Touchable Speculation: Crafting Critical Discourse with 3D Printing, Maker Practices, and Hypermapping

computer labs

I came across this image, a green phosphor cartoon computer flying across a black screen, during archival research of the institutionalization of computer labs on my campus. It embodies the potentiality of computers that is now said to be dead.[1] It is the logo of the (now-defunct) WAM labs, or the Workstations and Maryland computer labs. The logo is also the most obvious bridge between the speculative space and the real space upon which it is based. Like an ocean wave, the WAM labs swelled and receded. Though university campuses may feel “old,” they are in constant flux. The university campus is an archive (of which much has been destroyed or lost) of technological needs and their institutionalization that have long since come and gone.


The setup and design of those spaces are snapshots of that “current” relationship with technologies in the past. They illuminate how computers were imagined in social space, and how that space should function. For instance, the computer labs built in the late 1980s in the dorm buildings were constructed carefully and specifically with privacy in mind:

Both WAM sites were designed and furnished by a professional decorator […] They include modularized carrels to offer students the feeling of private, personal workspace. [One] lab is decorated in shades of rose and blue, with wall carpeting to buffer sound. [The other] lab is appointed in peach and turquoise and buffered with dark wood wall paneling.[2] 

This design reflects how themes of private and public space inform sites of technoencounter, especially as a dorm operates as both a public and private space. Here, the designer was attempting to move away from the sanitary, institutional paradigm of existing labs, and toward a “softened,” more home-like aesthetic. Even further, the modular carrels specifically aimed to foster “the feeling of private, personal workspace.”


What would be the implications of attempting to create a sense of domestic or private space in a computer lab? How may that change the practices of computing? Now, most institutional computer labs are panoptic, the opposite of these modular iterations of the past. Computer usage, especially in public space, is specifically set up for easy monitoring, largely to prevent the “private” viewing of pornography to occur, inappropriately, in “public” space—something that wasn’t a major concern in the late 80s as the internet was still largely text-based. Further, because more students have their own “private” computers, the fostering of domestic privacy in a computer lab is no longer a perceived need of the technoencounter. The design of the makerspace, which is founded on the value of collaboration and openness, juxtaposes this late-80s approach that positioned computer work as private, personal labor. The imagined practices and user of a space are reflected in its design and has disciplinary power over those practices and users.

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[1] This has been discussed previously in relation to the question, “is the internet dead?” See: Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?,” E-Flux 49 (November 2013), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/.
[2] Computer Science Center, “New Wave of Workstation Labs to Open,” The CSC Link 22, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 8.

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