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Contents : Spyn: Augmenting the Creative and Communicative Potential of Craft Daniela K. Rosner and Kimiko Ryokai School of Information University of California Berkeley Berkeley CA 94720 USA daniela kimiko @ischool.berkeley.edu ABSTRACT We present data collected from a field study of 12 needlecrafters introduced to Spyn--mobile phone software that associates digital records (audio/visual media text and geographic data) with locations on fabric. We observed leisure needle-crafters use Spyn to create one or more handmade garments over two to four weeks and then give those garments to friends partners and family members. Using Spyn creators left behind digital and physical traces that heightened recipients' appreciation for the gift and enabled a diverse set of meanings to emerge. Digital engagements with Spyn became a means for unraveling the value of the gift: recipients used digital information associated with the physical objects to interpret the story behind the objects and their creators. We discuss the nature of this relationship between digital and physical material and its implications for craft. Author Keywords Figure 1. The current Spyn system runs on Android 1.5 G1 phones vision recognition correlates recorded media with locations on fabric. Image courtesy of James Jordan. Craft process gift exchange material creativity design process storytelling tangibility knitting crochet ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2. Information Interfaces : User Interfaces--input devices and strategies interaction styles user-centered design. General Terms Design INTRODUCTION Here we turn our attention the ways people use digital tools to associate information with the creative process and products of physical handwork specifically the popular handcrafts of knitting and crochet. We present findings from a study of people's engagements with Spyn--mobile phone software that associates digital records of the creative process (captured through audio/visual media text and geographic data) with physical locations on handmade fabric. We investigate how digital augmentation impacts the creation transfer interpretation and continued use of everyday personal handcraft. BACKGROUND The production and exchange of handmade objects shapes and sometimes even defines our relationships with others. Handmade objects demonstrate personal skill express appreciation and become opportunities for reciprocation. While a diversity of scholars (e.g. 15 31 ) have studied the activities and relationships that constitute everyday creative acts the ways people incorporate physical creative work and digital information work is less understood. Apart from sharing craft knowledge (e.g. 2 28 ) the study of physical creative practice (e.g. 15 ) is often distinct from the study of digital information exchange around craft (e.g. 14 ). Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise or republish to post on servers or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI 2010 April 10 15 2010 Atlanta Georgia USA. Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-60558-929-9/10/04....$10.00. The process of creating a handmade object requires a human investment of time physical effort and care 9 19 . Through traces of physical handwork a handmade object reveals aspects of its creator's technical journey 1 . Through color material and form a handmade object hints at the creator's expertise knowledge and taste 19 . Through its historicity a handmade object connects with cultural tradition and learned technique 9 . Despite its seemingly non-technological orientation 1 handcraft often relies on tooling. A growing number of people extend the tools associated with craft by integrating skilled creative handwork with new technology (e.g. 12 ). Ravelry.com for instance has emerged as an important social networking site for sharing and managing craft knowledge around needlecraft activity. "Ravelers" use the site to share tips resources inspirations and arrange "yarn swaps" or "Knit Alongs" (events where several individuals follow the same pattern). Needle-crafters also create and listen to craft podcasts review and post to personal blogs and connect with one another using social networking sites or email. While these activities support aspects of craft practice they largely occur before or after handwork not during the practice itself remaining distinct from the physical activity of craft. In order to better understand the relationship between physical and digital creative practices we introduced crafters to Spyn a system that incorporates digital information with the craft process. By deploying Spyn we explore the porous boundaries between digital and physical engagements around craft practice. Gift-Giving Handmade objects seem to have a special quality that prompts their role in gift exchange. Some scholars of handcraft practice have suggested gift giving is a core motivation 4 15 . Blood's 4 survey of leisure handcraft activity suggested that the idea of giving away craft products helped individuals maintain an interest in the activity and avert inactivity. When a person freely gives away a handmade object the person is not simply transferring utility. Rather the person also gives his or her extended self 2 . Gift giving is a universal practice by which people constitute and maintain social relations. Taken broadly a gift is a possession voluntarily transferred to someone or something. As an expression of affection a gift can help create and maintain social ties 4 . As a marker of tradition a gift can both create and fulfill a social obligation 18 . As a rhetorical device a gift may obligate future exchange 2 18 . Thus a gift is both a coercive and cohesive gesture that helps us frame our interactions with the social world. Within HCI literatures gift-giving rituals have been studied in the context of mediated interactions. Taylor and Harper's 27 study of teenagers' text-messaging behaviors suggested text messaging follows familiar patterns of gift exchange. Others argue that the transfer of digital files as a form of online gift giving is affected more by the difficulties and dangers of sharing than by its monetary cost 26 . According to 26 this research "is in its infancy." Even less is