Critical Making
The historical context for the emergence of today’s maker movement includes its role in efforts to redeem the (capital H) Humanities following a period of active pejoration throughout the 1960s and 70s. Edward Said linked the rise of anti-humanism in the U.S. during this period to social movements against the Vietnam War, along with “racism, imperialism generally and the dry-as-dust academic Humanities" (Said 13). Concurrent with these social movements came increasingly critical public awareness of computerization and its role in emerging systems of social regulation and control, including, notoriously, the use of computer punch cards for inducting soldiers to fight in Vietnam (Gitelman, 93). So, the turn to computing was far from a logical or necessary path to redemption for a beleaguered Humanities in the 1980s and 90s. The coincident rise of largely depoliticized modes of digital archiving and research with the flourishing of academic discourses of feminism, post-colonialism, and critical race theory has been widely critiqued as providing formalist or structuralist refuges for “traditional” (read: white, hetero, Western, male) humanities scholars (Bianco, 2013; McPherson, 2013). Critical making, in turn, has not been immune from challenges directed at both the general precept of making and its application in specific contexts – including politics of access, ethos, and funding.
In part, such criticisms undoubtedly originate in the inflated rhetoric sometimes used to proclaim the potentials and importance of making. In 2014, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson declared (capital M) Making to be “The New Industrial Revolution,” extolling virtues of “the industrialization of the Maker Movement” (Anderson, 2014). Mark Hatch, CEO of Techshop, a national chain of pay-to-play makerspaces, likewise elevated the benefits of tinkering to a spiritual level, declaring that, "Making is fundamental to what it means to be human.…These things are like little pieces of us and seem to embody portions of our souls" (Hatch, 2013). The seamlessness with which maker culture may function in service to consumer culture is also highlighted in a report by the design firm HermanMiller. Based on analysis of a variety of maker spaces both in and out of academia, the report unequivocally states, “In today’s economy, people become innovators through a hands-on approach. A growing community of makers, hackers, and coworkers are creating an emerging culture of ‘learning by doing’ that is shifting how future workers learn to innovate” (HermanMiller, 2015). In each of these cases, it is the fact of making that confers the benefits associated with revolution, spirituality, and market innovation respectively. The particularities of what is made, by whom and to what purpose, appears to be of secondary concern.
In many cases, as HMS are incorporated into academic contexts, the euphoric rhetoric that prevails in the commercial sector is supplanted by critical reflection on the specific affordances of making. The University of Victoria’s Maker Lab in the Humanities, for example, offers a model for the convergence of humanistic inquiry and physical making. Lab director Jentery Sayers describes the lab’s work as operating at the intersection of “cultural criticism and comparative media studies with computation, prototyping, electronics, and experimental methods.” At a recent Digital Humanities Summer Institute, Sayers' team articulated the potential intersections of physical computing, fabrication, and the humanities in admirably diverse and specific terms, suggesting areas of research including experimental histories (“prototype the past”), labour studies focusing on materiality and manufacturing in digital culture, experimental media, installation and performance, surveillance technologies (“wearables for organizing and policing”), electronic literature that takes place “off the screen,” and so on. This conception of maker space as an extension of cultural space – which is therefore infused with ideology and cultural politics – follows the model of the "collaboratory" envisioned by Anne Balsamo. In her book Designing Culture, Balsamo urges designers to “take culture seriously” and to mobilize the benefits of culturally embedded making through mutual respect for the contributions of humanists and technologists alike (Balsamo, 2011). Balsamo’s model follows Teresa De Lauretis, Andreas Huyssen, and Kathleen Woodward in describing the embrace of values-driven goals in humanistic inquiry as an opportunity to expand the "technological imagination" (De Lauretis, 1983). Ironically, this suggests that significant outcomes of physical making may also lie in the abstract realm of the imagination.
Humanists who are drawn to critical making have sought to work around their limits of concern or competence through strategies of collaboration, repurposing of pre-existing tools, and work-for-hire (though the last of these is too often devoted to the development of expensive, one-off projects that are not even extensible to subsequent work on a related topic or genre). Recent advocacy for various forms of "code literacy" (Rushkoff, 2011) suggests that this pattern is changing, along with a gradual, generational shift to scholars, like Sayers, for whom coding has been long integrated into their academic and creative lives. In the meantime, a vast ocean of non-code-writing scholars continues to populate the tenured ranks of academia across the humanities. That said, the goal of this essay is not to recapitulate calls for software literacy but to recognize the “design of digital systems and tools” (Drucker, 2009) as a particularly fertile ground for cross-pollination of the complementary skills of scholars, designers, and technologists.
Proceeding from an understanding of critical making as deeply engaged in the transformation not only of physical objects but ways of thinking, I will offer a reflection on the development of a suite of digital tools created at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts. This account will highlight the evolving status of the interface in the development of three digital authoring platforms (the journal Vectors, the authoring platform Scalar, and the public media archive Critical Commons), each of which I have contributed to as an editor, co-principle investigator, and founder, respectively. My selection of these three platforms is not meant as self-aggrandizement so much as to take advantage of my intimate knowledge of their design and development during the past decade of extremely dynamic evolution in digital humanities scholarship. A different investigation might attend to the parallel development of research tools within the digital humanities, where nuances of interface and user experience are less consistently foregrounded. However, the focus of this article remains on electronic authoring, curating and publishing, where the role of the interface has been consistently central and contested.