The Trinidad Carnival is a worldwide cultural design practice through which people express their creativity, skills, and aesthetic sensibilities. Wire-bending is a sophisticated craft practiced in this Carnival since the 1930s. It inscribes a milieu of interactions between the senses, the moving body, and the community while designing with dynamic linear materials. Unfortunately, this craft practice is at risk. The Design and Making in the Trinidad Carnival exhibition showcases artifacts, drawings, sculptures, and structures made using traditional wire-bending and digital design and fabrication techniques. It presents an evolution of design—from past to future—and argues that computation and computing can remediate and reconfigure dying crafts for new design pedagogy, practices, and publics. The exhibition answers the interdisciplinary question, What is a line? through traditional and new forms of making with new imaginations. It showcases lines as cognitive expressions; codes; and structures in drawings, artifacts, sculptures, and more.

Vernelle A. A. Noel is a computational design scholar, architect, artist, and founding director of the Situated Computation + Design Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She investigates traditional craft, making, technology, and their intersections with society. Using interdisciplinary approaches, she builds new expressions, methodologies, and tools to explore social, cultural, and political aspects of craft and computation for new reconfigurations of practice, pedagogy, and publics. Noel gave a TEDx Talk in 2015 titled, The Power of Making: Craft, Computation, and Carnival. She has been a keynote at several conferences, has been featured on Madame Architect, and is a recipient of the 2021 DigitalFUTURES Young Award for exceptional research and scholarship in the field of critical computational design. Noel has held academic positions at several institutes and has practiced as an architect in the United States, India, and Trinidad & Tobago.