Why would you crochet an electrical switch?
Why would you embroider a 350 centimeter-long computer with gold thread?
Why would you knit a radio jumper?
[…]
Who decides what is real and what is not?
— Fiona Raby, Stitching Worlds
Introduction: Digital Humanities Labs and Local Partnerships
We are part of a group of scholars at the University of Maryland, College Park that has developed an ecosystem of digital and experimental humanities labs where play and experimentation serve as critical avenues of ideation, scholarship, and learning. Within this ecosystem, we have the African American Digital & Experimental Humanities (AADHum) research and design lab dedicated to experimental digital scholarship that connects work about Black people to larger intellectual and technocultural traditions. Our newest lab NarraSpaceXR focuses on immersive storytelling using extended reality tools and technologies to demonstrate how embodied experiences of marginalized communities can expand human understanding. Both labs are housed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and together we have a shared investment in cultural studies and media archaeology which exposes the histories and sociotechnical systems that have brought us to our current moment.
In AADHum and NarraSpaceXR, our approach to computing through craft and material culture often requires us to find hands-on, accessible ways to rupture, misuse, or break the blackboxed, “user friendly” technologies that we as consumers are sold. We have carried that ethos forward in a partnership with local libraries, where lab members facilitate beginner-friendly creative computing workshops, teaching students how to understand, build, and critique the computing systems they engage daily. We work closely with the Teen Action Group (TAG), a community-based service learning program for Prince George’s County teens, and Public Services Specialist Ana Martinez and Librarian Vilma Diaz who lead the program at Hyattsville Branch Library and Bladensburg Branch Library, respectively.
Based in humanistic thinking and our labs’ research mandate to investigate structure through form, our workshops with TAG have necessitated developing a process towards minimal and physical computing: bypassing the layers of glossy “user-friendliness” in order to return to the foundations of hardware through a makers-first approach emphasizing basic electrical engineering and physical craft skills. In our series of workshops with local libraries, middle and high school students have learned to ideate and code devices to remind them to drink water; to embroider conductive thread that produces a homemade speaker; to assemble an LED circuit for a Halloween lamp; and to code, write, and imagine poetry that draws from avant-garde Black intellectual traditions. Our hour-long exercises slow down and scale back the production of devices that students are accustomed to seeing ready-made.
The students’ engagement with the assembly, coding, and design of their computer kits unfurls a series of tightly-wound technological layers. In each workshop, students learn about microprocessors, conductive materials (thread, tape, wire), and electrical components (LEDs, amplifiers), as physical pieces of media that they can manipulate using code, physical assembly, and the electricity in their bodies. They recognize the ways our devices hail us through haptics, color, time-based notifications, and sensors as functions of design that they can determine themselves. Likewise, they connect larger conversations about resource procurement to power sources like lithium batteries that power their kits. As Jussi Parikka proposes in an interview with Ebru Kurbak, “technological things speak as dynamic events; they start to unfold histories, situations, and practices... [and] mass-produced electronic culture is brought into a new kind of tactile proximity” (Kurbak 2018, 126).
Minimal Computing, Maximal Approach
By expanding upon our most intensive workshop, in which students learned to embroider their own speakers, we demonstrate how dilation is both a necessity of our foundational approach and a moment of pushback against the norms of efficiency and offloaded labor that define the technological blackbox moment. Our foundational commitment to craft and hardware necessarily expands the following nodes of our approach: research, design, assembly, story, and system.
Let us begin with research, design, and assembly. Our embroidered speaker workshop project—a small speaker, embroidered using conductive steel thread in a four-inch embroidery hoop, and attached to a circuit with an amplifier, an audio cable, and a battery pack—was inspired by the work of New York City-based interdisciplinary designer, artist, and educator Liza Stark. We used her free and open source zine that she developed for a previous workshop as we planned our construction and materials, and gave copies of the zine to each student as reference material.
The process for making an embroidered speaker looks like this:
With Stark’s carefully curated pedagogical tools, we spread out the stages of gathering materials, development, and prototyping to fit into two one-hour-long TAG sessions that regularly hosts between twenty to thirty-five students. For our version of the embroidered speaker workshop, we pre-soldered seventy circuits consisting of amplifiers, audio cables, battery packs, and alligator clips.
