Nishra Ranpura

Design Researcher, Maker
Nishra is an anti-disciplinary designer and researcher inquiring the domains at the intersection of crafts and technologies. She makes things and breaks things. Sometimes, she writes.
Nishra is an anti-disciplinary designer and researcher inquiring the domains at the intersection of crafts and technologies. She makes things and breaks things. Sometimes, she writes.
Thesis Faculty
Aya KarpinskaDavid CarrollLouisa Campbell

Interweaving Interfaces

Interweaving Interfaces

Interweaving Interfaces is a design inquiry and a conversation that traverses the arena of collective intelligence through theories, philosophies, and applications of textiles. It is a critically fabulated narrative of the researcher’s intellectual journey through her lens of understanding textiles, where, by the means of a collection of digital and physical artifacts, and speculative investigations, she questions and rethinks the socio-cultural, technological, pedagogical, and metaphysical systems around self.

Interweaving Interfaces, as an advocate of collective intelligence, hopes to evoke conversations around alternative and plural perspectives of systems and interactions.

Technological interfaces 

Dimensional Fabrication | Research through loom design
Understanding motion, simulation, and animation technologies through multi-dimensional woven fabrication

playing with perspective
Understanding the axes
learning about the lattices

Visibility in Technology | a musing
A dialogue on showing your work while making

Blur: invisibility in layers
A visible soft circuit

Material API | Research through textile design
Understanding simulated and physical materials. If light is a material how will it feel?

Light as a material

Metaphysical interfaces

Regenerative weaves | Research through woven and digital artifacts
Thinking about repair, regeneration, and degeneration (in bio-systems, capitalist systems, psychological systems) through the weave structures and regenerative attributes of textiles.

Weave degeneration pattern
Algorithmic weave regeneration

Neuroplastic Fabrication  | Embodied Research
The fabric embodies my habits, and I embody its.

The swatch of screen time

Weaving Time ↗ | Speculation, Essay

Socio-cultural interfaces

Culture of Tools | Speculative design artifact
With cross-disciplinary practices, what is the culture of the tools we use and build?

a speculative manual of hybrid tools

Community of Tool | Explorative experience
What are the machines talking about? Are we part of the conversation?

Tracking and sensing motion and sound while weaving

Pedagogical Interfaces

Languages | A musing
Thinking about the parallels between the practice of weaving and languages (literary and computational)…

Woven erasure poetry (the excerpt is from The Craftsman by Richard Sennett)

“What might these diverse yet interwoven interfaces collectively express, and how?”
vantage

Frayed collar of a favorite shirt,
Or a shoe worn out, covered in dirt; 
First draft of an important letter,
Or a cracked pot, no better;
Whatever it is that is close to your heart,
Let it speak its part, your part.

That voice, that thought of yours, that lens, 
Your individual intelligence;
With mine and hers and his and theirs,
May weave together novel affairs;
What is your vantage, your way of thought?
That woven with mine, what can be sought?