Lecture | Vernelle A. A. Noel | Craft + Computation: Culture, Design, Cognition

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Vernelle A. A. Noel | Architecture & Interactive Computing | Georgia Institute of Technology

Craft practices and communities carry histories and cultures of people, knowledges, innovations, and social ties. Some reasons for their disappearance include dying practitioners, lacking pedagogy, changing practices, and technocentric developments. How might we employ computation in the restoration, remediation, and reconfiguration of these practices, knowledges, and communities? How might social and cultural values and practices shape cognitive abilities and creative expressions? How might investigations in these practices at the intersection of culture, cognition, and material inform our conceptualizations and understanding of the human mind? In this talk, I present research in the dying craft of wire-bending, and the diasporic design practice of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival to answer some of these questions. By employing design/ making, computation, and ethnographic methods as forms of inquiry, I will share new computational tools, research frameworks, and expressions that address problems in this context, and reveal new dimensions and possibilities for how we think about craft, computation, and culture.