Knotation: Supporting Exploration in Macrame Textile Crafting Through Parametric Motif Design

Macrame friendship bracelet creators produce ornate geometric motifs through the manual execution of sequential and iterative knot operations. By choosing different permutations of knot types and varying the number of operations in a sequence, creators fabricate different bracelet designs. Friendship bracelet patterns are often designed prior to fabrication using digital design tools. Existing digital tools require creators to manipulate designs at the level of each individual knot. As a result, creators must invest extensive manual effort in authoring and editing patterns. Furthermore, these tools limit creators’ ability to manipulate higher-level design elements. We observed that friendship bracelets can be represented as repetitions of parameterized motifs rather than a series of individual knot operations. We present Knotation, a parametric design system to generate friendship bracelet patterns. The system abstracts existing popular motifs into modules that can be easily manipulated and modified by the user to produce visually interesting designs. Through a workshop with novice macrame creators, we show how our approach engages users with the craft using parametric design, and examine desirable aspects of Knotation’s computational framework.