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

The “Maker Turn” within the Digital Humanities

The value of making within DH is thoroughly discussed in multiple valences in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers. The anthology addresses how making, here framed as a form of material experimentation in the humanities, offers an alternative methodology in pursuing scholarship, research, and pedagogy. Similar to Ratto’s definition of critical making as “a mode of materially productive engagement that is intended to bridge the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration,”[1] Julie Thompson Klein, in the chapter, “The Boundary Work of Making in Digital Humanities,” traces the genealogies and developments of the field of digital humanities, and specifically “tracks the practice of making in arguments and activities that have reconceptualized building tools from reductive mechanical work to an intellectual endeavor in its own right.”[2] Thompson Klein draws from several projects that position making as a form of thinking, as a way of coming to know an object or process that is perhaps not accessible in other ways of pursuing that knowledge.

In the same anthology, David Staley, in “On the ‘Maker Turn’ in the Humanities,” considers making not only as “an interpretive act” to “unlock meaning,”[3] but further, as a valuable approach to actively account for and foregrounding the role of materiality in humanities scholarship. Staley writes:

“Humanists do not have a name (other than ‘art’ or ‘performance’) for an interpretation or reading that is not written. […] The idea that humanists might use tools to make things may sound counterintuitive; however, humanists already make things: textual things. These things are not usually identified as such, and their material production goes largely unnoticed. […] The ‘maker turn’ expands the range of objects humanists might construct. […] Once freed from the printed page, the design of an interpretive object foregrounds the act of making as an important feature of the interpretive act. Design is thus a crucial part of interpretation and making in the humanities.”[4]

Like other approaches discussed here, Staley identifies the similarity between research that centers making and/or design as particularly well-suited for exploring the material world, and its potential for researchers, scholars, and students. Perhaps, then, making should not be circumscribed within the digital humanities specifically, but instead, would figure better in terms of a material humanities, thereby reiterating the value of material exploration, one that would include the digital, but not be limited to it.

While the critiques of maker culture and making (described in detail below) are well-founded and indispensable within the “maker turn” among (digital) humanities projects, a self-reflexive, critical approach to making allows for a humanities that continues to take up that which is beyond the textual and discursive, and one that looks to the material world to explore the human condition. In other words, making within scholarly spaces and pursuits should not be reduced to refer solely to the “maker movement” done academically, but also understood in relation to its generative worth in relation to material-ideological exploration. Perhaps, at some point, we can move beyond making if we (who?) find it too ideologically, politically, and socially fraught, and consider alternative modes of naming and utilizing these practices.

[1] Matt Ratto, “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life,” Information Society 27, no. 4 (2011): 252, https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2011.583819.

[2] Julie Thompson Klein, “The Boundary Work of Making in Digital Humanities,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), 21. .

[3] David Staley, “On the ‘Maker Turn’ in the Humanities,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), 32.

[4] Ibid., 36–37.

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Speculative + Making = Genealogies, Context, and Naming Matters
“At one time, Ts’ui Pên must have said; ‘I am going into seclusion to write a book,’ and at another, ‘I am retiring to construct a maze.’ Everyone assumed these were separate activities. No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same.” —Jorge Luis Borges, “Garden of the Forking Paths” (1941)
In the next section, “Speculative Making in the Digital Humanities,” I detail my specific usage and interpretation of the terms speculative, making, and their combination in relation to my choice to classify fleshLAB as speculative making. I largely frame the speculative in relation to Johanna Drucker’s work on speculative computing and speculative approaches in creative endeavors, such as art and fiction. I frame making in relation to what has come to be called the mainstream “maker movement,” especially the branch that has been adopted, institutionalized, and (often) reformulated in university education, and Matt Ratto’s critical making. Beyond this framing, these terms and practices are part of a much more expansive genealogy, one that spans many genres of making, of design.

Though certainly conceptual, hands-on practices do not occur solely within academic spaces, nor solely within the fields I will discuss below, I am most interested in the development of these practices and concepts within academic research, scholarship, and pedagogy. Though expansive, interdisciplinary, and diverse, these approaches, in my view, share a commitment to learning with and from things and a desire to pursue these epistemologically-rich sites through hands-on exploration of material objects. Often, this approach manifests in two major scholarly areas: 1) design practice and research and 2) the "maker turn" within the digital humanities (DH).

Though these practices may share several terms and approaches, they have come to be through different contexts and genealogies because of their various locations across the interdisciplinary fields of the humanities and of design. In some ways, you could say they share a common ancestor (a similar gene that has transmuted across fields and expressed itself in various ways), or put differently, a common vision (a similar perspective done differently as a result of disciplinary forces and trajectories). The practices and projects may take on similar qualities, but are often created by people who may have taken very different paths, use different tools, cite different archives, work in different parts of a campus, and attend different conferences.

