A Love Letter to Ironing: Learning and Unlearning
(2024)
author(s): Tricia Crivellaro, Lynne Heller
published in: Research Catalogue
What does ironing have in common with learning to build a digital world? This exposition explores the nature of learning and unlearning through the juxtaposition of skills, specifically ironing, a competency acquired for the most part through unconscious absorption, versus creating in a digital medium where our learning was much more self-conscious. In learning to build and program in Unreal Engine (UE5), a game engine capable of enabling a virtual reality (VR) experience, we learned, once again, what it means to learn. The exposition is written as a lyric essay to encompass both the prosaic and poetic ways that we engaged with a project titled, Craft and the Digital Turn. By using VR as a means of data visualization we sought to bring our craft backgrounds together with future trends in digitalization and communication. Through personal narratives and histories, melded with theory and analysis we hope to record a process that was deeply engaging and extremely challenging for us as practitioners.
