The Space Between: Embodied Interaction for Digital Craft

This documentation was created as part of the course MAS.S60 Critical Matter: Emotive Design from Fashion to Urban Scale, taught by Dr. Behnaz Farahi at the MIT Media Lab, Fall 2025. Team members: Giacomo Puri Purini, Annie Xing, Awu Chen, Yao Wang, Maggie Yan

The Imperfect Hand challenges the millennia-old narrative that craft belongs solely to those with steady hands and perfect vision, recognizing that this story has quietly excluded many whose bodies tremble, tire, or fail them. The project investigates how makers experience the distribution of agency between cognitive state, manual control, and machine behavior, exploring what visual patterns emerge as stable "signatures" of specific cognitive-machine states and whether makers can learn to modulate their EEG states to achieve desired outcomes. At its heart lies a radical question: "Who gets to be a maker?" with the answer being anyone with a creative impulse. Envisioning an AI machine based on human legacies, the project seeks a future where human-machine collaboration is not about automation but about harmony—about listening, sustaining, and extending the moments of tension where imagination and reason meet, where creativity truly lives.

1) Brother Embroidery Machine

2) AX4 Pen Plotter Writing Robot Open Source DIY

3) BrainCo device

4) Components:

1. Variable Resistance Slider (Potentiometer)
2. Arduino
3. Servo Motor (SG90)
4. Rotational Motion
5. Black Box + CAD-Designed Enclosure

Plug in pedal, turn on Embroidery Machine and touch screen

Center the plotter

Move cursor to the upper left corner of the fabric

Lower the foot pedal

Run the code

Turn on EEG (BrainCo) and put it on