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.^[1] 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 and director of the Critical Making lab in the Faculty of Information 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."^[2] "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."

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.

The main focus of critical making is open design.^[3] 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^[4] 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.^[5] 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 ^[6] 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.^[7] 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.^[8] 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".^[9]

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.

Practice

By way of illustration, the concept "flwr pwr" ^[10] is introduced in critical making scenario, which was introduced to shows how people gain knowledge from critical making.^[11] In general, this scenario is created to encourage people to participate in the infrared communication, visualized by a series of colored, blinking lights. Specifically, "flwr pwr" is simple electronic agents constructed from pre-assembled and coded components, including the arduino microcontroller and development environment^[12] Arduino also includes hardware and software. The software can be installed into computers, which allow users to control the hardware (i.e. colored, blinking lights) by using simple coding systems. Reflection is a very important process involved in the critical making activities. Participants are asked to reflect on the making process and the conceptual exploration. Some of the questions could be: What was difficult in your prototype construction? What would you do differently next time? Having completed this exercise, has your opinion on the social concept changed or remained the same?

Materials

3D Printing: Allows for relatively cheap and customizable design of objects which are often integrated into critical making projects.

Raspberry Pi: Is a single-board computer (SBC). It has the functionality of a computer with audio, video, USB and LAN interfaces.

Arduino: Is a single-board microcontroller (MCU). Used to interface communications between user and design.

LEDs: Small lights integrated into many critical design projects as a way to give feedback and interact with user.

Conductive textile: Conductive fabrics and thread are used in many projects to circulate electrical currents which might connect LED's to controller boards, like Arduino.

Craft Materials: Critical Making shares similar building practices from DIY, and as such, much of the ‘easy use’ craft materials are used during critical making projects. As a result, by connecting Arduino to computer through use cable, critical making allows designers to create arts using technologies.^[13]

We can't restrict ourselves by only the traditional materials. It is on us and our creative outlook to which and what can be utilized, for example in a paper mesh when fused with resin glue is used to make art, it forms a sturdy and durable material with optimum use of the given materials.

Critical Making Lab

Critical Making Lab is a shared space for students to experience the practice of critical making process in 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 this lab is to enhance collaboration, communication, and the practice-based engagement in critical making.^[14] The Critical Making Lab was founded by Matt Ratto. Ratto started the practice of critical making workshops since 2007. Since 2007 in Amsterdam, London, Canada, the US, and Scotland. There are six current lab members, who are all students from Faculty of Information. With some other active members and alums, they form the team of critical making lab.

Critical making can continue to enrich the learning environment of faculty, students and community members if critical making centers and innovation labs continue to grow in popularity. Such a center would host advanced resources, tools and shops as well as cross-disciplinary curriculum and research development.

It is possible for us to incorporate or have our lab of our own, there is no fixed criteria for the equipment that needs to be present for it to be called a critical lab. It is a hybrid, a robotics lab grouped with an art lab with the right students has the potential to become a critical lab, and its only 10 Percent of it the rest 90 depends on the minds involved.

Site3 Colaboratory

Site 3 is created to encourage people to making, teaching, learning and thinking about the intersection between art and technology. It is a space that invites people to become makers by providing them with the right tools to construct and display their creations while teaching new skills through regular classes and inspiring many more to join the maker community and bring their projects to life. Site 3 members form a diverse group of people, including artists, makers, engineers, creators, techies; people who collaborate to make and learn from the experience. Site 3 has done a lot of amazing projects and tests that covers DIY and critical making, for example the PK4A (Using a wireless EEG headset and a control unit connected to a flame effect, participants can create 20-foot-plus blasts of fire with their thoughts) and "DIY IR Remote Shutter Test at Site 3" (iPhone remotely control your camera).

Critical Making-Teaching

The first master's level critical making course was held at Faculty of Information in 2008 where the Arduino software and hardware were used due to its easy accessibility, open source nature, but more importantly, the physicality of the material which gave a more ‘hands on’ understanding of making. The goal was also to understand the nature of construction instead of simply being familiar with a system/concept in an abstract theory.

The pedagogy of critical making focuses on the novel understandings imbibed by the makers themselves instead of creating experiences to be used by people. The unpacking nature of the course is to allow a higher understanding of the digital technology that is already consumed and to come up with alternatives of such technologies.

The course taught at the Faculty of Information included an assignment for the students to develop a PRM (Physical Rights Management), where the students came up with modes of control such as auto-self-destruct of a book if photo-copying rights were breached.

The experimentative and ‘hands on’ nature of the course was designed to increase the knowledge base of the maker towards digitized technologies that they are already familiar with and create an engagement with the nature of such systems.

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’^[15] 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".^[16]

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." ^[17]

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).

With cross diversity in various fields critical making cannot be held back in terms of usability. To give an example we can have a look at the making of movies with special effects, from the movie Volcano (1997) the lava flowing on the streets was designed on a much smaller scale where the materials used were sluggish clay, paint and lighting which was later merged with the film on screen. With such a thing not been tried before the creative unit came together in a studio brainstorming to create what we seen now was then a part of Critical Making but then was not termed as such. There are many more such experiments in various fields that yet have to be linked and collected and can be carried out with the help of collaboration.

