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Designing Collaboration: Evoking Dr Johnson through Craft and Interdisciplinarity

The chapter analyses the collaborative partnership between a designer maker and a research technologist by examining the design and development of the Interactive Work-table and Escritoire, an interactive installation for the 2009 House of Words Exhibition. It evaluates the project’s integration of digital pen and paper technologies, live websites, decorative craftwork and the impact of the resultant augmented-paper interface.

Examining design processes as the sum of their collaborators (including artist, technologist, commercial partner, museum curator/moderator, social/computer scientists and museum visitors) shapes analysis of how interdisciplinary collaboration enables the production of works which create and encourage contributory co-participation and collaboration. The chapter explores these forms of collaboration that inform both the production and response to the installations and discusses the effect of interdisciplinary approaches to conceptualising responses to interactive technology.

Offering a challenging new argument for the collaborative power of craft, the text analyses the philosophies, politics and practicalities of collaborative craft work. The book is organised into sections covering the cooperation and compromises required by the collaborative process; the potential of recent technological advances for the field of craft; the implications of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaborations for authority and ownership; and the impact of crafted collaborations on the institutions where we work, learn and teach. With essays by established makers and artists such as Allison Smith (US) and Brass Art (UK), curator Lesley Millar, textile designer Trish Belford and distinguished thinker Glenn Adamson, Collaborating Through Craft is a core text for students, artists, makers, curators and scholars across a number of fields.