As a final post for this semester, I wanted to share the questions I sent to Hayley Mortin, knitwear designer and editor of Needlebound (the publication I mentioned in an earlier post), since she graciously offered to share her perspective on my topic and her view on the knit world. (Expecting the answers by the end of February)

Part 1

• Can you share a bit about your journey into textiles and knitting? What first drew you to this field?

• How did you develop your unique aesthetic, and what influences have shaped your design style?

• Your interest in AI and your interest in knitting seem quite contradictory, could you talk a bit about how these fields relate to you/how you created this connection and intersection where your work now resides? 

• Do you feel like the rising interest in knitting and other textile crafts can be connected to fears or doubts about AI?

• Since you mention the community building of crafts a lot in your work (esp. Needlebound), how do you experience the community and culture of crafts in relation/contrast to your field of design?

• Which aspects around the craft of knitting and fibre arts/textile arts would you like to transport into the design world? Or your daily life in general?

• Where do you see the influence and importance of textiles in contemporary thought and design?

Part 2

• How do you approach the design process when working with knitted textiles? Do you start with sketches, swatches, or another method?

• Are there any designers, artists, or textile traditions that have particularly inspired your work?

• What role does technology (e.g., digital knitting machines, software) play in your work?

• Which possibilities do you see in fibre arts and knitting as a medium for data visualisation, as someone with a background in data analysis? 

• Besides your captcha series and images from data report, did you experiment with any other combinations of the digital and analogue in your work? 

• I read that you create your knitting charts on stitch fiddle, and mock them up yourself. In which ways do you feel like the limitations of the grid, and the inaccuracy of v shaped “pixels” contribute to the design, your vision of the work and the process? 

• Do you have a favorite material or fiber to work with? How does material choice affect your design decisions?

• Do you see a difference between works like yours, and purely practical knitwear designs? And if so, where do you draw the line? 

• How do you balance functionality and aesthetics in your textile designs?

Part 3

• What do you think makes knitting unique as a medium within textile design?

• How do you see knitting and textiles evolving in fashion and design today?

• If you could push the boundaries of knit(wear) and textile design in any way, what would that look like?

While “AI is stealing our jobs” is not nearly as scary as it sounded maybe a few years ago, it is simultaneously way more realistic now than a few years ago. I will not go into the specifics on anything AI related since there is way too much to be said about that, but I do feel like the resurrection of crafts like knitting definitely happened in response to the growing capabilities of AI. As we know, what happens today is nothing but a repetition of what has happened before, so the resemblance to the Arts and Crafts Movement is not a far reach. 

The Arts and Craft movement originated in England around 1860 as  “Anxieties about industrial life fueled a positive revaluation of handcraftsmanship and precapitalist forms of culture and society.” (https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/acam/hd_acam.htm) While there was also a corresponding Arts and Crafts Movement in the USA, the English were far more outspoken about their aversion to machinery and industrialization. The movement in England was lead by William Morris, textile designer and active socialist – the movement therefore entangled from the start with political and democratic causes. Mostly it was concerned with labour practices, workers’ lives and the decreasing value of produced objects, in addition to the growing capitalist ideas about design that worried Morries and others. 

(https://www.theartstory.org/movement/arts-and-crafts/#:~:text=The%20Arts%20%26%20Crafts%20emerged%20in,at%20least%20into%20the%201920s.)

(https://utppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3138/cras.2014.S06#:~:text=Although%20the%20Arts%20and%20Crafts,in%20opposition%20to%20mass%20production.) 

It was mostly the works that were remembered in art history, not necessarily the political ideas, but they were integral to creating the movement and its works. Now as workers are increasingly worried with the possibility of being replaced, it seems that the search for manual labor that seems too intricate to be digitalized and automated has once again started. So again, “as our world becomes increasingly digital and automated,we find ourselves more enchanted than ever by artisanal craft goods and time-honored traditional methods.“ 

(https://adorno.design/editorial/the-persistence-of-artisanal-craft-in-an-ai-world/#:~:text=Ultimately%2C%20the%20age%20of%20AI,forms%20of%20creativity%20and%20value.) 

Krzysztof Pelcfor coined the term “William Morris Effect” in an article for WIRED, where he relates the emergence of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the current situation with art and AI. He proposes that not only will there be reactions to AI similar to William Morris’, but additionally there will be higher value put on the process behind a product, and human makers will be preferred to machines. 

