Craft Technologies Exhibit: Come See the Collection of Projects
Students enrolled in a course taught by Utah State University assistant professor Deborah Fields will showcase their projects completed this semester in a “Craft Technologies Exhibit” Wednesday, April 24, from 1:30-3:30 p.m. in the Emma Eccles Jones Education Building, Room 282.
This is the first semester the course has been offered by the Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences, and Fields is excited to show off students’ work.
The exhibit will include interactive games, jackets that light up in response to touch, glass jars that play music, squeezable light-up stuffed animals, singing mushrooms and much more.
Students have been designing a wide range of fun projects, from interactive quilts and twinkling tutus to pressure sensitive pet toys and NERF gun video games.
“We have students from fashion design, communications, art, publicity and instructional technologies and learning sciences,” Fields said. “The diversity of expertise in the class has contributed to a lot of creative work.”
The craft technologies course — officially ITLS 5285/6285 — is part of a new movement to transform the landscape of technology education by changing the way we think of and use computers. It’s about crafting with digital technologies, using threads instead of wires, using cloth instead of metal. In other words, making hybrid creations that cross traditional domains of computing, engineering, art and crafting, the exhibit organizers said. Students are using cutting edge technologies alongside more traditional crafts to explore the affordances of different conductive materials for interaction.
Each student designed several projects, including human sensor garments, fabric pianos and alternative video game controllers — try to picture a quilted Nintendo controller.
“The students have been amazing this year,” Fields said. “Most came in with very little to no knowledge of how to make circuits or program computers, but by the end of the semester have made some very clever and creative products.”
Children are welcome at the exhibit.
Related links:
Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences
USU Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services
Contact: Deborah Fields, 435-797-0571, deborah.fields@usu.edu
Writer/source: Amanda Harris, 214-909-7484
The Emma Eccles Jones Education Building, Room 282, is the location for an exhibit of new technologies developed by students in the craft technologies course taught by Deborah Fields.
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