In the context of challenging the field of design as ‘functional’ and ‘solving problems’, I present the Streamline research – a case study of interactive fabrication, that is diverging from the linear utilitarian process of digital fabrication. The process allows created ‘objects’ to be unfinished, through continuous, endless fabrication and through metaphors of decay and abandonment. Through those experiments, I challenge the notions of usefulness and efficiency and invite on the other hand rejoicing for the alien and the misfit.
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Joëlle Bitton
Joëlle Bitton is an ‘undisciplined’ practitioner. She currently teaches at the Zurich University of the Arts in Interaction Design. With her works, Bitton explores a sense of intimacy and personal geography with machines and systems that are usually considered cold or unfriendly. She likes most to entangle strangeness and familiarity together. As such, in her doctoral thesis at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Bitton created embodied fabrication experiences of personal data controlling CNC-machines. She has also conducted HCI research at Media Lab Europe, Distance Lab, and Culture Lab/Newcastle University. She explored the mediation of technologies in human relationships and their potential social impact, notably with the projects “RAW” and “Passages”.
Bitton graduated from Université Paris Sorbonne in contemporary history on the 19th-century rise of nations correlated with the development of networks and technologies. She advocates for the de-evangelization of technologies and of design as problem-solvers and as markers of progress, especially in the context of global warming.
