|Belo Horizonte, Brazil|
Digital Crochet is a project that represents a creative process and design practice that seeks to include computational agents with a certain level of autonomy in the production of handicrafts. Since the crochet practice is a traditional craft technique that stagnated over time, the inclusion of these computational agents, seeks to potentialize the emergence of unexpected and unexplored crochet patterns. In addition, because crochet is a technique whose fabrication has not yet been mechanized, it is necessary to include the craftworker's participation, experience, and intentions in digital and manual fabrication. This feature, along with other design strategies, gives the result a greater degree of improbability and surprise. Finally, the project materializes the interest and effort to include computational technology in the context of artisanal and local production, enabling the transmission of local and popular tradition, and innovation in the production of handicrafts.
For the project, we developed a cellular automaton that uses the basic crochet stitches to generate diagrams of circular pieces. A cell represented by the crochet stitch within the grid chooses to be chain stitch, single, or double crochet according to a behavioral logic defined by the proportion of stitches found in a neighborhood. The whole piece can be read as a neighborhood, or the circular piece can be divided up into 8 slices. The graphic pattern generated by the algorithm is then read and manually manufactured by the crocheter. Since the algorithm does not produce graphics visually similar to a physical pattern, as well as the crochet recipes (materialization instructions), the interpretation of the graphic was done by the artisan who materialized the patterns according to her perception. All of these characteristics increase the degree of contingency in the pieces, and the results are organic shapes with unconventional aesthetics when compared to traditional crochet.