Chap.1-5: What I Hope to Learn in Five Months

Hand & Algorithm is not beginning with a fixed conclusion. It is a five-month experiment in learning, applying and reflecting.

Through the Plus Human course, I am encountering many new tools and ideas. My intention is not to learn them in isolation, but to bring them directly into Jin Ah Jo Jewellery and observe what they can genuinely contribute to my practice.

Learning to Present Jewellery More Clearly

One of my main goals is to improve the visual presentation of my jewellery.

Jewellery is difficult to communicate through photographs. Its scale, texture, movement, perforation and relationship with the body can easily be lost in a flat image. I want to learn how AI-assisted photography and image editing can help me present the work more clearly without changing or misrepresenting the object itself.

I also want to develop stronger video skills. This includes documenting the jewellery-making process, creating promotional reels and producing more imaginative videos using images, existing footage or language alone.

Tools such as Flow, Vrew, Midjourney and other emerging platforms may offer new ways to visualise jewellery, but I also want to learn where their limits are. A visually impressive image is not useful if the jewellery no longer looks like the piece I made.

AI assisted image- hot pink cuff I have never made before

Learning to Communicate and Promote My Own Practice

For seventeen years, e.g.etal played an important role in presenting, advertising and selling my jewellery. The gallery developed relationships with clients and created a context in which people could discover and understand my work.

Without that structure, I now need to learn how to perform more of these roles myself.

I want to understand how to promote jewellery effectively without turning every post into a sales announcement. I want to improve my use of Instagram, become more confident and strategic on Threads, organise email campaigns and communicate more consistently with existing and future customers.

The Big Design Market in Melbourne will be an important practical test. I want to explore how AI can support the preparation of stock, promotion, audience communication, booth presentation and follow-up after the event.

I am not expecting AI to build relationships for me. I want it to help me create the time and structure needed to build those relationships myself.

Analysis and Algorithm

Building an Archive and Finding My Creative Algorithm

Another major goal is to create a substantial archive of the jewellery I have produced over the past seventeen years.

Much of my practice exists across old photographs, invoices, exhibition records, sales reports, notebooks and memories. I want to bring this material together so that it belongs to me and can support future exhibitions, applications, research and writing.

The Jin Ah Jo Jewellery Persona is one early part of this process. It gathers my history, materials, techniques, values and recurring ideas into a living body of information.

I also want to analyse my past rings and other jewellery to identify repeated decisions in geometry, proportion, colour, perforation, inlay and construction. From this, I hope to develop a Jin Ah Jo Jewellery algorithm—not a formula that produces jewellery automatically, but a clearer understanding of the creative rules already operating within my practice.

Could these patterns reveal what I might make next?

Building algorithm

Supporting New and Existing Projects

During these five months, I also want to learn how AI can help me sustain larger creative projects over time.

Hand & Algorithm itself requires continuous research, experimentation, documentation and reflection. I want to develop a structure that allows the project to continue without becoming overwhelming or losing its connection to physical making.

I also want to use what I learn to support The City and Its Uncertain Walls. This new brooch series explores walls, pipes, bricks, architectural fragments, memory and uncertain boundaries. AI may help with research, visualisation and narrative development, but the project must still be resolved through materials and the hand.

These projects provide different testing grounds. One looks directly at AI and studio practice. The other asks whether AI can support the development of a materially and emotionally complex body of jewellery without directing it.

New projects coming together

Researching the Larger Questions

Finally, I want to deepen my understanding of AI beyond individual tools.

I want to research AI and art, AI and craft, AI and handmade practice, and the changing place of embodied knowledge in a digital world.

What happens when material expertise is translated into language and shared with an AI system? Can AI support a handmade practice without flattening the knowledge behind it? Who benefits when makers share what they know, and what deserves protection?

I also want to use the blog to connect with others who are considering similar questions. Learning how to make the writing discoverable and meaningful is part of the project—not simply chasing website traffic, but finding readers who may genuinely engage with the research.

At the end of five months, I do not expect to have mastered every platform or answered every question.

I hope to have developed:

• a clearer visual language for presenting my jewellery

• stronger ways to communicate with audiences and customers

• an organised archive of my practice

• the beginnings of a Jin Ah Jo Jewellery algorithm

• practical strategies for my exhibitions, projects and sales

• a more informed and critical position on AI in contemporary craft

Most importantly, I want to understand which uses of AI genuinely strengthen my practice, which create unnecessary noise and which responsibilities must continue to remain with me.

My method will remain simple:

Learn → apply immediately → reflect.

Five months may not provide a final answer, but it should give me a much clearer place from which to continue.