We knew that this was going to be many hours of labor, over the course of several weeks leading up to the workshops, and that we would also need to test every single circuit for functionality once it was soldered. In many circumstances, particularly in classrooms led by one or two instructors, this would be an impossible amount of work to support. In our case, which we recognize is unusual, we have a large team of volunteer facilitators. Coming from fields ranging from English, Linguistics, and American Studies, to Computer Science, Engineering, and Library and Information Science, our team includes undergrad, graduate, staff, and faculty. The size of our team typically enables us to have an unusually high level of one-on-one interaction, with most facilitators at a table with six or fewer students. For our embroidered speakers workshop, we leveraged our team and our need to solder and test the kits as a means to support the time-intensive pre-assembly and as a learning opportunity for our volunteer facilitators, many of whom were learning to solder for the first time. We began by directly teaching the facilitators, but over time, volunteers were able to teach each other how to solder and to explain how the parts of the circuit worked together. The process of preparing the circuits served as a moment where we as instructors materially deepened our own relationship to the fundamentals of computing, engaging in the same pedagogy that we hope to enact with our students. Moreover, it exposed a form of assembly labor that remains part of the reality of computation, but is usually offloaded and hidden from consumers. As many digital humanities craftivists have demonstrated, minimal computing sometimes calls for a maximal approach to process (see Dombrowski 2022; Rogers 2017). In embracing rather than avoiding the labor of making and assembly, our process dilates the structures of computation that are usually hidden away from the end user.
A Wrinkle in Time: Problems Illuminate [Infra]structure
One such moment of dilation happened as we outfitted the embroidered speakers kit for mobile. We knew most of the students have phones or tablets and decided the phone could be a point of engagement rather than a point of distraction. Given many popular phone models have long phased out aux ports, we purchased adaptors—3.5mm aux headphone audio jack to USB-C and 3.5mm aux headphone jack to lightning cord—as some students have Androids and iPhone models with USB-C ports, while others have iPhones that preceded Apple’s compliance with the common charging standard push from European Union lawmakers. Apple no longer sells the aux to lightning adapter and sticking to minimal computing principles, we veered away from the Apple sticker price for the aux to USB-C adapter. However, we learned soon after that bulk orders of unbranded adapters were unreliable and we could not get around an expensive purchase; a purchase we could only make because of a flexible budget that we could continue to push as we learned that we needed to buy more things.
The “adaptor incident” exposes a tension between standardization and difference that stretches back throughout the history of computing. This history is not only thematically entangled with the questions we faced while designing this workshop; it is part of the story of how we arrived in our current sociotechnical moment, with an increase in technical complexity and a decrease in technical literacy. Fittingly, Apple plays a significant role in that story. Lori Emerson has written in depth on the decade of time from the mid 1970s-80s when personal computer design moved from open architecture to “user friendly”—a phrase that, like blackbox, has come to describe technology that creates a simpler interface level by hiding its actual structure from its users. She traces the trajectory from the Apple II, in 1977, which had eight expansion slots—connectors on the motherboard that could receive cards with additional features to customize the computer—to the Apple Lisa in 1983, with three expansion slots; to the Macintosh in 1984, with no expansion slots—“tightly sealed” (Emerson 2013). Through these hardware design choices and their prioritization of a graphical user interface, Apple moved the personal computer industry substantially away from users as makers, and reconstructed them as consumers (for more on “users” vs “consumers,” see Nooney et al. 2020). Ironically, one of the arguments that Apple made against the European Union regulations on its phone adaptors was this: “strict regulation mandating just one type of connector stifles innovation rather than encouraging it” (Vallance and Kleinman 2023).
On iteration, problem solving, and community
While on the one hand, our experience with the adaptors helpfully illustrated these ruptures in the assemblage of our devices, we also had to tackle the material reality of adapting our materials list and process as we learned. In order to make our expanded process work, we engaged in iteration, which allowed us to move through different steps of developing, building, teaching, and testing in a variety of orders, speeds, and contexts (such as classrooms, small instructor workshops, etc). These steps have largely been responsive to lab funding, and the skill sets, interests, and time of our staff and volunteers. While we always begin with research, we move as needed between assembly and design, the development of a story to make technological and scientific principles understandable, and exposure to the inner workings of our technological and sociocultural systems. Through iteration, we as instructors engage in the same ways of thinking that students learn through the workshop. Iteration, problem solving, and community are necessary in the process of making an embroidered speaker, just as they are necessary in the process of designing a workshop.
