Crafting AI: TVC, Storytelling & Speculative Design
Quilting, the act of joining multiple patches or scraps and layers of fabric together, is used to describe patterning, storytelling, data collection and analysis, and worldbuilding. Maude Southwell Wahlman, Eli Leon, and others describe the aesthetic preferences of traditional Black American quilt makers, which include strip-construction, multiple, flexible and bold patterning, asymmetry, and improvisation. Sherri Lynn Wood compares quilt making to jazz musical scores. Researchers (Savage & Lynch 2025; Tolliver 2024) discuss quilting as a “fluid iteration of artful inquiry that allows (people) to flow within, through, and beyond the research process.” In my book, I discuss quilting as a form of remixing:
The semi-symmetry in African weaving and African American quilt making are achieved by the juxtaposition of distinct geometric motifs and by controlled variations in texture, scale, shape, orientation, or color. — Nettrice Gaskins, Techno-Vernacular Creativity & Innovation, p. 68
Quilting is both a noun and a verb, which shows various ways that practice, research, or ritual can be used to ‘piece’ data or information together.
Quilting Performance
Academics use quilting to reimagine qualitative research by drawing on culturally relevant sensibilities that emphasize learning from the past to inform the present and future. “Performing Blackademics” uses quilting as a way to unpack the lived experiences of Black academics and the challenges and triumphs of engaging in research and scholarship. “Quilt Tactics” explores how quilting can be used as a methodological tool for qualitative research. Quilting performance serves as a method for exploring these re-imaginings. I also referred to this method as a “craft performance”:
Craft performances incorporate spontaneity and improvisation in designs to achieve uniqueness and individuality, part of the maker’s aesthetics or style, which is most often achieved by the juxtaposition of distinct geometric motifs and by controlled variations in visual and rhythmic elements. — Nettrice Gaskins, Techno-Vernacular Creativity & Innovation, p. 103
Quilts can tell stories about their creators or the historical and cultural contexts of their creation (quilting bees, events) through choices that are made in designs, materials, and content. Faith Ringgold and Rosie Lee Tompkins focused their quilt work on storytelling. Ringgold noted the strong connection between the way in which a quilt comes together and storytelling, speaking to the way they are “pieced” together. My AI-generated portrait of Ringgold is currently on view in Brooklyn. Tompkins was known for her “flexible patterning” and improvisational quilting.
Artful inquiry emphasizes quilting as a form of resistance and self-expression, and it suggests ways that this practice can be used to analyze and understand complex social issues. Take, for example, Una cosa es una cosa, a live 1990s performance by María Teresa Hincapié who placed real objects from her daily life in a physical space. She picked the objects up, put them away, and reorganized them on the basis of random taxonomies, though always laying them out in reference to the circular nature of time.
Quilting is techno-vernacular creativity or TVC, a term I coined to describe specific engagements with technology. One-third of the TVC framework, which is relevant for this article, focuses on combining and encoding (converting) skills that lead to remixing, which involves rearranging, modifying, or combining new elements to create new works. People who remix computationally have larger toolkits of computational skills with which to connect cultural practices to diverse subjects.
TVC, Restorying, & Storytelling
Mia Shaw’s restorying through design provides a context for integrating quilt making practices with computation and interrogating and reimagining oppressive narratives about emerging technologies. TVC and ‘restorying’ recasts quilt making as a form of interface design, which focuses on creating the visual, or interactive elements of a digital product.
In my chapter titled “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space” I portray abolitionist/activist Harriet Tubman as an ‘astronaut’ navigating space like a global positioning system or GPS while following the North Star to freedom. Underground Railroad ‘conductors’ like Tubman used quilts embedded with symbols to learn about an area’s immediate dangers or even where to head next. The notion of Tubman as a space navigator is an example of ‘restorying’ and generative AI can be used to help visualize this idea.
I took the words ‘traverses the south to the north by navigating the stars’ from “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0” and used ChatGPT to generate a short historical fiction about Harriet Tubman. Next, I wrote down key concepts as quilt ‘scraps’ from the story for characters, places, events, and props. These scraps can also serve as ideas for design projects that use generative AI tools as a way to explore and conceptualize possible future scenarios.
Speculative Future Design
The notion of Harriet Tubman as an astronaut is a speculation that pieces together history, heritage, or cultural artifacts as a basis for ideation. This approach can trigger the creation of speculative design. In order for designers to be critical, inquisitive, and apt at problem-finding, researchers Dunne & Raby introduce the act of speculation as an activity where “conjecture is as good as knowledge, where futuristic and alternative scenarios convey ideas, and where the goal is to emphasize implications of ‘mindless’ decisions for mankind.”
The purpose of speculative design is to materialize and imply fragments (ex. pieces, scraps) of possible futures and broaden peoples’ horizons through design. The domain of speculative design has gone through a few transitions, from the original notion conceived by Dunne & Raby in the early 2000s to more recent work. They argued that design and technology should have other uses to critique the current world and envision futures we want to live in. The creators of the Iyapo Repository used Afrofuturism as a way to explore this idea.
My current work looks at ways to engage people in speculative future design using generative AI and other tools. As mentioned above, I used ChatGPT to generate a short story and pieced together characters, places, events, and props. I used these scraps for worldbuilding that creates the context for a story to happen in. Concept mapping helps envision and explore what could be, encouraging innovation and critical thinking about the future. Prompts can be created based on story elements or scraps.
Using generative AI tools such Patchwork and MidJourney to develop and ‘quilt’ scraps, pieces, or patches of ideas can help people develop their prompt engineering skills, as well as imagine new worlds and possible projects with a sense of what may come. People (artists, scholars) can use what they have around them to address questions, solve problems, or reimagine the world.