Number in Craft
Dawn Nafus, Richard Beckwith · 2020
In this chapter, the authors explore how sensor data features as a material in craft work, alongside the sensors themselves. They are also interested in what it might mean to think about sensor data as itself crafted—that is, not just constructed, or socially shaped, but crafted. To examine the craft of data, we conducted ethnography with people who build or use home energy monitoring equipment and upload the results onto Pachube. Pachube is a website that acts as an open data repository for sensor data of all kinds. Pachube and its users are tied to the larger maker movement, and often the systems used to sense are not commercially made products, but hardware hacks of various kinds. In practice, the craft of making sensors actually useful in a home or elsewhere far more resembles the numbers woven into a basket than sensor manufacturers may care to admit.