eLoominate: Tools for Casual Creation in Hybrid Craft

eLoominate: Tools for Casual Creation in Hybrid

Cra

Jordan Graves

, Anne Sullivan

StoryCra Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

Abstract

Hybrid Cra is a form of combining digital media and physical creation. eLoominate is a hybrid cra

system that combines hardware and soware where the designs of both are inspired by casual creators.

eLoominate aims to simplify Fair Isle knitting–a technique for creating patterns using multiple colors

of yarn. The process requires a craer to take their eyes away from their work to read a pattern,

which slows down knitting and is prone to errors. We introduce a novel physical tool that embeds

individually-addressable LEDs into a circular knitting loom to provide row-by-row patterning instruction.

This physical tool works with soware we have developed to allow users to quickly design their own

repeating patterns and download them to the loom. We argue that the combination of our novel digital

and physical tools are required to create a casual creator appropriate for hybrid cra.

Keywords

Hybrid fabrication, casual creators, cra, knitting, computer-aided design

1. Introduction

With the eLoominate project, our goal was to create a casual-friendly tool that could be used

to aid in the creation of a style of knitting known as Fair Isle knitting. Fair Isle knitting is a

technique that uses multiple yarns to create multi-color patterns that is typically done with

knitting needles but can also be done on knitting looms (Fig. 1). These designs are known

for being more dicult–introducing multiple yarns into the design adds more possibilities for

errors and additional complexity that casual users may nd challenging.

To achieve this goal, we found that we needed to create both physical and soware solutions

that work in tandem to create a casual creator experience. In this paper we will describe both

the physical and soware aspects of the eLoominate project, as well as describe the design

decisions that helped shape the nal system. Additionally, we will discuss how both the physical

and soware aspects of the project aid in creating a complete casual creator.

Joint Proceedings of the ICCC 2020 Workshops (ICCC-WS 2020), September 7-11 2020, Coimbra (PT) / Online

 [email protected] (J. Graves); [email protected] (A. Sullivan)

 http://jordangraves.com/ (J. Graves); http://asdesigned.com/ (A. Sullivan)

 0000-0002-2704-1852 (J. Graves); 0000-0003-4258-7279 (A. Sullivan)

CEUR

Workshop

Proceedings

http://ceur-ws.org

ISSN 1613-0073

CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)

Figure 1: Fair Isle knit hat.

2. Related Work

Hybrid craing has been described as “where beautiful and meaningful artifacts are produced by

a machine and crasperson working together, not by a machine or crasperson alone“ [

] and

“everyday creative practices of using combinations of physical and digital materials, techniques

or tools, to make interactive physical-digital creations” [

]. Novel tools are needed to develop

new processes and make new artifacts with both physical and digital qualities. A subset of

these tools that explore the relationship between cra and digital fabrication are those that

are digitally-augmented to assist novice users with cra techniques. Research includes smart

carving tools that track the position of a hand-held milling device and adjusts its speed in relation

a pre-selected the 3D model [

] as well as using projection on the craer’s sculpture to indicate

where they need to add and remove material to form the intended digital model [

]. Both of

these tools allow the user to sculpt in a natural way, but other systems guide users to construct

their sculpture as a 3D printer would and explore the tension in a collaboration between the

computer and human [

]. These examples focus just on the fabrication of a pre-designed digital

model, whereas our system allows the user to both design and fabricate their design.

Research has also shown how parametric and computational design can be used to develop

soware that allows novices to learn to design wearable objects that are produced using digital

fabrication tools such as laser cutters [

] [

]. The generative methods of these tools are one

of the design qualities of the genre of Casual Creators–tools that allow quick and creative

exploration through possibility spaces of artifacts [

]. Casual Creators have been used to solve

some of the issues of wider populations being interested in personal fabrication systems such

as 3D printing but lack the experience to design objects that meet all the requirements to be

printable [

]. We used the ideas of casual creators and applied them both both the physical and

digital aspects of eLoominate.

