Contextual Crafting: Examples From Dinacon

Andrew Quitmeyer is an artist, researcher, and digital naturalist. Digital naturalism is his coined term for a field of study that investigates the role that digital media can play in biological field work. Digital naturalism seeks to merge the values of wilderness exploration with the possibilities enabled by digital technology.

As Quitmeyer puts it, “A blunt technological focus can begin to take over a scientific project and force the scientists to design their research around the tools rather than their original questions. In order for computers to truly engage with the world, they will have to leave the safety of the womb-like laboratories in which they were conceived and confront the messy challenges outside.”

Quitmeyer is the founder of the Digital Natural Conference (Dinacon), an alternative-style conference that explores interactive tool-making in the setting of a DIY biological field station. The conference occurs at irregular intervals, about every two years. It runs for 4 to 6 weeks in a new location every time and hosts anyone “interested in exploring new ways of interacting with nature”.

Dinacon 2025 was hosted in Les Village, a fishing community in North Bali, Indonesia. In Les, the villagers had fished for decades with potassium cyanide, which damaged the marine environment and poisoned the coral reefs. Reef rehabilitation efforts are ongoing with the help of non-profit ecotourism groups, such as Sea Communities, the local partner for Dinacon 2025.

Dinacon 2025 attendees explored coral reef transplanting using locally-made glue, salt farming, plastics recycling, and other projects within the local context.

In a Hackster Café session with Alex Glow, Quitmeyer said Dinacon’s core philosophy is “contextual crafting,” the idea of building and testing devices as close to the target environment as possible. So, a tool built to function in the wild would not be crafted in a remote, air-conditioned lab. According to Quitmeyer, this saves time, improves repairability, and fosters inspiration.

He encouraged Edge AI Guardians contestants to leverage contextual crafting and build in the wild (or at least close to it). He advised getting feedback from users to ensure that it is suitable for them and stressed finding problems before the design phase, not the other way around.

The Mothbox, developed by Quitmeyer's Dinalab team, is an example of a tool crafted to fit its environment. It is a portable, waterproof insect monitor powered by a Talentcell rechargeable battery. The EKA glue by SEA Communities is an inexpensive coral adhesive made from cement and wood glue, and another example of context-specific crafting.

Context is important, whether you are creating in the wild or an environment close to it. The outdoors are unfriendly to electronics. Humidity, temperature, and inquisitive creatures ought to be taken into consideration when deploying, for example, an edge device for detecting loggers and wildlife poachers.