Leah Buechley’s work speaks to everything I hold dear about the digital humanities: that it interprets, operates within, and both impacts and reflects the experienced world — of messy, embodied, personal, subjective, aesthetic, poetic, cyborgic, enveloping life. In other words, Buechley does high-touch as well as high-tech.

She brings a strong background in physics and computer science and an amazing design sensibility to her position as assistant professor of the MIT Media Lab’s newly-formed High-Low Tech group, an interdisciplinary band of makers who situate computation “in new cultural and material contexts… by developing tools that democratize engineering.”

From their site:

We believe that the future of technology will be largely determined by end-users who will design, build, and hack their own devices, and our goal is to inspire, shape, support, and study these communities. To this end, we explore the intersection of computation, physical materials, manufacturing processes, traditional crafts, and design.

Since Buechley has been at MIT, she’s taught courses on the New Textiles and on Design for Empowerment (hooray!), and her students have created beautiful and inspiring work with interactive wallpaper and electronic pop-up books.

Buechley herself is the creator of the Lilypad Arduino, a miniaturized microprocessor and set of sensors, power sources, and other parts and pieces designed to be sewable, wearable, washable, tolerably aesthetic in design, and hacked together by YOU. She and her students have since expanded the concept to the Teardrop, a kit that allows you to paint functional devices on paper. You can watch a 2009 lecture by Buechley here, or get a sense of her research group’s work in this fun video. And if you really want to delve into the theory and practice of smart crafting, find some inspirational projects, or see how it relates to teaching and learning (where, for instance, it’s being used as a great way to re-energize girls’ engagement with science, engineering, and math), you could check out our Soft Circuitry Zotero Group — and even add some resources of your own!

This isn’t the first tribute to Leah Buechley, and I’m sure it won’t even be the last on Ada Lovelace Day — but I just want to say thanks. Thanks for reminding us — women and men, boys and girls — that we’re capable of fashioning our worlds.

These are a few of my sketches for the last iteration of the Ivanhoe Game, the one that’s still available for play. I must confess — as much as I loved the design process in all its stages — that I haven’t played a really good game of Ivanhoe since we moved away from the more prosy and simple interfaces of the Turn of the Screw game (undertaken when Geoffrey Rockwell was a visiting scholar at UVA and I wrote moves like this) and the Haruki Murakami / D. G. Rossetti games I played in the wee hours of the night with my first baby sleeping in my arms. (The Rossetti one, on Jenny, in which I imagined a company specializing in flesh-bot reproductions of Victoriana, was re-printed by Laura Mandell at Romantic Circles and in Jerome McGann’s Like Leaving the Nile.)

These images were done mostly after the process Johanna describes in her Ivanhoe chapter — although you can see, in JD’s book and in the Java application online, the on-screen rendering of some of the icons and navigation elements sketched below. A couple of the wackier ones — stemma trees that reach up to a starry sky of Ivanhoe moves — were never entirely realized. I’ll leave them without annotation.

The SpecLab years — our over-hummused, thoroughly pita’d luncheon-club heady think-tank days — were the most amazing moment in my working life as a digital humanist.  Steve Ramsay, Worthy Martin, Andrea Laue, Nathan Piazza, Shane Liesegang, Ben Cummings, David Patch, Jim Allman, Geoff Rockwell, my old friends, will we see their like again?

I’m touched more than I can say that Johanna has dedicated her book to Jerry and me.