LLooM: Weaving, Storytelling, and Language Technologies

PhD project

A close-up photograph of a loom showing woven fabric strips containing participant stories about language technology experiences. In the center, a yellow fabric strip displays handwritten text reading "The AI Siri likes" followed by a hand-drawn illustration of a panda. The yellow strip is interwoven with other fabric strips in blue and yellow colors visible in the background, representing other participants' contributions to the probe.

PhD student:

Kimberley Paradis

Supervisors:

Tara Capel (School of Informatics), Lachlan Urquhart (Edinburgh Law School)

Outputs from this project

LLooM has been exhibited at the 2025 Edinburgh Science Festival as part of the AI for All exhibit, at the Edinburgh Doors Open Day at Inspace, University of Edinburgh, and at the Creative AI Exploration and Imagination: Innovative Methods for Alternative Digital Futures workshop at the University of Leipzig.

LLooM is a craft-based storytelling probe that invites people to share everyday encounters with language technologies such as voice assistants, chatbots, and large language models. Participants write short stories about these experiences on fabric strips and weave them into shared looms, creating a collective record of how these technologies shape daily life. Textiles are used to invite touch, reflection, and collective making, while offering a slow and material way to explore relationships with fast-moving technologies. The aim of LLooM is to create space for people to share and preserve their individual stories with language technologies while weaving them into a broader collective narrative about how these systems shape everyday life.

Funder: UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Responsible and Trustworthy in-the-worldNatural Language Processing.

Project dates: 2025 –