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The Impact of Making: Investigating the Role of the 3D Printer in Design Prototyping
Published in Steinar Killi, Additive Manufacturing, 2017
While many of these studies emphasize the roles artifacts play as representations and filters of design intentions, other scholarly contributions emphasize making as an act for critical inquiry. Matt Ratto (2011) coined the term “critical making” as a mode of inquiry that extends theory into physical space [37]. Ratto’s theoretical framework for making emphasizes critique and exploration in order to understand new concepts, rather than solving them with technically sophisticated prototypes. Critical making can be seen as a juxtaposition of critical thinking, which is based on linguistic and theoretical expression, with tacit acts of making artifacts. In recent studies, Ratto and Ree [38] investigated 3D printing as a fluid technological phenomenon that has great implications for materializing digital and physical convergences. Critical making being a potentially socially transformative technology, Ratto and Ree employ critical-making workshops with layperson participants. This allows these design researchers to delve into topics such as literacy (the need for development of skills in a new digital economy), infrastructure (citizen involvement through making), and legislation (the potentials and ramifications of collaborative, “open-source” sharing of designs) [38].
Speculative design as research method
Published in Gretchen Coombs, Andrew McNamara, Gavin Sade, Undesign, 2018
Anne Galloway, Catherine Caudwell
Other ways of using speculative design to engage audiences includes design friction and critical making. Forlano and Matthew (2014) employ speculative design in their workshop-based research to encourage stakeholders to engage with frictions and controversies surrounding urban technologies. The authors highlight that speculative design is often criticized for elitism as it “often does not move beyond the realm of the museum exhibit” (p. 11), but argue that public workshops are effective means of raising questions about participants’ future-oriented concerns and issues. Critical making is another design research practice that aims to reflect on social and cultural values and beliefs related to technology. Ratto (2011) explains that critical making “differs from these practices in its focus on the constructive process as the site for analysis and its explicit connections to specific scholarly literature” (2011, p. 253). This is achieved through a “review of relevant literature and compilation of useful concepts and theories … mined for specific ideas that can be metaphorically ‘mapped’ to material prototypes, and explored through fabrication” (p. 253). In other words, rather than displaying designed objects to an audience, in critical making it is the act of creation, fabrication, and contextualization or discussion that is the central focus. Ratto claims that this engagement creates personal investment in addressing matters of concern, problematizing connections between society and technology, and creates deeper conceptual understandings of technical innovation. Ultimately, Ratto distinguishes critical making through the notion of care, the fostering of “a ‘caring for’ that is not typically part of either technical or social scholarly education” (p. 259).
Futures labs: a space for pedagogies of responsible innovation
Published in Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2023
Shannon N. Conley, Brad Tabas, Emily York
In this learning context, the most important outcome of a scenario analysis isn’t a particular quota of plausible futures or a strategic justification for policymaking, but rather an enriched moral imagination endowed with heightened anticipatory reasoning capacities. In other words, it is the development of futures literacy as applied to innovation. Within the Futures Lab the means to this awareness often include critical making practices that generate supports for efforts to imagine the transformative potential of technical novelties. Engaging in critical making is a form of play through which learners can develop reflexive anticipatory capacities, including understanding the deeply contingent and political nature of the technologically-informed making of the social world. These learning games likewise catalyze awareness of how even ‘minor’ innovations can raise major questions of social justice (see Ludwig and Macnaghten 2020).
Artificial everyday creativity: creative leaps with AI through critical making
Published in Digital Creativity, 2022
In this article, artificial everyday creativity is approached through ‘critical making.’ Critical making is a term coined by information studies scholar Matt Ratto in 2009 to describe interdisciplinary design-based practices involving conceptual and technical work. In other words, critical making incorporates material modes of engagement with technologies to open up and extend social and cultural reflection (Ratto 2011). It concerns itself with questioning the values, agendas, politics, and tactical components associated with practices of crafting and making that are at the centre of the technology. In many ways, it is similar to Critical Technical Practice (Agre 1997; Soon and Cox 2021) that examine value propositions in technical/computer science disciplines and trouble the instrumental logics using critical literature from social science and humanities.
Investigating Culturally-Contextualized Making with the Navajo Nation: Broadening the Normative Making Mentality
Published in Engineering Studies, 2020
Daniel Z. Frank, Elliot P. Douglas, Darryl N. Williams, Carl D. Crane
Making has also been promoted as an empowering activity, a way for people to ‘reclaim power in their everyday lives.’17 This has led to the development of critical making.18 Critical making is used to describe ‘a research program that explores the range of practices and perspectives connecting conceptual critique and material practice.’19 The accessibility of new technology and open source software, both important tools that help drive the Maker Movement, has the power to shift established power dynamics. For example, these tools might empower the average citizen to make a weather balloon, allowing them to collect and disseminate their own scientific findings, a privilege that traditionally has been reserved for research and academic institutions.20 The data that this average citizen collects could be used to shape environmental policies within their community.