Making Design Tools Like a Weaver: Four Rules

What would happen if we designed CAD systems like a weaver designs cloth? Drawing from our ongoing collaborations with weavers, we suggest four rules to bring these qualities to your own practice: follow the materials, privilege the present and personal, form kinships with the past, and design systems of notations.

Consider the range of computer-aided design tools and ask yourself, what do they all consider “working” to be? Is working the ability to achieve a highly predictable outcome? Is working the ability to make the idea you had in your head? Is working the ability to create something you may not have otherwise envisioned? What else could working look like? Could a CAD tool be less of an assistant and more of a collaborator? A conversation partner? Could it push back on you, shape your perception of facets of design you may not have considered? Could it be stubborn or unpredictable?

These questions are characteristic of a “critical technical practice”—a term originally coined by Philip Agre in relationship to the metaphors used to describe “intelligence” in artificial intelligence systems [1] and later summarized and interpreted by Phoebe Sengers et al. in their seminal paper on reflective design as a structured activity for challenging assumptions in design and generating new ideas rooted in alternative metaphors [2]. In that paper, they suggest a tactic of analyzing the central metaphors of a certain class of designs (in the present case, CAD tools), pick alternative metaphors, and explore how the designs would look differently when developed with the alternative metaphor in mind. Applied to the context of 3D printing, we might see the central metaphor of desktop 3D printers as precision and fidelity to the digital model. Then, we might pick an alternative metaphor, like the ability to let the non-human forces shape the outcome, and develop an alternative system, say, a system in which you become the machine executing the 3D printer.