Fab City Summit

The best way to think about how can advanced technologies help us in the future, is to complement those ideas with traditional knowledge that once helped us build societies. Historically, a big part of this knowledge has been constructed through the preservation of stories and information in the form of physical objects, as a language for talking about those things communities wouldn’t have been able to talk otherwise. Is in preserving this cultural heritage in the shape of physical stories what has helped us reinforce our cultural heritage. The city of the future, with automation and biggest developments in technology being a big part of it, needs to reinforce this more than ever before, making sure that the tools we use to build and design take into consideration the expressions of our cultural life.  

This workshop is about how to translate qualitative data into physical and tangible pieces. We will be working with individual and collective narratives to design patterns that could then be translate into a physical weaving piece. We will tell and record cultural stories, analyze the audio using JavaScript and translate that data into a physical weaving piece people can take home. With this, we will be turning intangible expressions into physical objects to reflect on the importance of materials, designs and the language we can create just by using patterns.

The patterns created will also reflect of how cities are being build, combining different patterns that together create bigger ones. At the same time, the logic behind weaving, intertwining two pieces of materials to form a new shape, is also the base of how materials are used to construct new ones. In this case, this workshop will shed light on the language expressed by materials and its designs, and how together can create meaning, just as how the patterns inside a city or a space can also create different meaning for people.  

This is a new version of previous workshops I’ve been developing in the last year. By combining crafting with digital tools, we are able to create a new learning approach and a new way of understanding how to humanize our digital creations through handcrafting. People will learn the basics of weaving while the basics of how to translate stories into digital design that could then be applied to other surfaces and materials, and to reflect of how data stored in physical objects is a medium for expression we need to keep using in the future.