“Today, the William Morris effect is once more upon us. The first-wave craft revival that Morris brought about was the precursor to our current yearning for “authenticity” in every guise. Just as an unprecedented expansion of international trade has made cheap goods manufactured abroad widely accessible, the Western consumer has become enamored of locally made small-batch mustard with handwritten labels. The distinction comes down to the presumptive identity of the maker, and what we like to assume of their intent.“ (https://www.wired.com/story/art-artificial-intelligence-history/)

Not only seeing a process, and knowing that a person made something will be more important, but also the person themselves; Their ideas, their motivation and their biography. “We will demand works that can be attributed to an identifiable individual vision. The AI age will lead to a doubling down on biography, which happens to be another thing robots are notably short on.” He proposes that the acclimation process to AI in Art and Design has been happening for some time, and what is appreciated in the art world has changed with it, in favor of human artists, not AI. 

Relating this theory to the uproar in textile arts, ultimately one of the most tangibly physical, handmade crafts, there seems to be a connection in where we have grown to place our values. But can these newly valued aesthetics and processes be transformed to other disciplines? Can the tangibility of a process be shown in a work of design, and if yes, how can it create additional value? 

Needlebound by Daizy Chains / Hayley Mortin 

Overview

Needlebound is a publication on fibre arts and artists created by Hayley Mortin, knitwear designer and founder of the Daizy Chains Project, a knitting project that combines digital art, digitalization and AI research with knitting. 

Hayley Mortin/Daizy Chains

Hayley creates works influenced by data science in relation to developments in AI. Through her day job she is in contact with AI products and research about different aspects of AI especially in relation to data and imagery, all in the field of UX Design. Some of the images from these research papers find their way from her workplace to her knitting, and get reproduced in the shape of wearable, tangible items. Through this connection she opens up the conversation about the intersection of digital and analogue, and additionally the intersection of data and crafts. 

The publication

The aim of the publication is to share projects, research and personal stories of artists active today in modern shapes of fibre arts, mostly knitting and crochet, as well as production of yarn, think dyeing and spinning. “A common thread in the fibre arts community is the shared appreciation for creating something tangible, a piece that can be held and felt in contrast to our screen-dominant lives. Needlebound provides a space where fibre artists can share their stories and perspectives in a place that is not dominated through platform algorithms.” (https://dazychains.ca/needlebound)

The publication features 34 articles that show the different unique perspectives on fibre art and its relevance for todays culture and art scene. 

One aspects that gets a lot of attention, not only in Needlebound Vol.1, but also in several separate research papers and articles is the communal practice of crafts. In the Editors Letter, Hayley mentions fibre arts as being historically both solitary and communal, the act of knitting often transforming into a cultural activity that “weaves together social bonds”. (p.10) The more isolated and solitary side of fibre arts mostly developed through the industrial revolution, when the production of textiles and wearables was moved to factories, and the communal tradition of the craft was confined to those spaces, and eventually became a solitary act. (p.11) In “How Far Are You”, an article by Belinda Suen and Molly Berlin inside the publication, they have a conversation about their joint project of knitting the same sweater apart but simultaneously, and therefore touch on this topic of community. Molly Berlin says “Even when not physically knitting together with others, I think knitting is a perfect representation of communion. Knitting is pooling resources with each other […]. It is sharing ancestral Knowledge and traditions and information. Knitting for some has been survival and the survival of loved ones, or an expression of that love”. (p.59) 

In “Spun Structures, Fluid Forms”, the article’s author, Valentine Geze, defines the grid like structure of knitting as the main factor of interest. She talks about how through her background in engineering, the structural approach to a handmade craft drew her to it. Additionally she mentions the inherently feminist nature of the craft, since “the history of garment making is inextricable from women’s history”. (p.24)

“Its associations with housewives became more pronounced after the world wars and Great Depression, when women were encouraged to knit for the war effort, or turned to knitting and mending out of necessity; knitting still maintains connotations with the familial structures, gender roles and tastes of women who embraced it long ago.“ (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200630-how-knitting-became-cool)

Also mentioned by Emma Claire Foley in “Grid Limits” the clearly structural approach to such a soft medium seems to be of interest to multiple of the authors included in Needlebound VOl.1, as well as multiple of the researches in this field outside of the publication. In this article it is not necessarily the structural guidance of the grid that seems to be of interest, but rather the possibility of infinitive options, inside such a finite frame as the grid with its defined size and proportions. She also speaks on the fascination with grids that she noticed in herself and others, especially after her introduction into filmmaking. “If you think about it, the analogy runs to the foundation of the medium: digital images are formed by tiny points of light, and by patterning them at larger and larger scales, by making them sufficiently tiny, we can persuade the eye to stitch them together into a full, colorful image, grid after grid flashing by. […] The grid appears when things break down: people love to post the broken LCD ad boards across the city, orderly lines of cyan, hot green and red spidered over by cracks in the glass”. (p.39) 

Thoughts

One of the reasons why this magazine seemed relevant to the research was the fact that, as Hayley says about the publication, there are not really any other publications that collect fibre artists’ perspectives on the craft, and provide such a space to their words. This collectiveness and community seemed particularly important to me since it is one of the possibilities I see for design to evolve and learn from traditional crafts. Design has become an extremely solitary act, considering not only working from home, but especially the withholding of information, resources and the shyness (or fear of plagiarism) that keeps designers from sharing their work with others. The solitude of the work is not only something that designers struggle with, but that, in my opinion, also influenced the industry as a whole to be more competitive and less communal. 