In “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday,” Hancock et al. specifically address the interconnectivity between the realms of conceptual design and hands-on, material-focused humanities research in their work on reflective design, a term developed by designer Donald Norman, which they apply to bibliography and textual studies. They utilize this experimental method specifically to defamiliarize the materiality of the book to explore the codex as transmuted from its typical material form.[1] Linking design to DH, they assert:
“Reflective design complements the recent emphasis on critical making[2] in the digital humanities: the embodying of ideas or arguments in things. Ian Bogost’s carpentry,[3] Wolfgang Ernst’s media archaeology,[4] and Bruce Sterling’s design fiction[5] are all significant disciplinary touchstones. Part of the human-centered design philosophy of Donald Norman, reflective design foregrounds critical investigation over usability.”[6]

Reflective design is one concept among many similar others based on the conceptual, hands-on exploration of the material form, and bibliocircuitry, one iteration of this cross-disciplinary practice.[7]

Similarly, making within academic fields, specifically (digital) humanities, is just as complex and nuanced, some aspects of which I discuss in more detail throughout this project. Making is not far off from design (i.e. as a form of creative fabrication), but presents perhaps a different, yet interconnected, set of historical and social connotations. The most compelling critiques of making come by way of the more specific critique of maker culture or the mainstream maker movement, and by extension, the dangers of their entry into education.

Despite this, making can be and often is used within humanities frameworks to attempt to learn more about the material world as a way to identify hegemonic, often oppressive, mechanisms—a step required in the process to later remake the material world for the “better”—and, indeed, as a form of unmaking. For example, Hancock et al. suggest that reflective design is a method to transform the authors into “creative agents of change:” “…it is what helps us discover fault lines in the objects, artifacts, or systems being explored […] and in doing so allows us to imagine them otherwise: to see them as alterable rather than immutable; as possibility spaces rather than rigid, inherited structures.”[8]

Design scholar and practitioner Anthony Dunne (whose work is discussed in more detail in the "speculative making" pop-out note above) suggests that design practice and research may “improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment […] to be subverted for more socially beneficial ends.”[9] Opening up the black box, whatever the obfuscated item may be, lets the light in to reveal the inner-workings, and empowers us to look inside to then remake through iteration. These modes of exploration may help us not only uncover that which needs re-designing, but also, the means in which to do so.

As I have hoped to make clear by now, naming matters. Naming materializes through and around classification and is a significant aspect of the ideological development of these projects. The larger context of speculative and making provides a set of tools to classify, distinguish, and situate the spectrum of approaches drawing from these concepts. The terms practitioners select to identify themselves and their projects and practices define the work perhaps just as much as the work itself, often revealing the motivations, context, goals, and conceptual framings of the works, which in turn provides insight to how we might interpret or understand them.

Though fleshLAB is certainly an act of speculative making, it is also, perhaps more broadly, an act of scholarly making. I prefer scholarly making as an umbrella term for its ability to include multiple academic branches, namely research, scholarship, and pedagogy. Scholarly making names research that centers hands-on, material explorations utilized for its unique epistemological value in research, and is enacted not only after the object of study is created, but also during. It redefines knowledge production that “counts” as scholarship beyond the academic article or book.[10] It is also useful to identify how making might be detached from its connotations to the maker movement, and the critiques of its uncritical adoption as defined above, and redefined accordingly. Finally, and more broadly, it suggests an additional mode of working within the material humanities. I, like Borges, wonder what might be revealed when we make books that are labyrinths and labyrinths that are books.

[1] Charity Hancock et al., “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday,” Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation 8, no. 1 (2013): 75.
[2] Hypertext links are used throughout this text. Instead of reproducing the hyperlinks within the quotation, I will maintain the URLs here as footnotes as they were embedded into the original. Link: http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2012/03/full-interview-matt-ratto-on-critical-making/.
[3] Link: http://www.bogost.com/blog/carpentry_vs_art_whats_the_dif.shtml.
[4] Link: http://www.amazon.com/What-Media-Archaeology-Jussi-Parikka/dp/0745650260.
[5] Link: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/02/bruce_sterling_on_design_fictions_.html.
[6] Hancock et al., “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday,” 75.
[7] Ibid., 79.
[8] Ibid., 76, emphasis added.
[9] Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (Cambridge: MIT, 2008), xvi.
[10] Bill Endres also discusses this issue in relation to academic employment practices, specifically tenure and promotion. See: Bill Endres, “A Literacy of Building: Making in the Digital Humanities,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), 44–54.