. The craft-based lenses and no-tech prototypes that resulted enabled us to undertake investigative, participatory experiments with a broad public and continue to move forward with the research. To support our discussion, we unpack the notions of no-tech prototyping and advanced material interactions; we describe the PKI Phase I prototypes and discuss the value of working at different resolutions of conceptual and material finish. We then lay out our four lenses and reflect on how each of these lenses enable us to remain in a state of unknowing and continue to not only craft our way through our impasse, but deepen our embodied inquiry into the development of experientially rich material interactions. The resulting extended, reflective, embodied, craft-based approach to material innovation is supporting greater public engagement with our core research concerns, as well as an expanded vision of how to effectively work towards material innovation. This research contributes to exploratory material-based and craft-informed interaction design and wearable technologies development. It also contributes to research into how to upstream public engagement with emerging science and technology, though this is not the focus of this article. The purpose of this paper is to use the case of PKI to reflect on how our approach may be fed forward, to be of use for others grappling with the challenges of multifaceted research into emerging materials and practices.