(Mortin, Hayley (Hrsg.): Needlebound Volume One.)

A popular way of combining design and textiles is in the field of typographic design and type design: Typeknitting (as it is sometimes known as). The pixel-like nature of construction in knitting grids and the possibility of color changes basically offer a pixel grid for various designs that can be realized in knitted matter. Although, with consideration for the fact that the “pixels” in knitted pieces resemble a “V” more than a square, which can mess with the contrasts and contours of shapes. 

This specific interest in knitting letters relates to the growing interest in alternative materials for typography and type design. There have been experiments hand lettering with sauces, melting ice cubes that shape glyphs, text etched into fruits and decomposing, etc. – the text itches to leave the canvas and make its way into our lives. While text on textiles is a traditional concept, there have been projects transforming the practice into more concept driven pieces, or even projects that use the limitations of the medium as guidelines for new type design. 

Ismahane Poussin researched knitted type for her masters thesis and started designing a font for herself to knit with, inspired by football scarfs (so called Jacquard knitting). 

“As she continued her experiments, she began noticing the ways the knitting machine contributed its own abstract aesthetics and quirks to her designs. ‘The letters are played around as if my machine was also a type designer: the letters are wider if we knit vertically, for example.’” The project culminated in a series of wearables that thematized fast fashion, an example of textile work referencing its own history and process. 

(https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/ismahane-poussin-graphic-design-140422)

Another designer that was inspired by football scarves is Rüdiger Schlömer, author of “Pixel, Patch und Pattern”, a book on type knitting. He designed the “Knit Grotesk” font, basically a low resolution pixel font inspired by Futura, that was created to both be knitted and used regularly on screens and printed matter. In the making of the font, the process of knitting was considered, so that even if the font is used on regular designs, there should be a tactile and textile quality to it – the font existing both in design and craft, and in the inbetween. (https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/rudiger-schlomer-knit-grotesk-graphic-design-project-230424)

There are a number of downloadable fonts that are either inspired by textiles and knitting, made to look like textiles and knitting, or actually serve as direct patterns. Some examples include Yarndings, StitchinKnit, and CrossStitch. 

While in craft circles like knitting there are numerous possibilities to create social interaction around the work, graphic design offers relatively few outside of the scholarly experience.

Tracing back to the domesticity of knitting, that mostly arrived to households in the 19th century, knitting often became a joined activity for women, meeting every week in alternating homes, and crafting together, the social interaction as important as the work. Knitting, as well as other textile crafts and traditionally feminine crafts, seems to be reclaimed by modern feminists, using the femininity of the technique as a starting point for design and fashion projects. Additionally, since the feminist ideologies often align with the interest in those feminine crafts, the social gatherings of knitters and crafters often serve as groups to discuss these ideologies and ideas, and can lead to groups venturing into social and political territory additionally to fashion and design, and naturally also combining the two. “And while there are plenty of knitting groups based purely on fun and socialising around the world, like the Stitch ’n’ Bitch Groups, pub-based groups and LGBTQ-specific gatherings, knitting-based groups have also long been hotbeds of activism and progressive causes. Even though knitting circles remain the butt of many jokes, these spaces have radical implications.” (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200630-how-knitting-became-cool)

In the graphic design field, there seems to be (at least to me, geographically confined and not all knowing) a lack of those gathering opportunities. I am deliberately choosing to not call them networking meetings, since the economic implications of networking do not align with the purely social ideas of craft circles and gatherings. One project that seems to combine the two aspects is Lola’s Club, a portuguese project offering design club meetings every month, where members or strangers can join for 3 hours to work on their individual projects, while connecting with others, exchanging ideas and enjoying the community. (https://www.instagram.com/lolas._.club/)

