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

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.