Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (Design Thinking, Design Theory) by Daniela K Rosner

Author:Daniela K Rosner [Rosner, Daniela K]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: knit, knitting, technofeminism, feminism, critical design
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2018-06-21T22:00:00+00:00

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Encountering Critical Fabulations: A Personal Journey

When my 2007 fieldwork in Bay Area knitting circles began, I was working by day as an intern at a technology company. On one particularly brisk late summer afternoon, I left my job to find a bar in Noe Valley, a gentrifying neighborhood already known for its growing number of baby strollers and urban professionals. I ducked to the back of the bar, carrying a notepad and a recent knitting project. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I made out a room of thirty-somethings, most of them white women, everyone sitting on benches lining the walls with a pair of needles in hand. A few of them carried small babies on their chests. And several people in the room had pulled out their cell phones.

Knitters have long taken on the unlikely role of early adopters when it comes to social media.1 A social networking platform for knitters, Ravelry, had launched earlier that year and already boasted more users than it could manage. Like many of the other knitters in the bar, I was, months later, still stuck on a waiting list and unable to join the online community. A small e-commerce website, Etsy, had begun to sell and distribute hand-knit products. A technology publishing company, O’Reilly Media, was in its second year of printing the magazine Craft: and running a local festival, Maker Faire, with a section dedicated to retailing handmade goods. Not much later, Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl had completed their road trip across the United States: driving 19,000 miles and passing through fifteen cities to film a documentary on this modern “handmade nation,” the name they gave to the people reclaiming traditions of craftwork as forms of creative, independent labor.2

When the Noe Valley knitters took out their phones, they embraced this handmade nation, even if unwittingly. The event was wrapping up for the day. Some took photos of their knitting progress. Others posted knitting updates on their Facebook pages. A few just needed to coordinate their evening plans. There was something odd about the connection of collective knitting with individual screen time. But all the same, I had put my knitting down and was checking my phone too. I had dinner plans.

It was July. A cool San Francisco breeze made knitting still feel viable, inspiring me to sport a knit hat as the temperature dropped at night. I used to avoid knitting during the humid Chicago summers of my childhood, finding it uncomfortable to wrap wool around my hands in the sticky heat. Back then I’d spend hours watching my aunt use her knitting needles like magic wands, turning one-dimensional string into two- or three-dimensional shrugs. During my twenties, I picked up knitting to make a quick holiday gift on a limited budget, learning to loop the yarn around my own fingers at impressive speeds. And now in the Bay Area, knitting became a cozy complement to my office day job where my colleagues were adapting “creativity-support tools” like Photoshop for the hobbyist designer.

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