Disciplines of Craft and Textile Production in specific carry a long tradition and vernacular culture with them, while graphic design has not been recognized as a discipline as long, when comparing the two. In some of the most influential works on the history of graphic design, e.g. Phillip Megs Works, the relationship between Design and Art has been honored, and mentioned as influential to Design on multiple historical occasions, while the relation between Craft and Design has not been mentioned in a significant way. Hyun Kim proposes in his research paper “The Significance of Constructing the Social Model of Craft in Graphic Design History Narrative” that this recent recognition of the field is to blame for a lacking narrative in graphic design history. He speaks on his worry for the future of graphic design, a future that is building up on roots that have yet to solidify. He worries about the narrative that has been created, and its benefits for future design and designers, as he feels like there has been a lot of emphasis on the looks of works, but not on their social implications. “The new technological changes suggest the need for alternative narratives to foster social visions that create meaningful values, which would be commonly shared in a community”. (Hyun Kim, p. 99) The graphic design narrative is, according to Hyun Kim, not only lacking in meaningful narrative, but also significantly lacking in community and social interactions. These social interactions and communal values are in contrast to design, inherently a part of craft. Since crafts originated from a social interaction at first, and more recently after the industrial revolution as a social movement, craft as a discipline automatically evolved into a democratic and political activity. 

Hyun Kim proposes that graphic design history, as well as future, would benefit from a closer relationship with crafts, to create a more socially conscious, politically and democratically active, and in general more social and interactive discipline. 

(Hyun Kim, Jung: The Significance of Constructing the Social Model of Craft in Graphic Design History Narrative. The Second Asian Conference of Design History an Theory – Design Education beyond Boundaries – ACDHT 2017 Tokyo 1-2 September 2017 Tsuda University)

By “Theory of Craft” in this context I want to research specifically about what makes craft on a meta layer, that is separate from any specific project or pattern, what there is to be said about the making of the thing, rather than the thing. And how the making of a craft object can be inspirational to the making of a design project, how the process can be influenced and changed.

Mostly, crafts are seen as a means to an end, a product that is mostly to be worn. But depending on the research, craft is also often seen as “a way of thinking through material” (Nimkulrat 2012) “In textiles as well as other material-designated disciplines, craft is understood not only as a way of making things by hand, but also as a way of thinning through the hand manipulating a material. […] Craft is thus ‘a means for logically thinking through senses’.” (Nimkulrat 2010) The material itself plays a more active role than in design disciplines: while the paper as a material of for example a poster only comes into play when the design is finished, in textiles the material itself is what builds the design, what the designer is working with, the work is building itself up row by row. 

The thought process behind a piece is most often seen as separate from the process of making it, maybe since there is a lot of work from patterns in craft that were designed by someone who is not the person making it. But the movements that create the piece, the tangibility and the connection to the physical object in the making can also be seen under a more philosophical lens. “The process of making objects by hand can be identified as one way of thinking intellectually” (Sennet 2008)

(Yes I changed my topic again)

Introduction 

While Arts and Crafts have been in lively exchange and reference each other frequently (think of fibre arts as a genre, or soft sculptures), crafts and design are not necessarily as connected. Knitting has experienced a great upswing in recent years, but somehow simultaneously still feels disregarded as a craft for homebodies and grandmothers, where outcomes are to be worn but not necessarily to be appreciated in an artistic way. While this is a whole topic to be explored, including researching under a feminist lens into the whole genre of fibre arts, it is not exactly what this research aims for. There are some projects out there connecting design and typography with fibre arts and knitting, but mostly they concern themselves with bridging the gap between analogue and digital, and end up with knitted works that were informed by digital practices, or depict digitally designed concepts. While these projects offer a lot of perspective for creatives focused on fibre art and creating textile works, I want to try it the other way around. How can knitting influence graphic design? Typography, editorial and publishing? How can the process of knitting and graphic design relate? How can the tangible, physical, material craft of knitting inform the increasingly digital practice of design? How can craft philosophies be integrated into modern graphic design? How can factors like color, grid, texture and rhythm create a common ground between these opposing disciplines? How can a return to craft and handmade philosophies play a part in the future of graphic design (from the perspective of someone trying to be very mindful about the ways AI gets integrated into our processes)? And ultimately, does that even make sense and is there anything to gain from this experiment?

Typographic metalanguage/multimodal typography and how it influences our sense of culture, identity and belonging

After a lot of brainstorming and research (which took a long time, since my idea of a topic is extremely broad and doesn’t satisfy my wish for a clear vision of its potential) the topic I decided to go further into is typography and its communicative power beyond the words you read. 

