Jayne Wallace
Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Sometimes I forget to remember

So my perspective of my practice has been altered, from an expression of my personal perspectives to a more open one

Engaging with digital technologies I am a researcher and jeweller often presenting, discussing and opening my work up to the disciplines of Human Computer Interaction, Interaction design and Product design. In these situations I have often felt myself defending the values and perspectives of my craft education and realise that craft knowledge and sensibilities have much to bring to other disciplines.

Often other human centred disciplines focus on people as users, on tasks, which are perfectly valid and necessary, but what other areas often do not focus on are challenging the boundaries of ways of interacting with and experiencing objects, each other and in this case new technologies. Our craft training is worthwhile because it teaches us to think creatively, to deal with human issues, with feelings, meanings, emotions - perhaps what are really essential to people, to work to high standards, to produce expressions of these things in the form of beautifully crafted objects. We are taught to search for new levels of engagement with our materials, our ideas and ways of expressing them. We are taught to push boundaries, to challenge and extend our material, process and form vocabulary,

Interaction design is one of the creative thinking new technology disciplines and frequently does challenge these boundaries, but although these designers share many aspects of our thinking space they often lack our vocabulary with objects, our understandings of making and our understandings of human relationships centred around objects. Many other disciplines are not equipped to tackle the emotional, human qualities of experience that are so central to craft sensibilities.

For me similarly the change of perspective of working with digital technologies and conducting research has fundamentally shifted the way I perceive my practice and its credibility. I now seek to explore the personal criteria for meaning of others as well as of myself, to create environments for experience possible through and because of digital technologies and jewellery.

In exploring aspects of people’s lives that are meaningful to them two projects have influenced me in terms of methods:

The Presence Project collaborated on by the Computer Related Design course at the Royal College of Art, which used creative tools termed probes to find out inspirational information from participants, and KPZ-02 a project from two jewellers based in Amsterdam.

KPZ-02 is an interactive art project within a culturally varied neighbourhood, where the council and tenants wanted to enhance interpersonal contact in the area between the neighbours. The focus of the project was ‘home’. Here members of the community shared their stories of what 'home' means to them, which were interpreted by the jewellers through making pieces of jewellery and other objects for each participant.

These methods fed into my approach to work with individuals to explore elements of emotionally significant aspects of our lives: meaningful experiences, stories and triggers to significant memories that we each have as individuals. My research methodology has been to work with individuals; asking questions in different ways through the use of objects and interviews and then to make jewellery in response to these which have digital capabilities specific to that individual. Within this process my aims are not to try to find out what a person needs, or what I should make for them, or to be instructed what to make, but to use sensibilities I feel to be evident in my craft practice and perspective, to interpret the responses and conversations through making jewellery with digital capabilities. To make pieces which echo aspects of the participant's lives that they feel to be meaningful, as well as unavoidably echoing elements of my own criteria for significance.