Research Philosophy

This is written from Morgan Vigil-Hayes’ first person perspective and represents her personal opinions and observations as a textile enthusiast/non-expert weaver.

Why LOOM?

The acronym, loom, was intentially chosen as a symbol for the way in which our group conceptualizes and designs networked systems. It is inspired by my time in Arizona, where I was able to learn about and watch Southwestern Indigenous weavers create textiles that embedded elements from the land and its history–wool and plants.

The resulting textiles were used for cultural expression, encoding information, and utilitarian purposes. By learning about the weavers and their looms, I observed several important lessons that assisted my understanding of people and networks:

  • Just as textiles require raw materials from the land, computer networks are shaped by the land where they are deployed. The raw materials themselves are embedded with the history of the people of the land–trade, conflict, adaptation, cooperation.

  • Looms assist weavers by holding threads in tension. Research and design at the intersection of people and networks fundamentally reckons with and holds tension with the goal of facilitating the creation of new artifacts and understandings.

  • The methodology used to weave and the resulting woven textiles expresses something fundamental about the land and the weavers. To truly understand a network, it is necessary to understand how it was created, who created it, for whom it was created.

  • Textiles are appropriated from person to person; culture to culture; generation to generation. Networks are similarly appropriated over time and that can fundamentally change how well they work at any given moment in time.

  • Textiles can be ripped and unwraveled over time when they endure uneven tension or friction; maintaining them requires mending. Networks, too, require maintenance and repair in the face of ongoing sociotechnical frictions.

By framing our lab as a loom, we position ourselves as an infrastructure that supports network creation and care for the purposes of locally determined purposes.