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| Malcolm McCullough, the author of Abstracting Craft, has recently moved to the University of Michigan, where he is working on a book about technology design for location awareness. Malcolm McCullough explores digital media in the physical environment. From a background in design software (at early Autodesk), and architectural education (for many years at Harvard), he has crossed into the emergent field of human-computer interaction. His 1996 book, Abstracting Craft became a literary pick among digital designers. Following a short residence at Xerox PARC, and more recently two years amid the human-computer interface design community at Carnegie Mellon, he been pursuing the question of place identity in ubiquitous computing. From this, he has been at work on a book entitled Digital Ground. As of January 2001, McCullough has joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, whose schools of Architecture, Information Science, and Art & Design offer good border crossings. Contribution: Building Cultures of Digital Craft When my book Abstracting Craft explored these theme now several years ago, it gained widespread discussion by the interaction design community. Why was this so? And why was the book less noticed by those among traditional designers ready to explore the new medium? Besides explaining the book’s essential position for those who have not encountered it, I would like to share some retrospect on reactions I have found. Beyond the basic goal of cultural assimilation, the theme of adequation has many other possible interpretations here. Digital craft comes at a cost of further separating representation and reality. Indeed, many full-time computer users appear to lose touch with material sensibility. On the other hand, digital craft just as often realizes new physical forms—in architecture, in product design, in environmental technology, and in entertainments. Authors, educators, manufacturers, storytellers, and critics thus find themselves in a process of adequation, not only to the new medium and its possibilities, but to each other and their formerly separate approaches to work. Finally, at the personal level, each of us aspires to a closer relation to our own work, through ambient and haptic interaction techniques for example, and through accumulated physical and symbolic contexts (our studios), and through our own respective roles in networked communities of practice. As my own current writing explores the importance of context in interactivity, I may be able to explain some ways forward into the crafts of contextual (physical-, environmental-, ubiquitous-) computing. |
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