Crafters Connect 🚨🔥💪: An Event-Driven App for Crafters to Connect & Create
Contributors: Bimal Brar, Amy Le, Brady Manske, Miranda Naya
Overview
For many young adults, physical mediums such as painting, fiber arts, and pottery can be a substantial form of stress relief and creative expression. However, creative expression itself can produce stress. Many artists struggle with artist block, a phenomenon that occurs when an artist is unable to produce new work or gain inspiration. For our project, we are tackling artist block for physical medium artists by providing tools such as art prompting, rotational small group discussions, and community building to encourage and inspire artists to continue their creative progression. Our main feature consists of creative prompting in several forms — audio, text, and visual. By providing our users with different forms of media, we hope that it enables artists to view the world in a different perspective and provide inspiration. Implementing art prompting as a platform-wide experience creates a unique experience for artists to view different interpretations of the same prompt, bolstering creativity and community.
User Research
Goals, Stakeholders, & Participants
To gain a deeper understanding of our user group and their creative processes, we conducted design research using a combination of online surveys and semi-structured interviews. Our research centered around 22 college-aged individuals, primarily students and hobbyist crafters, who work with a rich mix of physical media, including painting, fiber arts, and pottery. Participants were recruited organically, through word-of-mouth and shared links across various crafting clubs at the University of Washington.
From this diverse group of survey respondents, we selected two crafters for follow-up interviews, inviting them to share their stories in comfortable, conversational settings — whether over a cup of boba, or via video call. These settings allowed for more honest dialogue about our interviewee’s relationship to their craft. While our survey helped us identify broader trends and patterns — particularly around how hobbyist crafters seek inspiration and engage in collaboration — our interviews unearthed the individual motivations, frustrations, and joys that shape their creative lives.
In developing our app, we have identified primary stakeholders to be hobbyist crafters who are looking for inspiration and a sense of community. Secondary stakeholders primarily consist of mentors, experienced crafters who want to share their skills and support others. Tertiary stakeholders consist of the crafter’s family and friends, who likely want to support the crafter’s creative and recreational pursuits.
Results & Themes
With over 20 survey responses and 2 interviews, we have built a strong understanding on what our potential user base values and desires. Although we were originally focusing on both hobbyists and professional crafters, we decided to focus on hobbyists to better fit our expectations regarding the app’s development. We also decided it best to focus our energy on a singular group so that we can better cater to their needs. The results of our survey cemented this; Since a majority of our survey respondents were hobbyists, we concluded that our user research would best be channeled towards finding solutions for hobbyist crafters and the problems they addressed in our research.
One of our initial themes involved artist collaboration. As students, we are often encouraged to collaborate with each other to gain a different perspective and boost creativity. Following this logic, we wanted to create a mechanism that allows two or more artists to collaborate with each other, working on the same art piece. However, from our survey results, we learned that hobbyist crafters had a different preference when it came to collaboration. While some artists were open to collaborating, preferences were much more skewed towards working independently. When we discussed this further in our interviews, we learned that there were many potential factors of stress that occurred from artist collaboration. Some of these issues included scheduling conflicts, communication issues, and disagreement on the vision & goals for the project. As hobbyists, many of our respondents reported creating art as a form of stress relief, therefore the stress of collaboration simply did not feel “worth it” for the majority.
Another common trend was creativity, or the lack thereof. According to our survey, most artists frequently experience artist block. We also discovered that artists attempt to tackle this artist block in several different ways, such as finding inspiration from other artists, doodling, or discussing their art with friends. We took these elements into consideration and focused on developing a feature within our project to combat artist block. We also took feedback from our interviewees, who mentioned that receiving inspiration in alternative, non-visual mediums could often provide a fresh perspective, fueling creativity.
Our Design
Our survey data pointed us to several important conclusions:
- Hobbyist crafters were interested in learning in various mediums.
- Over 90% of artists believed that learning skills from other artists would be beneficial.
- Over 80% of artists encounter artist block sometimes to often.
- Artists often find themselves turning to prompts or mood boarding sites like Pinterest for inspiration when faced with artist block.
- Through further investigation in our interviews, we learned that artists often find that visual inspiration from sources like Pinterest is misguiding, discouraging creativity by enabling the recreation of existing artwork.
Our research indicates that artists have a desire for a space to connect and learn from other artists and find inspiration that is not limited to visual formats. We see an ample opportunity for technology to provide a unique solution that can ease both of these issues.
Given these findings, our proposed solution is a mobile app that will give users a prompt that can be of various mediums (words, pictures, and audio). The prompt will operate on a weekly basis, offering crafters time to work on pieces and submit them during that time period if they choose to. At the end of the week, pieces submitted to the prompt will be available for all to view as a gallery, and art will be saved to the users’ profiles. Further, our design would give crafters the chance to connect with others through a small group chat that they will be placed into each week to exchange feedback, inspiration, and skills.
Our first storyboard demonstrates a situation where a crafter faces artist block. The key feature in this storyboard is the weekly prompt. The app first displays the prompt, asking if the user would like to join. After a few days, the artist finishes their piece and submits it by uploading a photo. This method of prompting encourages the crafter to think outside of the box rather than copying from an amalgamation of visual inspiration that can be creatively overwhelming and limiting. Thinking critically about a single word, sound, or image can allow the artist to practice creative interpretation in a short-term, low-stakes environment.
Our second storyboard showcases the importance of feedback during the creation process. After a crafter has completed their project, they may feel that their craft is still missing something. With this app, crafters can simply take a picture of their creation and share it in their small group. This way, other crafters in the group can suggest changes or additions. With this feedback, crafters can modify their work and feel more confident in their final product! Additionally, this chat feature can be used to pass ideas and inspiration to fellow crafters, ultimately assisting in the creation process. This group chat feature will provide a space for brainstorming, sharing inspiration, and sharing creativity, which makes it an extremely valuable tool in the crafting process.