3. eLoominate Design

Our goal with eLoominate was to create a tool that made complex techniques more approachable

for casual users, in particular Fair Isle knitting. As discussed above, a major challenge of Fair Isle

knitting is the error-prone and time-consuming nature of the designs. In particular, when using a

knitting loom, these challenges are due to the pattern and loom being in two physically dierent

spaces, causing the user to divide their attention between the two locations and remember

details of each. Therefore, our solution was to create a device that integrated the pattern within

the tool (Fig. 2). Since the pattern is now part of the tool itself, we also chose to allow the user

to generate or design new patterns that could be stored within the tool.

3.1. Physical tool

When considering the design of eLoominate, we looked to knitting looms as inspiration, as

they are an existing tool designed to be a casual counterpart to knitting needles. Knitting

looms are physical craing tools that are made up of a circle of specialized pegs mounted into a

rigid (oen plastic) form. The looms are used by wrapping yarn around the pegs and using a

special tool to hook the loops over each other to form stitches. These looms are generally made

in circular or rectangular shapes and used to create small items like hats, scarves, and socks.

Casual users can easily knit their own items with the looms, but the designs are typically limited

to one color of yarn. Traditional knitting looms oer no guidance in patterning. Therefore

the knitter must read a pattern, remember that pattern as they redirect their focus to the loom,

execute that pattern, then look back at the pattern and remember their place. This slows the

pace, lowers condence, increases frustration, introduces opportunities for errors. On the

other hand, constraining the designs to a single color critically limits the possibility space of

the system. All of these are at odds with the denition of a casual creator as an “interactive

system that encourages the fast, condent, and pleasurable exploration of a possibility space” [

Figure 2: Knitting with eLoominate.

Knitting looms are made in a variety of sizes and number of pegs. If a pattern needs to

seamlessly repeat around the circular form of a hat, the number of pegs needs to be evenly

divisible by the number of stitches in a pattern. It was important for the loom we made to have

a number of pegs that was highly divisible. 48 pegs was ultimately decided on for this reason.

The availability of an existing 48-peg knitting loom in a 5/8” gauge allowed for the option to

create a mold instead of 3D printing a new loom. The spacing between the pegs closely matched

LED strips available in 60 LEDs per meter densities. Several techniques for making molds were

tested, as well as options for creating separation between the pegs to prevent the light from the

LEDs bleeding into neighboring pegs.

The microcontroller we chose for the prototype is an Arduino Nano due to its smaller physical

size with enough memory to store the entire pattern (Fig. 3). We added two buttons that have

associated programmable RGB LEDs that are used to interact with the physical loom. The

buttons are context sensitive. In knitting mode, the green button advances to the next row,

while the red button goes back a row. In programming mode, the buttons change colors to

represent the two colors of yarn.

Figure 3: Schematic for eLoominate electronics.

The soware for the microcontroller needed to receive a pattern as well as display that pattern

row by row. When receiving serial data, the microcontroller stores the incoming data as the

colors for the pegs, how many stitches wide and rows tall the pattern is, followed by the bits

determining the stitches in that pattern. This data is stored in the microcontroller’s EEPROM

so the pattern can be retrieved even aer the device has been restarted. The Adafruit NeoPixel

Library is used to help control the individually-addressable LED strips, which change in response

to the craer pressing one of the two buttons.

To give the users more exibility in what patterns they could create, we chose to make

eLoominate programmable. Initially the prototype explored the possibility of the knitter being

able to program the pattern directly on the loom without needing a separate soware interface.

When the loom was turned on, the knitter had the ability to enter their own pattern using the

two buttons. The user would press one button to increment how many stitches wide and tall

their pattern would be, then press the other button to conrm these dimensions. Once the

dimensions were determined, the buttons would change colors and be used to key in the pattern

for every row. While this approach allowed users to knit custom patterns, it did not assist in

the design of new patterns.

