Critical making

Critical making refers to the hands-on productive activities that link digital technologies to society. It is invented to bridge the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration. The purpose of critical making lies in the learning extracted from the making rather than the experience derived from the finished output. The term "critical making" is popularized by Matt Ratto, an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. Ratto describes one of the main goals of critical making as: "...to use material forms of engagement with technologies to supplement and extend critical reflection and, in doing so, to reconnect our lived experiences with technologies to social and conceptual critique." "Critical making" as defined by practitioners like Matt Ratto and Stephen Hockema, "is an elision of two typically disconnected modes of engagement in the world — "critical thinking," often considered as abstract, explicit, linguistically based, internal and cognitively individualistic; and "making," typically understood as tacit, embodied, external, and community-oriented."

Arduino Hardware

Critical making has been coined as a reaction to digitisation and is moreover a reaction to things that have essentially been done before. It involves engaging with physical components and materials in their raw forms and building something from scratch, encouraging maker culture. Critical making is less about the aesthetics of the end product and more about the process and conceptual exploration. It is the inquiry that matters and not the final solution through making you get a better understanding of how various technologies function. Critical Making gives birth to curiosity. While making, you question several aspects of the process, explore various directions formulating your own opinion on what works or does not work and why.

Arduino Software: Processing Demonstration

The main focus of critical making is open design. Open design develops a critical perspective on the current institutions, practices and norms of society, and reconnects materiality and morality. Matt Ratto introduces Critical Making as processes of material and conceptual exploration and creation of novel understandings by the makers themselves. Critical Making includes digital software and hardware. Software usually refers to the Raspberry Pi or Arduino, hardware refers to a computer, or any other device that facilitates an operation.

Matt Ratto and Critical Making

Matt Ratto coined the term in 2008 to describe his workshop activities that linked conceptual reflection and technical making. This concept explores how learning is influenced by the learner's participation towards creating and/or making things within the technological context. Ratto's first publication to use the term was in 2009. Ratto claims that his goal is to connect the conceptual understanding of technology in social life to the materialized activities. By situating himself within the area of "design-oriented research" rather than "research-oriented research," Ratto believes that critical making enhance the shared experience in both theoretical and practical understandings of critical socio-technical issues. However, critical making should not be reviewed as design, but rather as a type of practice. The quality of critical making lab is evaluated based on the physical "making" process, regardless of quality of the final material production. Prior studies have noted the separation between critical thinking and physical "making". Specifically, experts in technology lack the knowledge from art, and vice versa, however it is very important that technology be embedded in a context rather than being left in isolation especially when it comes to critical making.

Importance

Ratto's empirical findings in the current research on critical making provide a potential solution for the so-called "wicked problems"; this concept refers to issues in which no consensus exists with regard to problem definition. In this context, critical making is successful. It encourages participants to collaborate during the process of "making", which can also be referred as "a mode of engagement".

Critical making is an opportunity for participants to design low-fidelity prototypes. Prototypes help you follow your main inquiry and figure out new possibilities to a problem, rather than just giving you one solution. Critical makers might code instructions for an arduino, construct a structure using traditional crafting supplies and/or use building toys like Lego to realize their visions. Thus, critical making seeks to increase the use of technology in classrooms, studios and labs. Participants are not expected to deliver a highly sophisticated final product; thus, critical making can ease hesitant individuals into becoming acquainted with intimidating hardware and software.

Often, critical making is done in small groups which supports discussion and facilitates productivity. Participants can leverage the particular skill set of each group member in the wider group effort. Critical making provides obvious opportunity to kinaesthetic learners who thrive in hands-on situations; however, critical making could also benefit students who learn best while listening. Those who learn via written text could be an asset to the greater group in their ability to explain concepts from the consulted literature relevant to the making activity.

Critical making, more over uses innovative ways to adhere to the ideas of conceptualizing further more by substituting the final tools with more simpler and available ones in order to promote the creative aptitude of the group involved.

Critical Making Lab

The Critical Making Lab was founded by Matt Ratto. Critical Making Lab is a shared space for students to experience the practice of critical making process in the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Critical Making Lab provides participants tools and basic knowledge of digital technology used in critical making. The mission of the lab is to enhance collaboration, communication, and the practice-based engagement in critical making.

The sense of responsibility and accountability for the adoption of the technology is an essential nature of critical making that is often referred to as a movement from ‘caring about’ an issue to ‘caring for’ an issue. The course has since then been taught in 2009 and 2010.

Garnet Hertz and Critical Making

In 2012, Garnet Hertz adopted the term for a series of ten handmade booklets titled "Critical Making" published in 2012. It explores how hands-on productive work ‐ making ‐ can supplement and extend critical reflection on technology and society. It works to blend and extend the fields of design, contemporary art, DIY/craft and technological development. In this project, 70 different authors - including Norman White, Julian Bleecker, Dunne & Raby, Daniel Charny, Albert Borgmann, Golan Levin, Matt Ratto, Natalie Jeremijenko, McKenzie Wark, Paul Dourish, Mitch Altman, Dale Dougherty, Mark Pauline, Scott Snibbe, Reed Ghazala and others - reflected on the term and critical responses to the maker movement. Generally speaking, Hertz's use of the term critical making is focused around studio production and the creation of objects as "things to think with".

