Crafting for Major Life Events: Implications for Technology Design and Use

Technology increasingly plays a role in the way that we prepare for, celebrate, and reflect upon major life events. Modern digital artefacts, such as Facebook messages and digital photos, now stand alongside traditional artefacts, such as guest books and heirloom jewellery, as cherished mementos of these occasions. Considering how these physical artefacts are crafted provides a useful lens for understanding the evolving relationship among digital tools, the artefacts they produce, and the major life events where these artefacts are used and imbued with meaning. In this paper, we present themes from an interview study conducted with crafters who created items for major life events including weddings, household moves, and births. Our findings outline properties of the crafting process and of the crafted items. Across all occasions, crafters saw major life events as opportunities to learn new skills and use special materials to create personalized artefacts that codified and extended interpersonal relationships. This occurred in parallel with a creative, thoughtful process to make crafts that were appropriate for each occasion and meaningful enough to be kept and treasured for years to come. We reflect on the properties of these crafters’ processes and artefacts, and suggest implications for the role of digital tools and assets in relation to major life events. In particular, digital ways to reveal an artefact’s provenance and relationship to an event may be useful for augmenting its symbolic meaning and its ability to represent interpersonal relationships.