Abstract
The inspiration and background for both reports came from the same line of personal investigations. I have been interested in fiber arts and sewing for a long time, and had recently decided to put together plans for building my own floor loom to weave my own fabrics with. As part of this project, I had to learn what sorts of patterns various looms can create to decide on the specifics of my build. This investigation into patterning lead directly into the concept of my technical project, a database of digitized handweaving pattern drafts and a scripting API for searching, modifying, creating, and combining patterns. This was designed to fill the gap of handweaving resources specifically targeted at people interested in computing, and aims to allow users to more fully leverage computing in the pattern design process.
In addition to the hobbyist handweaving I was planning on doing myself, I also found myself interested in industrial weaving technologies and wanted to know what all was possible and what the current state of the art was. Approaching this topic from the angle of someone interested in creating fabrics myself, I was positioned to be interested in not only the technologies themselves, but who is involved in operating them, and what that operation looks like in practice. This framing of my research set me up to identify more closely with the workers directly involved in the manufacturing process than I might have I had approached the topic from a strictly technological direction. This led me to the topic of my STS paper, which is about understanding the ways that automation and technology in textile and apparel manufacturing is made to be more visible than the human labor working alongside it. I aim to explore how these systems of labor emerged, what our cultural values and understandings surrounding them are, and how engineers in this field specifically have some ability to shape what that labor looks like for better or for worse.
Through both projects, I aim to foster curiosity and interest in how the parts of our built environment are made, especially the “uninteresting” or “simple” parts, and especially among my fellow engineers. I first became interested in engineering because I wanted to know how the things humans make work, and what goes into making them, and I know many others had the same experience. Here I hope to reignite this impulse for things that are often overlooked and not thought of as “engineered.” By building a weaving application specifically targeted at programmers, I hope to inspire more interest in fiber arts among engineers by highlighting the ways it shares many of the technical aspects I enjoy in my engineering practice. In my STS paper I then invite my colleagues to then consider the reasons why this kind of work is often overlooked through a world-systems lens, and how textile engineers are situated in the social and economic structures surrounding the industry. In this context, the technical project reinforces the STS one by hopefully allowing engineers to build identification and affinity with the people who operate the technologies that engineers design. By encouraging engineers to manufacturing workers as peers in the production process, and the work that they do as valuable and interesting, I hope to encourage my engineering colleagues to use their position in the technological landscape to build a more equitable world.
