Critical Making With and For Communities
Regina Sipos, Victoria Wenzelmann · 2019
Critical making offers the chance to combine practices of making with critical thinking, to explore topics utilizing technologies and materials and thereby creating tangible artefacts which have a societal impact. Many of the growing number of makerspaces globally - though by far not the whole so-called "maker movement" - foster participatory design for and with their communities to solve local problems, explicitly or implicitly basing their practices on critical design. This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners at the 9th International Conference on Communities & Technologies to discuss emerging and evolving issues of critical making, participatory design, and maker communities. It will offer an introduction to critical making based on a short history of the maker movement, current societal impacts achieved through practices of making, as well as criticism directed towards maker culture. Together with the participants, we will look at participatory practices of critical designing and making for and with communities, and the role which makerspaces play as facilitators and drivers of these practices. Participants will share examples, best practices, tools and methods, and explore how we can better work together towards collaboratively developing theories, methods and practices, and achieving more societal impact of critical making in makerspaces around the world.