Design for Songket Weaving in Malay Cottage Industry

Songket is a traditional cultural heritage and national identity of Malaysia. Yet the hand-weaving practices are increasingly endangered. We know little about the current challenges faced by rural songket weavers. This paper reports on interviews with 12 home-based weavers from four Malay villages. We recognized two key actors in songket supply and demand chain: weaver and middleman, and outlined the motivations and challenges of three different types of weavers, alongside the multiple roles played by the middleman. We concluded with three design implications supporting songket cultural heritage preservation and weavers’ economic empowerment

Bibliometric analysis on the implementation digitization technologies in cultural heritage in Malaysia

Malaysia is a rich country with significant tangible and diverse intangible cultural heritage assets. The cultural heritage information must be collected in order to transmit the information to future generations. In this digital era, knowledge transmission can be easily spread using digital platforms. Furthermore, the post-Covid-19 pandemic driven necessity of digital sharing platforms. However, the status of digital cultural heritage in Malaysia is unknown. Hence, this paper will be addressed the digitization of cultural heritage implementation in Malaysia based on the published research articles. The data extracted from the Web of Science and Scopus database has been analysed using bibliometric analysis. The search keywords related to the digitization of cultural heritage has extracted about 171 documents over 15 years of publication. This finding is significant to provide local researchers and related institutions with the potential of digital cultural heritage in a post-Covid-19 pandemic. The large potential of digital cultural heritage should motivate local researchers to increase the attention on digitization cultural heritage research area. Many potential applications which are benefited cultural heritage tourism, sustainability as well as contribution to the economy. The findings from this research indicate that the trend of digitization in the cultural heritage field needs to be strengthened

Designing for the Infrastructure of the Supply Chain of Malay Handwoven Songket in Terengganu

The growing HCI interest in developing contexts and cultural craft practices is ripe to focus on their under-explored homegrown sociotechnical infrastructures. This paper explores the creative infrastructural actions embedded within the practices of songket's supply chain in Terengganu, Malaysia. We report on contextual interviews with 92 participants including preparation workers, weavers, designers, merchants, and customers. Findings indicate that increased creative infrastructural actions are reflected in these actors' resourcefulness for mobilizing information, materials, and equipment, and for making creative artifacts through new technologies weaved within traditional practices. We propose two novel approaches to design in this craft-based infrastructure. First, we explore designing for the social layer of infrastructure and its mutually advantageous exploitative relationships rooted in culture and traditions. Second, we suggest designing for roaming value-creation artifacts, which blend physical and digital materializations of songket textile design. Developed through a collaborative and asynchronous process, we argue that these artifacts represent less-explored vehicles for value co-creation, and that sociotechnical infrastructures as emerging sites of innovation could benefit from HCI research