As modes of thought, iteration and the crafting process help us learn things we cannot easily access otherwise. As John Sharp and Colleen Macklin (2019) note in their study of iteration, iteration is the art of “learning to fail” in ways that teach us something. They identify the incremental or growth mindset, which is based on failure as a necessary step that produces knowledge: “We might hear the incremental learner say something like ‘now I think I know what I did wrong, and I can get it right the next time’” (Macklin and Sharp 2019, 35). As Theresa Quill and Leanne Nay identify from their paper circuit workshops, failure drives learning: “when the LED does not light up, things get interesting” (Maps that Glow).
In craft processes, failure is an expected part of the activity, particularly when learning something new; for textiles, there is an extension of this idea—undoing and redoing work, for example, undoing a stitch or two, or even restarting. When Irene Posch worked with a group of embroiderers to make a gold embroidered computer, she noted that
they were often reluctant to start, asking: “Can I do something wrong?” to which I answered, “Yes, you can do many things wrong. But also, everything is handmade and if not done well enough can be taken apart and made again”... This did reassure the embroiderers. I assume, because they knew the craft and risks involved in embroidery work, they could estimate the potential damage they could do, as well as know what it would take to fix it. (Kurbak 2018, 79)
In our workshops, students often started off nervous to begin stitching—afraid that they would do something wrong and “mess it up.” There are cases where students do need to learn how to undo their work in order to fix a mistake; the steel thread that we used is thick, slightly coarse, and can often tangle with itself on the backside of the embroidery hoop without students realizing it. In learning how to unpick or tighten their stitches, or if needed, start over again by cutting the thread and re-stitching from the beginning, they learn productive, iterative failure. Not only do they understand the materials better, but they gain confidence in their own ability to troubleshoot, and even get better at formulating questions when they need to ask for help.
This making-first pedagogy is at the heart of our instructional design. The majority of the workshop is designated for making and tinkering, with facilitators there to support the students when they get stuck. Instruction and interaction is centered around students building, running into problems or questions, and then finding ways to address them collaboratively with their peers and with facilitators. The iterative approach, with many facilitators on hand to help troubleshoot with students, anticipates common issues around skill and pace of learning in hands-on minimal computing classrooms, such as Brandon Walsh’s “Three Speed Problem” (2023). With enough facilitators and careful scoping for time, a student needing to redo a line of stitches becomes a chance for them to practice and get better, rather than “falling behind.” This also works effectively because we build in different points of entry and interaction to get their minds and their hands on the activity without our immediate instruction; their kits contain QR codes to access instructions from their phones, and zines that they can reference. There is very little “talking at” the students. Rather, the format of the workshop—make, fail, adjust, make, fail, adjust, repeat—is part of the key takeaway.
Failure and iteration helped us learn how to better structure and facilitate the workshops, too. Our workshop development process included multiple points of testing the activity. As we worked on the circuit soldering, we made the choice to keep the workshop focused on sewing the conductive coil; while tempting to have the students engage in some of the actual assembly through soldering, the time and safety constraints made it infeasible. Then, we engaged our volunteer co-facilitators for an hour of practice stitching and reviewing the best practices for workshop instruction; this served as another opportunity to observe how a group of people, many new to sewing, handled the task of stitching the coil. Iterative practice sessions helped us as the workshop leads develop and adjust our methods: we learned to keep several samples of the completed embroidery with us for visual aids, and to have an in-progress sample so that we could demonstrate points about stitching technique without interfering with the students’ own embroidery.
We were also able to iterate from one workshop to the next; while the workshops at Bladensburg and Hyattsville libraries were identical in terms of the project, we used the lessons from the first workshop, at Bladensburg, to improve the instructional design for Hyattsville. After watching many students struggle with confusion about what the embroidered coil should look like, one of our facilitators suggested letting them draw out the shape they were going to embroider before they began stitching. This led us to develop a paper sewing template, which, when held against the fabric, would show students the line where their stitches should fall.1 We tested the template in our second instructor practice session, and found through both the practice session and the workshop that it significantly reduced confusion and allowed more students to complete their coils within the workshop time.
