Beyond the screen: craft as inquiry in human-computer interaction

The field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has been historically shaped by efficiency, productivity, and task completion—priorities that reflect the class and gender biases of those who built it. We propose critical crafting as a framework for disrupting these hierarchies and reimagining what HCI can be. Using two research-through-design case studies, crocheting and embroidery serve as modes of inquiry that point toward a future of HCI that goes beyond screens and may imagine delight, joy, and surprise through crafting technology. Developed over 8 months within the Interaction Design Thesis Course at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at The George Washington University, these case studies pair a distinct craft technique with a technological intervention: the first translates the embodied, repetitive logic of crochet into an interactive digital installation designed to invite conditions for joy and presence; the second embeds responsive technology into an embroidery artifact to transform it from a static object into a two-way communicative system that invites touch. Together they propose how technology can function as both vessel and mediator for craft-based experience. These findings suggest that centering craft in technological development legitimizes embodied, process-oriented ways of knowing that HCI has historically overlooked—and that the stakes of that overlooking are not merely aesthetic, but political. Critical crafting offers a reorientation of HCI towards human experience and emotions, arguing that craft offers an important route for expanding HCI beyond dominant screen-based paradigms, toward interfaces that foster conditions for joy, play, and curiosity.