Infinite Quilts in Her Trousseau Chest: Artificial Intelligence and a Woman’s Work Textile-making is closely related to the expectations of women and their role in the domestic sphere. 19th century pattern manuals and magazines instructed women on how they should conduct themselves. The moral wife encloses herself at home and silently needleworks and instructs her daughter to do the same. The home, its affairs, and its furnishings were the responsibility of the woman, who could preserve her modesty and virtue by remaining inside of it, but the design of the house and its spatial arrangement was a man’s work . This project coalesces the role of the homemaker with the role of the home maker, and will make visible domestic labor by legitimizing quilting as a representational form and organizing tool. Quilting offered women agency: the ability to sell one's own work, to earn a prize and recognition in a county fair, and to improve one's social standing by increasing the value of her dowry. The trousseau chest is a piece of furniture that a young, unmarried woman would fill over the course of her life with household items and linens that would become part of the dowry paid to the family of the groom. Bridal quilts were an opportunity for the young woman to demonstrate her domestic prowess and secure a better marriage match. In some regions of America, the bride-to-be would be expected to accumulate thirteen quilts in her trousseau. The first twelve quilts might be made in collaboration with her community as in a quilting bee, or under her mother’s instruction, but the final quilt must be one of her own design, crafted without help. For a quilt to be a worthy addition to her trousseau chest, it must have careful stitches and a complex symmetrical pattern. The quilt would be composed of smaller “quilt blocks” that would be rotated and sewn together to create an image with many possible permutations. Foundational quilt blocks, usually composed of triangles, squares, and quarter-circles, are aggregated to create a larger visual effect. This project examines the recursive capabilities of the quilt block by studying the Snake Trail quilt pattern. Besides the part-to-whole quilt assembly, there is an architectural lesson to be learned from the format of the quilting bee, a social gathering where participants work to complete a quilt together. Quilting bees have historically been a gathering place for women to socialize, share knowledge, and discuss politics. Quilting bees still take place today, and often result in unexpected quilts. Contemporary quilts have less emphasis on total symmetry and it is possible to see where larger blocks meet other larger blocks and where the space is filled in after. A quilt like this, though unorthodox in a 19th century trousseau, is reflective of spatial negotiation among self-expressive individuals. This project proposes this mode of collaborative making as a new model of communal urban planning. This project aims to develop a public forum inspired by the quilting bee that results in a collectively-authored space and its quilted diagram. The “players” in the game negotiate and advocate for their individual and collective spatial needs and desires. Together, the players design the community that they will inhabit, with each quilt block representing a different kind of program. The part-to-whole assembly logic of a quilt allows the players to design a space with their immediate co-habitatants to create a whole, which then becomes a part in the whole of the quilted community or neighborhood. The changes of scale in living and ability to self-arrange is facilitated by the quilt. The framework of quilting allows me to investigate interfaces for alternative forms of authorship, decisionmaking, and spatial negotiation. Utilizing the form of the Snake Trail quilt block, each interface has a set of protocols and constraints and results in space-generating configuration.