known about the integration of physical and digital forms of exchange. In our work we study the creation and exchange of handmade objects as a way to explore the communicative and creative interactions people have with digital and physical material. When a person gives a handmade object the object may not simply be valued for its utility it may also communicate affection and care or demonstrate unique expertise. Thus by studying the digital augmentation of handmade goods we can investigate the ways digital augmentation affects the recipient's relationships with the craft practitioner as well as with the process and products of creative work. RELATED RESEARCH Memory and Storytelling Technologies Memory technologies have been designed to capture store and provide access to personal information. This work presents interesting albeit difficult challenges for the curation of vast amounts of data and the protection of privacy (see 30 for a helpful discussion). Our design of Spyn was inspired by ubiquitous computing technologies (e.g. 16 32 34 ) that combine paper transcripts with information technology. ButterflyNet 34 and Books with Voices 16 enable the collection retrieval and exchange of task-specific information in order to support scientists and professionals in mobile settings whereas MEMENTO 32 augments the creative activity of scrapbooking. We build on this work by designing mobile technology that allows for the collection and sharing of social activity around craft and gift exchange. Recent HCI research has explored the use 20 and creation 21 of memory objects and their implications for the design of life-logging technologies. This work has emphasized the potential of annotation technologies that augment meaningful physical objects and the contexts in which they are used. We directly extend this work to the domains of leisure crafts and gift exchange. Storytelling technologies have focused the augmentation of creative play (e.g. 24 ) and the representation and exploration of personal histories (e.g. 25 ). The storytelling enabled by Spyn can be distinguished from other narrativized presentations of self in that it physically connects the narrator's story with the creative artifact. Craftwork and HCI A central theme in HCI research has been the study of people's social and informational uses of online resources. This work has recently expanded to include the study of online activity around creative handwork. Blogs 3 howto resources 28 and diverse distribution channels 28 impact the ways creativity is conceived of and enacted by individuals and the communities they help sustain. Researchers have also designed tools for offline sites of craft activity that merge craft with electronics to promote educational engagement 7 . Others view HCI 33 and Interaction Design 17 as crafts--allowing us to suspend "the distinction between tools and materials" 33 . Much of e-textiles research (e.g. 4 7 ) involves building interactive fabrics and open-source easy-to-program toolkits (e.g. LilyPad Arduino) for the invention of new wearable computational garments. Using workshops and classroom activities e-textiles researchers have employed interventionist strategies to study everyday design. Though this research shares an interest at the intersection of craft and computation it has distinctly different goals than Spyn. First it is often directed toward increasing engineering engagement rather than supporting the social activity surrounding creative handwork. Second it rethinks the materials and practices of craft rather than digitally augmenting the craft process. Lastly it explores new aesthetic interactions (e.g. 4 ) rather than studying the convergence of contemporary online and offline craft Our work adds to a growing body of HCI research that considers the materials activities and relationships around creative activity 3 14 28 . practices. Our work contributes to e-textiles research by broadening the investigation of digital-material engagements involved in craft activity. SPYN Spyn is a design study that explores how technology can support the social relationships that people have around handcrafted artifacts and with the people for whom they are made. Over the past two years Spyn has developed from a design sketch into a series of prototypes 22 23 and now a mobile phone application. Iterative Design Process Figure 2. Gina using scanning guide to pin her knit. As detailed in our previous work 22 we began our design process by conducting fieldwork in four knitting circles in the Bay Area. Based on the data we collected we distilled five design principles for Spyn. 1) Portability: knitters craft in diverse locations technology should capture the places and times of craft activity. 2) Process and Invested Time: knitters enjoyed the process of handwork as much as its product technology should keep track of progress and make the process visible. 3) Occasions and Opportunities: knitters were motivated by a variety of social and cultural phenomena technology should celebrate those motivations by supporting digital media capture. 4) Annotation: knitters annotated their projects on note cards notebooks and websites technology should support note taking. 5) Tactility: knitters enjoyed the rhythm created by hands needles and soft materials technology should remain lightweight and preserve the existing aesthetic of knitters' tools and materials. The Spyn prototypes 22 23 were designed to capture contextual information around craftwork by enabling knitters to record digital information (geographic location timestamp yarn yardage digital media) and associate it to locations on fabric. The connection between the fabric and digital records was achieved by correlating the position of the yarn (tracked by a rotary encoder) with locations on fabric (marked by patterns of infrared IR invisible to the naked eye). From our previous fieldwork we learned several lessons that informed the current design. First we established that knitters began their exploration of Spyn after using the system for several days. We therefore decided to extend the study period to allow knitters to begin multiple projects on their own. Second we found that--despite its relatively compact size--the entire system (basket cameras rotary encoder and Ultra Mobile PC) was still