Robotic Knitting

As a reaction to typically dead-end debates on future human and robot collaboration that tend to be either dismissive or overly welcoming towards »cobot« technologies, this book provides a technofeminist intervention. Pat Treusch not only shows how both the fields of technofeminism and robotics can engage in a practical exchange through knitting, but also contributes a tangible example of coboting dynamics. Robotic Knitting re-negotiates the boundaries between formalization and embodiment, craft and high-tech as well as useful and dysfunctional machines. It re-crafts the nature of collaboration between human and robot. This finally entails an alternative mode of relating - a mode that enables an account of careful coboting.

Pat Treusch (Dr. phil.) works as a feminist science and technology studies scholar at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies (ZIFG) at the Technical University Berlin. Her interdisciplinary research on digital AI technologies focuses on the practices of interaction at emerging interfaces in their embodied and affective nature.