In a landscape of accelerating overconsumption, a critical question for designers is how to create objects that people hold on to and care for over time. While durability and material quality are essential, so too are elusive qualities like sentiment, adaptability, and an object’s ability to hold meaning. This creative scholarship investigates how the processes of making can inscribe these qualities into objects, fostering circumstances for attachment to form. Framed by the central question “where does craft end and production begin?”, this research challenges the traditional binary between craft and industry. It explores a hybrid methodology that merges the intuitive, variable nature of the hand with the precision of industrial production. The work emerged from an eight-month research and development grant at the Industrial Sewing and Innovation Center (ISAIC), centered on the FeltLOOM®, a 5-foot-wide industrial needle felting machine. The methodology utilized a reciprocal process of intuitive making and iterative evaluation. Recycled fabrics were composed into abstract arrangements directly on the machine bed, allowing for improvisation and direct material engagement. The machine was then used to execute the felting process, creating surfaces that bear traces of both machinic precision and the subtle inconsistencies of the hand. Theoretically grounded in sensory design and critical craft theory, this research questions the alienation of the maker and user in mass production. The resulting products—textiles suitable for wall coverings, spatial dividers, or acoustic panels—serve as tangible explorations of this hybrid process. By opening space within production for flexibility and creative input, this project demonstrates that meaning is not only applied by an end user but can be fundamentally inscribed through an object’s making.
Sponsoring Organization: ISAIC (Industrial Sewing And Innovation Center)
My scholarship investigates the fertile ground between craft and industrial production, challenging the traditional binary to ask where one ends and the other begins. Drawing on the Slow movement and theories of emotional durability, I examine how reintroducing the hand into mechanized workflows can complicate desirability and foster long-term attachment to form. Ultimately, this research posits that meaning is not only applied by an end user but can be fundamentally inscribed through an object’s making.