“We’ve conquered dark”: Shedding Light on Empowerment in Critical Making (original) (raw)

Reading Makers: Locating Criticality in DIY and 'Maker' Approaches

Since its inception, digital and interactive art has been forced to negotiate the tension between the inherently spectacular nature of the technologies it uses and the desire of creators to embed relevant critical stances within the work. With the recent rise of 'maker' or DIY culture, this negotiation has become even more pronounced as the production of technologies becomes more accessible and (allegedly) more democratized. Additionally, our relationship with technology is becoming increasingly intimate. Whereas machines once could have been read as tools, through which we would enact our individualized wills, they now implicate themselves into our mental processes, our bodies, and (one could argue) our very being. Within this cyborgian construction we risk mindless acceptance and integration of the particular logical models technology and its producers bring to the merger. A tension arises between our need to understand/recognize the logic which drives our lives and the technology, which often seeks to obfuscate that logic. This paper, through the application of philosophy of technology to a specific maker subculture – as it has been adopted by a movement in Fine Art (Art and Technology) – situates making as a form of artistic practice at the intersection of these ideas. As a mode by which technologically-inclined artists can navigate the spectacular and the critical in their work, making allows these artists to enact criticality through revealing underlying technical (and social) logic in the systems (and objects) with which they engage. Thus, this paper will trace the philosophical foundations of this critical approach and finally analyse a series of works that reveal strategies through which 'making' as a mode of 'revealing' has been refined by artists as a critical approach to embedded technological systems.

Sustainable Making? Balancing Optimism and Criticism in HCI Discourse

We examine the recent move from a rhetoric of “users” towards one of “makers”, “crafters”, and “hackers” within HCI discourse. Through our analysis, we make several contributions. First, we provide a general overview of the structure and common framings within research on makers. We discuss how these statements reconfigure themes of empowerment and progress that have been central to HCI rhetoric since the field’s inception. In the latter part of the paper, we discuss the consequences of these shifts for contemporary research problems. In particular, we explore the problem of designed obsolescence, a core issue for Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) research. We show how the framing of the maker, as an empowered subject, presents certain opportunities and limitations for this research discourse. Finally, we offer alternative framings of empowerment that can expand maker discourse and its use in contemporary research problems such as SID.

Listening to the sociomaterial: When thinking through making extends beyond the individual

Design Studies, 2023

Current discussions in practice-led design research concentrate on the thoughtful dimension of working with materials and the problem of analyzing acts of making at the scale of individual practice. Informed by the theoretical tenets of sociomateriality, this paper encloses a practice-led study addressing both issues. We followed the making of a collaboration-based, material-intensive workshop designed by the first author, where he also participated as a maker. This approach afforded us an insider's perspective to delineate how thinking through making transcends the individual and distributes across the entangled becoming of the social and the material. Our findings shed light on four features of sociomaterial assemblages that warrant critical attention in practice-led design research: temporality, contingency, epistemic capability, and analytical agency.

The Elements of Making: A Social Practice Perspective for Everyday Creators

Creativity Studies

In contrast to behavioural approaches that attempt to explain creativity, social practice theories commonly emphasize aspects of the material world that shape and reproduce how people engage with them. How might social practice theory clarify how making affects millions of hobbyist creators – and what makes making matter to them? This article examines the theoretical work tying creativity to social practice. It then reports on a project in which small groups of everyday creators in the United Kingdom (n = 95) gathered in workshops to discuss their experiences and opinions regarding the materials, meanings, and competences of making. A model-making research method instigated peer discussion revealing both individual and shared accounts of practice. The data indicated that participants, regardless of practice, experienced creating as an ongoing performance providing many benefits that promote personal and societal transformation. With our graphic iteration of the elements of making, w...

Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life

The Information Society, 2011

This article provides an overview of a series of experiments in what the author calls critical making, a mode of materially productive engagement that is intended to bridge the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration. Although they share much in common with forms of design and art practice, the goal of these events is primarily focused on using material production—making things—as part of an explicit practice of concept elaboration within the social study of technology.