Accessibility in Collaborative Making

In this project, we investigate the situated practice of collaborative making at a community weaving studio where blind weavers and their sighted instructors collaboratively produce handwoven products using physical materials such as loom, shuttle, and yarns. Through ethnographic field observations and contextual interviews, we uncover how blind weavers engage in coordinated embodied interaction with their sighted instructors and the materials in their workspace to learn and perform weaving steps.

Building on these insights, we designed and built Melodie, an audio-enhanced loom to support blind weavers in understanding the loom state through auditory feedback; and Simphony, an audio-tactile system to enhance their participation in the pattern generation process. Through design exploration sessions at the lab and the community weaving studio, we investigate whether and how the new technologies can augment blind weavers’ embodied understanding of the weaving process and the state of the woven products and what roles digital technologies might play in traditional, manual form of making.