Hybrid Craft: Towards an Integrated Physical-Digital Craft Practice.

Nowadays, people engage in a diverse range of craft practices in their everyday lives, which take place in physical and digital realms, such as creating decorations for their homes, modifying IKEA furniture, making digital photo collages, or creating their own personal websites. Within this increasingly hybrid age, in which people engage with physical and digital artefacts alongside each other and simultaneously, the research presented in this thesis poses that there are opportunities for new forms of making and creativity at the intersection of physical and digital realms. In other words, it introduces hybrid craft as a new everyday craft practice. Using an interaction design research methodology that consists of research for design (interviewing physical and digital crafters about their current practices) and research through design (designing, prototyping, and evaluating a novel toolkit for hybrid craft, called Materialise), this thesis explores what forms hybrid craft practice may take in everyday life, and what new systems or tools could be designed that facilitate this practice. Employing a comparison of physical and digital craft practices, and findings from design work, design guidelines are formulated for effective combination of physical and digital materials, tools, and techniques, and the realisation of interactive hybrid craft results in interaction design, for example by implementing surprising material behaviour within physical-digital combinations, and by realising techniques to work with physical and digital materials in the same materiality realm. Through empirical and theoretical grounding and reflection, this thesis establishes hybrid craft as a novel concept within design research and craft communities that has a wide range of possibilities in everyday life, both in offering ways to do more with digital media, and in encouraging new forms of making and creativity