Digital Hybridities: Theorising the ‘Social’ and the ‘Local’ of Fabrication Technologies in Craft Practice

The digital design research community keeps moving towards increasingly techno-centric spaces. Largely development-focused, the evolution of technology adoption in our sector is often reported from performance and efficiency perspectives, instead of its efficacy – its implementation and adoption in real-world design practices and cultures. In that context, this paper presents a theory framework to investigate the adoption of digital fabrication technology among craft practitioners - emphasising the challenges among craftsperson’s activities protected by both heritage and cultural traditions developed outside authored and institutionalised contexts of digital design research. Through the coupling of theoretical strands originated in management studies (socio-materiality), media obsolescence, heritage, and crafts theory, our approach is demonstrated through the infusion of digital fabrication tools into the analogue world of letterpress printmaking. Through methods such as community engagement, codesign and prototyping, and graphic outputs, we reflect on issues emanating from uniting a technology that has already faced industrial obsolescence with newly developed digital tools, including the influence of heritage and cultural traditions, tensions around irreplaceability, the need for preservation, spatial and community manifestations, and knowledge transfer and translation across seemingly diverging ways of engaging with technology. The resulting approach challenges the standard hegemonic analogue/digital dichotomy and allows for the interrogation of a more ‘complexified’, nuanced field of hybrid practices encouraging a balance between preservation, tradition, and experimentation.