“Re-seeing” Computation with Tactile Proximity
Throughout the workshops, students learned from the process of stitching not only as an iterative mode of thinking; they also interacted with the material reality of the technology that they were building, bringing them closer to computational structure in a way that allowed them to “re-see” it. One student, upon learning that the thread we were using was made out of steel, immediately observed that it would be conductive, before even knowing the exercise. This hearkens back to Parikka’s “tactile proximity,” and to Irene Posch’s observations that with electronic textiles, the materiality of craft and electrical engineering entwine with each other: “knowledge about the material and the technique that structures it reveals the essential laws of physics underlying the electronic components” (Kurbak 2018, 78). Students who had sewn before gained an immediate confidence and excitement in using the material that they were familiar with to do something new. The material craft element to the workshop meant that there were more modes of entry for students to get excited: students could be engaged by the circuitry, by the stitching, or by both.
Teaching circuitry through embroidery also intentionally speaks to and intervenes in the gendered history of computing, as much of the existing work around textile computing currently reflects (including the work of Stark and Posch). Computing history is women’s history; women were the first human “computers,” provided much of the physical labor for early computing infrastructure, from woven core memory to computer chips, and were instrumental in developing early programming languages. One of Liza Stark’s other zine projects, “Hilda Wove All Those Wires,” is dedicated to the story of Hilda G. Carpenter, who wove the first plane of magnetic core memory, and was a lifelong member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (Stark 2018). By bringing embroidery into the technology lesson, we open up the “re-seeing” that we ask students to do, folding in questions around gender, skill, race, memory, and what “counts” as computational. Technical literacy is a kind of cultural memory, and we should all have the opportunity to “unfold histories, situations, and practices” by tinkering with our technologies, and to do so in public, as a public. This, too, speaks to the importance of where we choose to work, and with whom: we work at a public university, teach workshops at local public libraries, with public high school students.
While we might not teach the entire history of woven core memory or the design of the Macintosh within our hour-long workshops, we do frame the exercise in order to pose questions that are attentive to structure, which throw some of the assumptions shaped by these histories into sharp relief. We ask students to pay attention to their feelings, sensory experiences, and other humanistic observations about their interaction with the technology as they engage. These questions might look like the following:
- What does it mean that it feels so different to hear sound come out of fabric, versus out of your phone? What does that difference feel like?
- How is building something for your phone different from using something that’s built in?
- How does seeing all the parts of a device (batteries, circuits, wires, etc) change the way we think about our phones and computers—devices that we don’t usually see the parts of?
- What does sewing remind us of? How is it similar or different to other types of interaction that we do, either with computers/phones or otherwise?
- What does it feel like to trust your own ability to learn and build technology?
- How does it feel to trust your senses and consequently your ability to “re-see” the affordances and constraints of ubiquitous technologies through the fundamental mechanics that require the hands and the ears and the eyes?
In this way, our minimal hardware computing pedagogy is designed not only to address the realities of our current moment—to accommodate the black box, the phone, the audio jack, the adaptor—but also to reach back and help expose the structures that got us here. There is a flip side to the war over standardization and difference that was fought in personal computers in the 1970s and ‘80s: it was a fight, not an inevitability. Emerson’s research includes Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, developers of a software called Smalltalk, which they envisioned and designed to emphasize user learning and understanding through creative making and tinkering. Smalltalk’s target demographic was children, and they considered all users “active builders” in the software, with an emphasis that “they understood the underlying structure, the how and the why, of the programming language” (Emerson 2013). Studies of early personal computers and microcomputers remind us that at one time, “to own a microcomputer required soldering, fiddling with chips, and thinking in machine code—struggling with the machine for the sheer pleasure of it” (Nooney et al. 2020, 106).
Sociotechnical systems created the moment that we are in, where we have an increase in technical complexity and a decrease in technical literacy. While new technology appears simpler and sleeker and presumably easier to use, the black box hides (infra)structure. Alternatively, our minimal physical computing pedagogy intervenes by deconstructing mechanics. We look for counternarratives in history, for the Smalltalks and the Hilda Carpenters. We follow the ethos of understanding “the how and the why” and “struggling with the machine for the sheer pleasure of it” (Emerson 2013; Nooney et al. 2020). We assemble our own circuits to expose the path where electricity flows and where sound vibrates. We dislodge the magic from the congealed technological object and relocate it to its moving parts and processes; parts and processes that are incomplete without the human, for better or for worse.