too bulky for people to comfortably carry to different locations. In response we redesigned the software for mobile phones. Third we found that IR ink was impractical for long-term deployment the ink solvent was non-permanent and the preparation of ink posed significant demands on the researcher's time. Thus we replaced the IR ink with a vision technique for reading stitches on the garment. The row count produced by our vision algorithm (a more useful cue for knit work) also eliminated the use of the rotary encoder to track yardage. Finally we added new functionality to Spyn that allowed participants to 1) delete and edit each Spyn entry (called a memory) 2) create and customize multiple projects (by changing the title background image knit or crochet stitch) 3) automatically associate row count (along with the date and location) to each Spyn memory 4) associate multiple media items to each Spyn memory (short text long text photograph video and audio) (see Fig. 3c) 5) distinguish between projects (or project parts) using 1cm diameter buttons with unique barcodes and 6) easily switch between projects (or project parts) by scanning the barcode buttons attached to fabric. Current System The current software has four main functions: Pin View Find and Map (see Fig. 3a). Pin associates information with a location on the fabric. View displays pinned memories over an image of the garment each pin links to the content associated with that memory. Find allows the user to switch projects (using the barcode buttons see Fig. 5) and retrieve memories associated with that project. Map displays pinned memories on a map each pin links to the content associated with that memory. Pinning Memories In order to "pin" a memory (Spyn entry) to fabric a person captures or selects a photograph of the garment and then touches the screen at the location he or she would like to add the information (see Fig. 3b). This opens the "Create Memory" screen (see Fig. 3c) where the person creates a title (short text) description (long text) and/or media items (still image video audio). Once created the memory is automatically associated with the location on fabric (knit or crochet row and x-location) geographic location (when available) and timestamp. The computer vision algorithm that automatically associates locations on fabric with digital information uses simple edge detection to count rows on the sockinette stitch (a basic knitting stitch). Each creator was instructed to capture images about six inches from the garment they were also provided a "scanning guide" (see Fig. 2) for accurately gauging that distance. We adjusted the row count for other stitches and yarns. If the knit was too large to fit under the viewfinder at six inches from the garment the user took multiple images of the fabric. Each image was analyzed separately and the combined in the viewfinder. STUDY: RESEARCH METHOD & PARTICPANTS We are interested in the ways people integrate Spyn with their existing practices of craftwork and gift exchange. The scale of the current work differs from our previous work 23 both in terms of the duration and the number of people involved in the craft process. While in prior work 23 we focused on creator's use of Spyn over short trial periods researchers before beginning this work. Creators were all female and active in the knitting or crochet crafts. They ranged in age (early 20s to late 50s) nationality (US Argentina and Russia) number of years knitting or crocheting (16 years on average) and comfort level with various technologies (see Fig. 4). Their occupations also exemplified this technical diversity: professions ranged Figure 3. Screenshots of Kyla's Spyn project (left to right) (a) Spyn home screen (b) pinning from web-master ("I'm pretty tech garment (c) creating a new Spyn memory and (d) viewing the Spyn memory. savvy") to stay-at-home mother and nurse our current study involves both the creator and recipient of practitioner ("For a non-technical person I did okay!"). a craft object further investigating the creator-recipient Recipients were coworkers (N 3) friends (N 2) family relationship over two-to-four weeks. Specifically we study members (N 2) and a romantic partner (N 1) of the creator. the following questions: Seven recipients were female and four recipients were male. What types of information do people capture with Spyn Study Design when creating a gift for someone else Our study was designed to intervene in the existing practices How does using Spyn affect the creator's craft activity of needle-crafters (cf. 13 ) in order to understand the role of How does it impact the creator's thought process while annotation technology in the process of craftwork and gift making exchange. Although we asked creators to complete one craft project five participants chose to create two or more How do recipients of the craft object respond to the projects. This independent activity indicates a desire to use digital information associated with the object How does Spyn that was not directly prompted by our study protocol. it affect the recipient's understanding of the craft process How does it affect the recipient's relationship to We tried to give our participants as much flexibility as the creator possible to determine the creative and temporal constraints of the craft project. In order to compare aspects of the craft Participants process across subjects we asked creators to use Spyn for at Twenty-four participants were recruited for the study: 12 least two weeks and to log their activity in a journal every creators and 12 recipients. Since one creator was unable to day (whether or not they used Spyn). Paper diaries 6 were complete her project due to time constraints we were only used to gain more insight into the creators' experiences with able to interview and observe 11 creator-recipient pairs. Spyn when we were not present and provoke reflection on Creators were recruited from several sources including their use of Spyn. Questions included: "How comfortable community-based craft events craft social networking were you using Spyn today " and "How do you think the websites and through referrals from local contacts. recipient of your craftwork will interpret these memories " Recipients were recruited based on their availability and The diaries