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CHI '26 · Honorable mention · full-paper review · confidence medium-high

Making the Sacred: Craft, Ritual, and Computational Imaginaries in Postcolonial HCI

Nusrat Jahan Mim , Prajna Devi Upadhyay , Priyanka Paul , Dipanjan Chakraborty

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This is a thoughtful, well-bounded ethnographic paper that makes a clear field argument: devotional craft is not just a cultural curiosity but a serious site for HCI theory-building about materiality, agency, and the sacred. The contribution is strongest as a conceptual reorientation grounded in rich fieldwork, not as a broadly generalizable empirical claim.

Axes Lens

Rare contribution shape, typical evidence profile. The point here is not a score. It is to show what kind of claim the paper makes, and whether the evidence pattern is unusual or baseline in this 268 -review set.

Review Summary

This paper stands out because it does something CHI often struggles to do well: it takes a domain that is usually treated as peripheral or “special topic” and uses it to unsettle core assumptions in the field. Rather than presenting religion as merely a context for digital mediation, the authors show how devotional labor itself is a materially organized, socially distributed, and cosmologically meaningful practice. That move is both intellectually ambitious and well supported by the ethnographic framing in the abstract and methods evidence. The novelty is not a new system or technique; it is a reframing of what counts as craft, making, and agency in HCI, anchored in a specific idol-maker community in Kumartuli. The paper’s strongest contribution is therefore theoretical and descriptive at once: it offers a grounded account that can travel as a field argument, while remaining honest about its scope. The validation is appropriately qualitative and context-specific, which fits the claim type. The main caution is overgeneralization: the paper itself limits the data to a four-month field study during the lead-up to Durga Puja, and it acknowledges that some structural dimensions are not deeply examined. That said, those limits do not weaken the paper’s core contribution; they actually make the argument more credible by keeping it tied to the evidence. In CHI terms, this is a strong honorable-mention-level paper because it expands the conceptual vocabulary of the field without pretending to offer universal coverage.

What Changed

Canon before

HCI accounts of craft, making, and religion have typically emphasized secular, instrumental, or digitally mediated practices, with less attention to devotional labor as a material site of world-making.

Departure from common sense

The paper challenges the default HCI framing that craft and making are primarily secular, instrumental, or digitally mediated. It argues instead that devotional craft is not peripheral but a primary site where the sacred is materially enacted, sustained, and made meaningful through embodied labor and collective care.

Actual novelty

The paper’s main novelty is an ethnographically grounded account of idol-making as devotional craft, showing how material, embodied, and relational processes produce forms of knowledge and agency that are largely absent from existing FRS or craft-and-making research. It reframes sacred making as a substantive analytic for HCI.

Evidence

The paper is grounded in a four-month ethnography in Kumartuli, Kolkata, using interviews, observation, spatial mapping, focus groups, and engagement with digital archives. The evidence supports a field-specific argument about devotional craft and its implications for HCI, while remaining bounded to one community and a festival lead-up period.

Limits

Method limits

The study is qualitative and ethnographic, so its claims are interpretive rather than statistically generalizable. The paper itself notes that the data come from a specific moment in time and that some dimensions, such as caste hierarchies and broader city/infrastructure dynamics, are not examined in depth.

Deployment limits

The findings are most directly applicable to devotional craft contexts and to HCI scholarship interested in religion, materiality, and postcolonial computing. They should not be treated as a universal account of all craft, all religion, or all making practices.

Boundary conditions

The evidence is bounded by a four-month field study in Kumartuli, Kolkata, conducted between May and August 2025, and by the lead-up to Durga Puja. The paper explicitly cautions that its data reflect a specific moment and community context.

Manual check: No additional manual check required for the core claims; the main caution is to preserve the paper’s bounded scope and avoid reading it as a universal account of religion or craft.

Position in field

This is a strong CHI qualitative contribution that expands HCI’s treatment of religion beyond mediation and belief toward material devotional practice. Its value is primarily conceptual and ethnographic: it supplies a grounded case for rethinking assumptions about craft, agency, and the sacred in postcolonial HCI.

Abstract

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) scholarship has begun to examine religion and spirituality; yet, devotion as a lived, material, and world-making practice remains largely overlooked. For millions across the Global South, devotional labor such as sculpting, tending to, or worshipping sacred figures forms a primary mode of engaging with the divine and shaping everyday social and technological imaginations. Drawing on a four-month ethnography with an idol-maker community in Kumartuli, Kolkata, India, this paper examines how artisans bring gods into being through materials, gestures, obligation, and collective care. Their practices reveal forms of knowledge, intentionality, and agency that complicate HCI’s predominantly secular and instrumental understandings of craft, creativity, and technology. Building on anthropological craft studies, postcolonial computing, and scholarship on religion and materiality, we show how sacred making foregrounds relational, embodied, and cosmological dimensions of practice. We argue that devotional craft constitutes an under-recognized site from which HCI can critically rethink its assumptions about materiality, mediation, knowledge, and the sacred.