The paper “typographical landscaping” poses some interesting views on this: 
Letterforms, types, and scripts are always emplaced or spatialized, and situated within specific temporal trajectories. They are part of the semiotic landscape, or, rather, of historically layered semiotic landscapes that we move through or that “move” in front of our eyes in a constant interplay of discourses, genres, and styles interacting with land, built environment, and bodies. Thus, landscape can be understood as both a view and a representation of a view. (Source)

Everyone is aware of the example of Blackletters/Fraktura as the probably best known connection of culture/society and typography, so I won’t go into that as much. More interesting to me in the first part of this were examples from other cultures and times, but also Kurrent (German Cursive Writing), which also suffered under the Nazi Regime, and had to give up its post as the main writing system in Austria. Lesser known than Fraktur, Kurrent currently is being forgotten by most as we speak, since it was last taught in schools during the second world war and shortly after. The question now is, if this uprising and downfall of Kurrent, though obviously in connection with cultural developments, had any influence of its own, and cultural relevance it carried and that has thus been left behind. (Source)

In multicultural areas with multiple languages like Switzerland, the use of typography can help to unite or separate. With 4 official languages and therefore no uniform national language, typographical, linguistic and writing systems contribute to the sense of national identity and belonging, and help overcome internal cultural differences. (Source)

This parallels the development of Devanagari as a national script in India, uniting the different writing systems and languages to shape the national identity. Devanagari uses unified Glyphs, that then are adjusted in pronunciation according to the area and language. (I would personally compare it to latin writing being used in different languages with mostly the same glyphs, but the research into Devenagari has been minimal so far so I wouldn’t bet on it.) (Source)

One example that goes a bit more into linguistics that the graphic part of writing and typography is the “appropriation of the letter k in the Spanish linguistic landscape”, where instead of using regular ways of writing words that include c or qu, anarchists protested the rules of the language, by replacing it with a k instead. This started being picked up by not only people but also corporations, as for example a spanish bank employed this writing quirk in their ads, on one hand recognizing this show of protest, while on the other hand trivializing it. This lead to some of the groups that started the movement, to abandon it all together after it was picked up on this scale. (Source)

Thus, not only does typography pose a playground to subvert rules and create protests, but can turn into a political, cultural and societal battleground when these movements are picked up by outsiders, bystanders, or people profiting off it. In “Is your font racist? Metapragmatic online discourses on the use of typographic mimicry and its appropriateness”, Dimitrios Meletist talks about the practice of typographic mimicry. This term describes typefaces that are created to resemble another script (for example “Chinese Style” latin typefaces. In the article, typographic mimicry is handled as a practice highly influential on society and culture, as well as public perception of the mimicked culture, due to reinforced or -established stereotypes. (Source)

Origin
Maybe it came from realising that other countries actually have young adults with a sense of national belonging, pride and heritage, maybe it stems from the deep longing for designs with historical context, relation to artistic and cultural heritage, intensive research and thought behind them after a long time of trend based designing, but who knows. Dissecting how our cultural and national identity is created, especially through language and visuals is something that I’ve been interested in for the past months and years, and is promising to be an interesting field of research.

Defining terms
To be able to research design in context of historical and cultural heritage, first one needs to define what is meant by cultural heritage. UNESCO defines cultural heritage as » include[s][ing] artefacts, monuments, a group of buildings and sites, museums that have a diversity of values including symbolic, historic, artistic, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological, scientific and social significance.« (Source)

A similar term that showed up in initial research and brainstorming was national identity, which is generally understood to be either the identity or sense of belonging of a person in relation to the nation or state (or multiple). This includes not only geographic aspects but also culture, language, politics, symbols, and the history of a nation. The development of national identity is either seen as historically founded and strictly kept, or as continuously developing depending on politics and the changes in society. (Source)

Additionally a person’s identity can also be related to their ethnic and cultural identity, which can coexist or rival with the national identity. Cultural identity relates to a person’s beliefs and values, their moral concepts and their norms of life. Aspects that could influence a person’s cultural identity are their gender, sexuality, and race. Cultural identity is a contributing factor of which groups we feel a part of, and in return the groups we participate in influence our cultural identity. (Source)

Continuation of thoughts
To be a part of any of these identities, one would assume that they need to be communicated first, through specific imagery (thinking of specific styles of images like soviet propaganda for example), colours (thinking of national colours and flags), fonts (seeing how much a shared language contributes to the sense of identity and belonging, the depiction of it must also matter) and symbols (communicating identities and movements to others easily through widely known symbols, icons and signs) and probably more nuanced elements that relate to the cultural and national heritage. Which is where design comes in.

Prospects
As one might conclude, this opens up a gigantic realm of possibilities, where the fields of theoretical research might connect to the practice of design. This, so far, leaves a lot of possibilities to dive into, either in an artistic, social studies direction (visually supporting cultural movements and groups for example), or a more marketing based direction of redesigning brands with cultural heritage or influencing peoples sense of pride and patriotism.