3.2. Soware

Designing patterns for this technique oers its own set of challenges. If a pattern is meant to be

repeated, the number of pegs on the loom must be evenly divisible by the number of stitches

in the designed motif. Based on our own experiences of designing patterns, it is important to

view the designed motif repeated because positive and negative spaces are created along the

edges where the pattern repeats that can’t be seen when the motif is viewed as a single unit.

It is also important to see the full pattern to be able to see the scale of a motif compared to

the entire object. Repeatedly drawing a motif is time consuming, and any adjustments would

require editing each one.

Figure 4: eLoominate design soware

These experiences with loom knitting have revealed challenges in both the design and knitting

process that could be alleviated by digital media. The binary nature of knit patterns allow

them to be easily stored and repeated, edited by a custom design soware, and used as data

to be displayed by a microcontroller. eLoominate was designed to address the issues in loom

knitting using the aordances of programmable media. There is existing soware for computer

aided design for hand and machine knitting, but casual users who want to design new patterns

for eLoominate would benet from a soware designed for the possibility space of patterns

that can be knit on this specic loom. DesignaKnit [

] is a knitwear design soware that

could be used be design patterns for eLoominate, but this soware is designed for experienced

and professional knitters, provides advanced and superuous functionality, and is expensive.

DesignaKnit allows users to download patterns to select knitting machines, but would not

be able to download to eLoominate. Custom soware would allow casual users to quickly

and easily design patterns for eLoominate. The soware currently constrains design motifs to

dimensions that seamlessly repeat around the loom, but future iterations may consider other

design principles including awareness of oats–when not knitting with a particular strand of

yarn for several stitches results in long strands of yarn that form on the back side of the fabric.

We developed the online design soware to assist the craer in the design process as well as

provide step-by-step instructions to guide users through the knitting process (Fig. 4). It runs in

the user’s web browser and is built with HTML, CSS and the p5.js and p5.serialport.js libraries

for JavaScript. The soware allows users to draw their own pattern and view it in a repeat

(Fig. 5A), as an isolated motif (Fig. 5B), or as a three-dimensional hat preview (Fig. 5C). This

soware allows designers to quickly make changes and preview many options. The craer

can use the soware to download the pattern to the loom through a standard USB port. If the

loom stays connected to the computer, the soware is alerted by the loom when the knitter

presses the buttons to work through the pattern and shows their progress in the browser window.

Figure 5: Dierent view options in eLoominate design soware: Grid(A), Swatch(B), 3D(C).

4. Reflection

We plan to conduct user studies to evaluate the eLoominate hardware and soware, but our

own experiences as craers have provided initial feedback during the iteration of prototypes.

We designed a pattern and knit a fair isle hat prior to building the rst prototype to identify

how eLoominate could make a more enjoyable craing experience. Knitting with eLoominate

resulted in fewer mistakes when the LEDs signied which color of yarn to use. However, when

the LED pattern signied dierent types of stitches, such as knit or purl, mistakes were made

more oen. The techniques for creating the physical loom have improved based on our own

feedback. The initial looms were cast with resin using molds made with silicone putty. The

putty was easy to use but the resulting looms were rough and the yarn would catch on the

pegs. Smoother looms were then cast from molds made from a pourable silicone rubber. We are

currently designing a new iteration of the loom with additional 3D printed pieces to better hold

the electronic components for eLoominate.

5. Conclusion

We designed eLoominate to alleviate some of the perceived diculties of Fair Isle knitting that

may make it unapproachable to casual knitters. By embedding LEDs into the physical device,

eLoominate oers a visual representation of the pattern on the device itself, thereby increasing

eciency and reducing errors. The loom works through a design one row at a time, allowing

the user to create their patterned hat, scarf, or fabric aided by the loom. While the initial focus

of this research was on the development of a novel digitally augmented knitting loom, the

design process brought forward the question of how soware designed for this craing tool can

further support novice knitters. The soware we developed has limited design functionality

compared to commercial knitting soware, just focusing on quickly designing patterns for this

specic loom. We plan to conduct user studies to evaluate how the soware and hardware

assists users and what benets are experienced from using an integrated hardware/soware

system that cannot be gained from only one part of the system.

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