effectively provided us with data surrounding their relationship to the creator rather than their familiarity the two-to-four week creation process such as how their with needlecraft. We made this decision based on lessons understanding of the system changed over time. We from our previous fieldwork 23 where accessing recipients conducted a situational analysis 8 of field notes proved difficult. Although this limited the creator's selection interview transcripts and diary entries. We then iteratively of a recipient we were able to meet with each person who developed a set of (non-mutually exclusive) categories for received a Spyn gift (N 11). Participants had no previous the content of the Spyn memories. exposure to the Spyn system or affiliation with the Figure 4. Participants during the gift exchange in Phase 4. The study was composed of five phases and took place over seven weeks. Phase 1: Introduction to study. We spoke with creators by email (N 4) phone (N 5) or face-to-face conversation (N 3) asking them to use Spyn for at least two weeks to make a gift for someone else--a recipient with whom we could also speak with in-person. Creators intending to use unusual stitches were instructed to bring us sample swatches or inform us of their pattern choice before Phase 2 so that we could optimize the vision software. Phase 2: Introduction to Spyn. We met with each creator individually for 1-2 hour(s) in a quiet location of the creator's choosing: the creator's home (N 5) the researcher's home (N 3) the creator's workplace (N 2) or a nearby caf (N 2). Creators were introduced to the Spyn functionality and received an Android G1 phone and a Spyn "kit" containing support materials (see Fig. 5). Introduction to the software involved asking creators to complete four "practice" tasks using two existing Spyn projects supplied by the researcher (a long scarf and a short scarf). The tasks included "pinning" the Spyn projects and viewing and editing the Spyn entries. We also conducted semi-structured interviews during this initial phase in order to better understand how creators talked about their past experiences knitting for others and communicating with others about their knitting. Phase 3: Creators use Spyn on their own (for two or more weeks). We offered creators technical support by email by phone and in face-to-face meetings. Support ranged from replacing a lost battery charger to helping participants learn how to "tile" scans of their garment. During this period we also created and maintained an online how-to website which was kept up-to-date with answers to creators' questions. Phase 4: Gift exchange. Each meeting consisted of a 2 to4 hour meeting with the creator and recipient in a quiet location of the their choosing: a caf (N 5) the creator's home (N 4) the creator's workplace (N 2) or the recipient's home (N 1). We first conducted a semistructured interview with the creator we then observed the creator present the Spyn project to recipient. Next we gave participants pencil and paper survey questions and interviewed both the creator and recipient based on the gift exchange and the survey answers. Survey questions included: "If you were going to create another project with Spyn what would you create " and "Do you think that the Spyn project changed how you feel about this craft Please explain." Sessions were videotaped and later transcribed. Phase 5: Final survey. In order to further investigate the recipients' reflection on the gift we sent them a final survey by email 3-to-7 days after the Phase 4 meeting. FINDINGS Figure 5. The Spyn "Kit". The kit contained support materials for the Spyn software and a journal for documenting daily activity with Spyn. Support materials included barcode "buttons" (for switching projects) a scanning guide (for gauging the viewfinder's distance from the garment) and instructions for using Spyn. and managing their Spyn entries and recipients were appreciative of the creators' efforts. Two participants continued to email the researchers (un-prompted) about their craft experiences after the end of the study. For some the act of making and receiving their Spyn projects was highly emotional as evidenced by the two creators and two recipients who shed tears just before or during the gift exchange sessions. For others the projects became a way for recipients to learn about the lives of some they love. During the course of the three-week study participants dealt with professional deadlines moving homes romantic stresses and childcare. Despite pressing life events all but one participant finished at least one Spyn project. In total 11 creators completed one project five of whom started one or more additional project(s). In the following sections we first discuss the content and form of the Spyn memories. We then describe the ways that creators and recipients attributed meaning to the process of craft the creator-recipient relationship and the craft product while using Spyn. What types of Spyn memories did creators make Overall Spyn memories varied considerably in sentiment and style (see Table 1). Creators recorded and saved a total of 161 individual Spyn memories (15 memories per creator on average) the majority of which (62%) described the creators' subjective experiences at the time of capture or earlier that day. For example in a memory for her friend Qwara Erin described her surroundings while knitting in her garden: Spyn video I'm enjoying the weather and enjoying the blue of my princess tree. And I'm thinking gosh it's a good time to be alive. ... And I'm thinking gosh I bet this is what Qwara feels when she's in Mariposa. On average creators used Spyn for 3 weeks one person (Fay) used Spyn for 14 days and one person (Carrie) used Spyn for 28 days. All participants took the Spyn projects quite seriously--creators spent significant time creating Erin's video excerpt gave her recipient access to what her life was like while knitting. Unlike an instant message or a status update the communication was asynchronous and the content was intended to last. It was also typical of 14% of Spyn memories that discussed the outdoors or pleasures of nature and 26% of Spyn memories that detailed events or situations related to the recipient.

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