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What happens when an artifact gets replaced by another artifact in a practice? In what respects, this artifact replacement impacts users, tasks and practice? This paper discusses socio-cognitive impact of artifact replacement in Indian native craft practice, Amritsar carpet-weaving which used a code-based design representation (talim) till few decades ago which it inherited from its historical cousin Kashmiri carpet-weaving. However, this DR got replaced with a graph-based DR called naksha around India's partition in 1947. The cognitive impact of this replaced artifact on users in information retrieval, team communication and coordination, and social impact in terms of design creativity of industry is reported. The paper emphasizes including historical analysis of artifact-evolution over time and their impact on user-interaction while analysing artifacts so that one may go beyond giving static snapshots of their current profiles and associations.

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The gift of a velvet with repeating patterns of the Virgin Mary nursing Christ (Madonna del Latte) from Shah Abbas of Safavid Persia to the Republic of Venice is often interpreted as the embodiment of the Shah’s two-fold political and commercial motivations in pursuing his transcultural allegiance with Venice against the Porte. This paper explores the Shi’a Safavid iconography of the biblical imagery on this velvet and rereads it as a Safavid attempt in defining commonality across cultures through visual media. This vision differs significantly with the Venetians’ perception of the Shah’s luxurious gifts and letters, which is reflected in Gabriele Caliari’s painting of the Safavid reception by Doge Grimani in 1603, in Palazzo Ducale, Venice. The paper analyzes the two visions of the Safavids and the Venetians in a comparative study of the period’s textual and visual materials. It explores how the gifts such as the Madonna del Latte velvet facilitated diplomatic negotiations with Christian Europe, whereas painted representations such as Caliari’s reveal much about the perception of cultural difference in early modern courts.

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This article addresses the striking resemblance of a late nineteenth-century obstetrical simulator to contemporary commercial paper dolls. This period is often characterised in histories of medicine as one of increasing institutionalisation and professionalisation of childbirth through hospital training and state regulation. But this narrative is only part of the story. It marginalises the perspective of patients and midwives, and those outside of the geographic ‘West’, and it silences aspects of medical culture: social and caring relationships, emotion, play, and humour. While these aspects of medical history are less well represented in textual sources, material objects like Shibata Kōichi’s ‘Obstetrical Pocket-Phantoms’ can help to give a fuller picture.

Beginning by situating Shibata’s phantoms in the conventional histories of obstetric training and the intermedial spaces of the clinic and lecture theatre, I then ask how the phantoms might have been used and understood differently outside of these spaces. Using Robin Bernstein’s concept of ‘scriptive things’, I employ a visual and material study of the objects, informed by the wider cultural contexts of dolls and popular print culture in Germany, the USA and Japan, to argue for a history of Shibata’s phantoms as paper dolls that encouraged many forms of play: from learning and explorative, to mothering and caring, to humorous and subversive. By acknowledging that Shibata’s phantoms would also have been recognised as paper dolls, I present a history that centres unrecorded aspects of, and under-studied agents in, medical culture.

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Stone fireplaces and chimneys have been documented in nineteenth century Indigenous settlement sites in the Northwest Territories. The cabin and chimney designs were adapted by Dene craftsmen based on examples they encountered when engaging with Euro-Canadian traders and explorers. The Indigenous cabins and chimneys were built during a period of transition in Dene culture, at a time when they began the process of integrating into a fur trade economy. The chimneys and cabins are elements of Euro-Canadian vernacular architecture adapted by Indigenous people in the north. The Indigenous cabins and chimneys are an example of cultural diffusion and, in some instances, might have also been expressions of social status. Together, the Indigenous stone chimneys and the extant chimney features at Fort Confidence and Fort Reliance in the Northwest Territories are part of a shared architectural heritage.