An AI model is infused with the socialist ideals of William Morris and operated by pressing the treadle of a vintage foot-powered sewing machine in this project by recent Central Saint Martins graduate Max Park.
Park‘s project combines artificial intelligence with the life story and philosophies of Morris, a pioneering textile designer of the British Arts and Crafts movement who was also well-known in his time as a poet, author and socialist thinker.
Titled Prompting Nowhere, the project is named after Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere, which saw the writer develop his vision of an anti-industrialist, egalitarian world, where craft and art is the backbone of society and people live enriched by beauty.
Max Park created a William Morris-inspired AI that is powered by a treadle sewing machine
Park wanted to explore what an AI – specifically a large language model, in the vein of ChatGPT or Claude – might look like in a future that lived up to Morris’s ideals.
So he made one using a vintage Singer treadle sewing machine, which he modified so that the pedal powers a computer instead of sewing stitches.
Park explained his thought process in a video essay made to accompany the project, which he undertook as part of his postgraduate degree in industrial design at Central Saint Martins (CSM).
Tapping the treadle turns the flywheel to charge the battery
“My grandparents were both craftspeople,” he said. “My grandad repaired watches, and my nanna was a seamstress, and their flat in Walthamstow was actually just down the road from where William Morris grew up. And I think because of that, I’ve always had this real interest in him.”
Reading News From Nowhere, he was inspired by Morris’ vision for an egalitarian society built on craft, but he felt like “we’re losing this future”.
“Literally, with what we’re doing to the planet, but also the things we make, the technologies which shape us – both of which I contribute to through what I might call my craft of industrial design,” Park said.
The AI prioritises data relating to William Morris and his philosophies
“They seem to be creating an environment with completely different ideals to Morris’s world,” he added. “And I was thinking, if he were still alive, how might Morris suggest we get out of this mess?”
The connection of manual effort to output by way of treadling is one of the ways Park’s generative AI differs from those we commonly use today. There are also differences in how the model has been trained and how the data is processed.
While for practical reasons, Park did not do all of the training himself – instead using a small version of Meta’s Llama 3.2 model – he “fine-tuned” the dataset with Morris’s writing and told it to prioritise that data in answers.
For the processing, the AI is run and its data is stored locally on the Raspberry Pi 5 computer, bypassing the cloud platforms that have become central to AI use.
Park told Dezeen that he considers the locality of processing to be the most important part of the project.
“It was an attempt to try and reclaim a sense of ownership over artificial intelligence, and I think that that reflects what Morris was trying to do with the Arts and Crafts movement,” he explained.
“It was not an entire rejection of industrialisation, but it was highlighting some of the problems that can come when all of the power and the ways things are being produced are centralised and being controlled by a small group of people, and how that can then really negatively impact the people who are putting in the labour.”
The critical design project is meant to spark discussions about AI
Park believes that both the way we interact with AI and the way we produce it, through a vast but largely invisible infrastructure of human workers and material resources, deserve examination. But he was only able to do so much on a physical level.
The other ideas are developed in a research paper, which reflects on whether AI can be considered a crafting tool, the skill involved in writing questions and interpreting answers, and concerns about plagiarism and intellectual property, among other things.
Park developed his ideas through expert interviews with the likes of futurist Brian David Johnson and William Morris Gallery curator Róisín Inglesby, to which he took a portable version of his treadle-powered machine in the form of a simple box with a hand crank, allowing the AI to be involved in the discussions.
Park also created a smaller hand-cranked version of the AI
Park’s hope is that his work, which isn’t intended to be a prototype for a literal product but rather a work of critical or speculative design, prompts people to think differently about AI.
“The main takeaway for me is that we can do AI differently, and this is just one way of thinking about it,” said Park. “I think to move forward with AI in ways which truly positively impact people and planet, I think we really have to look at not just using them but creating them in radically different ways.”
Park’s project won him a MullenLowe NOVA Award for Fresh Creative Talent, the main award for CSM design students.
Other recent projects from CSM students have included WoolTech electronics made from wool and the Tilt planter, which allows people to observe the rhythms of their plants’ growth.
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