Hertz initially set out to make a zine of about 50 pages but was flooded with almost 300 pages of original content from approximately sixty people. It consisted of academic papers, detailed technical projects, interviews and documented artworks. He then categorised the information into specific topics thereby producing multiple booklets. The booklet itself is a testament to critical making. It was printed using a hacked photocopier and about a 100,000 pages were manually folded and stapled to create 300 copies of 10 booklets each.The publication asks us to look at aspects of the DIY culture that go beyond buying an Arduino, getting a MakerBot and reducing DIY to a weekend hobby.These books embrace social issues, the history of technology, activism and politics. The project stems also from a disappointment. A year ago, Make received a grant from DARPA to create "makerspaces" for teenagers. Everyone who, so far, had assumed that a culture built on openness was antithetic to the murkiness that surrounds the military world was bitterly disheartened. CM is not the anti-Make Magazine, it is simply an alternative, a forum for electronic DIY practice to discuss hacking, making, kludging, DIYing in a less sanitized, mass-market way.

In 2014, Hertz founded "The Studio for Critical Making" at Emily Carr University of Art and Design as Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Arts. The facility "explores how humanities-based modes of critical inquiry – like the arts and ethics – can be directly applied to building more engaging product concepts and information technologies. The lab works to replace the traditional engineering goals of efficiency, speed or usability with more complex cultural, social and human-oriented values. The end result is technology that is more culturally relevant, socially engaged and personalized."

John Maeda and Critical Making

In 2012, John Maeda began using the term while at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD): first as a title for their strategic plan for 2012-2017 and next as part of the title of an edited collection titled "The Art of Critical Making: Rhode Island School of Design on Creative Practice" published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Other Uses of Critical Making

Other individuals to use the term critical making to orient their work include Amaranth Borsuk (University of Washington-Bothell), Jentery Sayers (University of Victoria), and Kari Kraus (University of Maryland).

Concepts Related to Critical Making

DIY and Critical Making

Traditional DIY is criticized by its cost and standard. DIY products are difficult to spread in lower-income areas where issues of cost and ease are more commonly cited (William, 276). Today, TET increases the technological standard of DIY, enhance the modernity of it, and open up a more practical and advanced area for DIY projects to develop It is not only a lifestyle choices but also a technological product. "DIY activity is not for example seen as a coping practice used by those unable to afford to externalise the activity to formal firms and/or self-employed individuals. Instead, and reflecting the broader cultural turn in retail studies, their explanation for engagement in DIY is firmly grounded in human agency" (Williams, 273).

Speculative Design and Critical Making

According to DiSalvo and Lukens, "Speculative design is an approach to design that emphasizes inquiry, experimentation, and expression, over usability, usefulness or desirability. A particular characteristic of speculative design is that it tends to be future-oriented. However this should not be mistaken as being fantasy-like sense, suggesting, that is "unreal" and therefore dismissible (DiSalvo and Lukens, 2009)."

The term speculative design involves practices from various disciplines, including visionary or futurist forms of architecture, design fiction, and critical design or design for debate instead of referring a specific movement or style. More than just diagrams of unbuilt structures, speculative design aims to explore the space of interaction between culture, technology, and the built environment (Lukens and DiSalvo, 2012, p. 25). Practitioners of speculative design engage in design as a sort of provocation, one that asks uncomfortable questions about the long-term implications of technology. These practices also integrate pairs of concerns that are traditionally separate, such as fact and fiction, science and art, and commerce and academia. This provocation extends to questions about design itself.

3D Printing and Critical Making

3D Printing allows for relatively cheap and customizable design of objects which are often integrated into critical making projects. There are two type of industrial manufacturing: subtractive Manufacturing: involves shaping a material through a process of chipping / removing some of its substance (think whittling a figure out of wood) and additive Manufacturing: creates by adding material into a product. The basic steps of 3D printing are digital design: design the object you want to print using digital design software OR download a design from a website (like Thingiverse, for example), press print and the printer will begin creating a physical version of your digital design. 3D printers use layerization to create objects. 3D printers use a variety of materials to create objects, including plastic, metal and nylon (Flemming, What is 3D printing?). The Makerbot, for example, uses polylactic acid (PLA), a substance derived from corn. The coiled PLA filament is pulled into the machine via a tube and then heated up by the extruder, causing the PLA to melt. This melted material forms the model's layers, which is applied in approximately .02 - 1 millimeter layers. The model is built up until it is finished.

See also

1. Critical technical practice
2. Critical thinking
3. Critical design
4. Speculative design
5. Maker culture
6. Technology
7. Arduino
8. 3D Printing

External links

1. Arduino
2. Open Design Now
3. Raspberry Pi or Arduino
4. Critical Making - Paulos Syllabus (Berkeley)
5. Critical Making - Hertz (2012)
6. The Studio for Critical Making (Emily Carr University of Art and Design)
7. John Maeda: The Art of Critical Making