we present patchprov supporting improvisational design practices for modern quilting
the modern quilting movement has changed the process of making quilts and their appearance
one technique improvisational quilting often results in colorful bold geometric designs that
can look like some modern paintings improvisation is a well-known technique in music and acting
and much of the prior work on improv in the hci community emphasizes supporting brainstorming
or the performing arts in improv quilting spontaneity is important but the process
does not have the urgency of live performance this means that a system to support it does not
necessarily require real-time responsiveness and must account for longer-term reflection
we wanted to know if we could design a system to support this improvisational design approach
whereas the process of making a traditional quilt involves following a mostly linear process
improv quilting is more iterative quilters start with some design inspiration
and then cycle through design cutting fabrics and sewing the final piece from reading several
popular books on improv quilting we identified key properties of the technique and its challenges
these challenges include getting started getting stuck costly experimentation and recording process
we set out to design a system patchprov to address these challenges
our system needs to assist the user with starting a design help users avoid indecision promote
reflection and capture the overall approach or process by which a design is produced
to use patchprov a quilter starts by cutting fabric working directly in the usual medium
they then load the piece to create the digital representation in patchprov automatically
they can then use this digital representation to cut and
layout pieces digitally without having to waste precious fabrics
they can then add pieces to the design note that as they make changes digitally
items are getting added to the to-do list which keeps track of this experimentation
then as the user cuts and sews real fabrics they can check off these items on the to-do list to
make sure that what they see in patchprov matches what they see in their sewing studio
and they can see how their design looks repeated
by adjusting the rows and columns in the layout guides
as you may have noticed the user is taking steps in both the digital and physical environments
and this can cause the two representations to become out of sync first as we just saw the
user may update the digital representation without cutting or sewing any real fabric
to keep track of these digital changes we use what we call a process graph for more information on
our approach please see our paper second in cases where the user gets out of sync in the physical
world they can just load the new pieces into the system to replace any pieces that are out of date
to evaluate patchprov we invited four quilters to create a quilt block in a two-hour remote study
they were required to upload at least one photo but were otherwise free to choose their workflow
here are the blocks that they designed
we found the patchprov helped quilters with many of the key
challenges identified in improv quilting particularly low-cost experimentation
with one participant noting i've gotten stuck with the pieces that i've made in the past
being scared to try anything because i only have this much fabric and i don't want to cut it up
so being able to take a picture of that fabric would definitely help bridge that artist's block
when i'm not quite sure how to proceed and your materials are limited quilters also appreciated
abstracting away some material and construction constraints to focus on the visual design
and based on these insights from designing patchprov we think that
there are some questions to consider when looking to support improvisation
how tied the digital and physical representations need to be and how much of an active role the
tools should play in the design process likely depend on the creation time and physical scale
of the finished artifact we chose to take a lightweight approach providing relatively
few design suggestions but there are likely other domains in which a more active approach may work
well we have shown the possibility of supporting improvisational design for quilting and we hope
that our project will encourage future work on supporting improvisation in quilting and beyond
thank you for watching our talk