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 east are more commonly cited (William, 276) ^[18] . Today, TET increases the technological standard of DIY,^[19] 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.^[20] "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).^[21]

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)."^[22]

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.

Matt Ratto's Publications on Critical Making

1. Ratto, Matt. "Taking Things Apart/Making Things Together: A Critical Making Experiment." Royal College of Art/Imperial College, London, UK, April 22, 2008.

2. Ratto, Matt and Megan Boler, eds. DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (2014)

3. Ratto, Matt and Garnet Hertz. "Critical Making." Special Issue on The Culture of Digital Education: Innovation in Art, Design, Science and Technology Practices: Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Accepted, January, 2014.

4. Ratto, Matt, Kirk Jalbert and Sara Wylie. "Critical Making as Research Program: introduction to the forum on Critical Making." Special Forum issue on Critical Making, The Information Society 30(2). (2014) 85-95.

5. Wylie, Sara, Kirk Jalbert, Shannon Dosemagen & Matt Ratto "Institutions for Civic Technoscience: How Critical Making is Transforming Environmental Research," The Information Society 30:2, (2014) 116-126.

6. Ratto, Matt, Kirk Jalbert and Sara Wylie, eds. Critical Making Special Forum Issue, The Information Society 30.2 (March 2014).

7. Record, Isaac, Matt Ratto, Adriana Ieraci, Nina Czegledy and Amy Ratelle. "DIY Prosthetics Workshops: ‘Critical Making’ for Public Understanding of Human Augmentation." International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS) 2013, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, June 27–29, 2013.

8. Ratto, Matt. "Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life." The Information Society 27.4 (2011): 252-260.

9. Ratto, Matt. "Open Design and Critical Making." Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. Eds. P. Atkinson, M. Avital, B. Mau, R. Ramakers and C. Hummels. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers, 2011. 203-209.

10. Cohn, Marisa, Tobie Kerridge, Ann Light, Silvia Lindtner and Matt Ratto. "Tracing Design(ed) Authority in Critical Modes of Making." Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, DIS 2010. New York, USA, August 18–20, 2010. 440-441. (Acceptance 30%)

11. Ratto, Matt. "Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life." Hybrid Design Practices workshop, Ubicomp, Orlando, Florida, USA, September 30-October 3, 2009. (Acceptance 60%)

12. Ratto, Matt and Stephen Hockema. "Flwr Pwr: Tending the Walled Garden." Walled Garden. Eds. A. Dekker and A. Wolfsberger. Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform, 2009. 51-60.

Students' Publications on Critical Making

1. Resch, G (forthcoming). "Wayfinding in ‘Smart’ Information Space: The Future of Ambient Sensing in Academic Libraries and Beyond," Faculty of Information Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 1.

2. Record, Isaac, Matt Ratto, Adriana Ieraci, Nina Czegledy and Amy Ratelle. "DIY Prosthetics Workshops: ‘Critical Making’ for Public Understanding of Human Augmentation." International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS) 2013, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, June 27–29, 2013.

3. Erickson, Ingrid, Lisa Nathan, Nassim Jafarinaimi, Cory Knoebel and Matt Ratto. "Values|Design|Critique|Making Workshop," iSchool Conference, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, February 7–10, 2012.

4. coons, g. & Tissenbaum, M. (2011, February). Non-Standard Bodies. Poster presented as part of the Design Methods for the Information School Curriculum at the iSchools iConference 2011, Seattle, WA.

5. Resch, G & Ratto, M. (2012, February). Building the Makerbot: 3D Printing at the Critical Making Lab and our Study of the Materiality of Information. Poster presented as part of the Collaboration, Convergence & Communities – iSchool Student Conference, Toronto, ON.

6. Resch, G, Jancen, J & Miller, L. (2011, May). ENroute: Turn a Highway into a Museum of Community History. Poster presented as part of the INplay Conference, Toronto, ON.

7. Cohn, Marisa, Tobie Kerridge, Ann Light, Silvia Lindtner and Matt Ratto. "Tracing Design(ed) Authority in Critical Modes of Making." Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, DIS 2010. New York, USA, August 18–20, 2010. 440-441.

Master Theses

1. Bélanger, Marie-Eve. (2010). The annotative practices of graduate students: tensions & negotiations fostering and epistemic practice (MI thesis). University of Toronto.

2. Camisso, Jamon. (2010). Embedding metadata: Exploring the ontology of hybrid digital material object (MI thesis). University of Toronto.

3. Coons, Ginger (Virginia). (2011). Colour standardization: Its past and a possible future (MI thesis). University of Toronto.

4. Gamba Bari, Antonio. (2010). Critical assessment of customization discourse in information systems design (MI thesis). University of Toronto.

5. Krauss, Armin Martin. (2010). Dynamic categorization: What we can learn from the emergent arrangement of physical artifacts in libraries (MI thesis). University of Toronto.

6. Lam, Margaret. (2011). Online music knowledge (MI thesis). University of Toronto.

7. Ree, Robert. (2011). 3D printing: Convergences, fictions, fluidity (MI thesis). University of Toronto.

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

References

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