Collaborative Capabilities: Aural encounters in digital/analogue co-creative making

Contemporary arts and design practitioners are mobile, diverse and interdisciplinary. Often operating as micro-businesses or solo practitioners, they need new and innovative approaches that promote collaborative knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary experimentation. This ongoing practice-based research covers the developing co-creative relationships that arise through integrating digital making and data-driven processes as inspiration within collaborative distributed networks of design and making. The authors developed an analogue/digital transformation process for sound-inspired pattern creation, initially explored in the context of textile pattern design with a cohort of practitioners geographically distributed across Scotland, and now expanding out across other craft/design disciplines. Through a participatory design approach (Bannon & Ehn 2012), the project developed a series of collaborative workshops where the practitioners worked together with the researchers to develop new processes for inventing and generating transdisciplinary designs using non-traditional approaches, with designs taking inspiration from the “heard” rather than “seen” environment. It uses the robust multi-sensory process to promote alternative environmental attunement to place and landscape, whilst experimenting within a collaborative digital platform. Through these different lines of work, we explore what it means to be a practitioner in the twenty-first century in Scotland and beyond, including challenging the arts/crafts and craft/design divide through collaborative interdisciplinary participation.