Resonant Threads: Materialising Stories from the Community

Abstract

Resonant Threads adopts collaborative techniques to create a series of crafted artefacts, which investigate how community voices can be incorporated into a multi-layered design practice. Creating social spaces for participants and designers to interact, express ideas and tell stories as part of the development process can facilitate a broad range of insights. This responds to issues around technology adoption and use that aim to focus on the processes and experiences of design rather than the products. As a result, user-centred designers are challenged to widen the context of their work, adopt inclusive methods and engage with participatory tools and techniques. This project proposes that initiating group and individual interactions in the early, discovery phase of an enquiry, can contribute to meaningful, dialogue and co-production.

To test this approach, the author has been working with a female group to capture shared memories of local community history. Electronic textiles and audio narratives were used as prompts within social encounters to encourage group discussion of memories and common themes from their past, such as childhood, freedom or change. The desire to cherish and preserve personal and collective narratives charged the anecdotes with significance, producing a rich archive. Digital craft practice creates opportunities to combine material production with digital technology, integrating novel functionality into objects. It is hoped that by mediating meaning and personal histories through objects, the practice can produce something of value and envision new experiences with expanded expressive properties.

This paper will describe the multi-layered aspect of the inquiry in more detail, the stories that emerged and the legacy it could provide through building tangible things that have a connection to the future as well as the past.