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

The Most Compelling Critiques of Making

One powerful, yet accessible and brief, critique of making is Debbie Chachra’s “Why I Am Not a Maker.”[1] In this piece published in The Atlantic, Chachra details the dangers of cultures, here specifically tech culture, that value making above all else. Specifically, the supremacy of making 1) devalues and erases the labor required in caregiving and repair, and so, too, that which has typically been done by women; 2) is not rebellious nor revolutionary, but rather, reinscribes that “artifacts are important, and people are not”; and 3) reifies that the most valuable and desirable activities are those which result in commodities that can be tidily packed up and sold.

Building on Chachra’s foundation, Vossoughi et al. provide more detail into the racialized, gendered, and class-based dynamics of this maker ethos and education, especially in relation to working-class students and students of color. Some (of many) valuable points argue that the mainstream maker movement deemphasizes and devalues making as social or artistic practice, or as economic survival; that making is an “adult, white, middle-class pursuit” that requires leisure time and economic resources; and romanticizes for middle- to upper-class audiences what has historically been associated with vocational training. Echoing Chachra, they caution against the “uncritical adoption” of making.[2]

Similarly, in a keynote address responding to a series of panels based on Chachra’s more recent piece titled, “Beyond Making,”[3] Jack Halberstam suggests that the framework of unmaking and unbuilding the oppressive logics of this world may be a fruitful approach for humanities projects invested in social well-being and equity.[4] Halberstam specifically cites Audre Lorde, speaking to the praxis of revolutionary politics, who warned, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”[5] In these ways, advocates for making as scholarly practice must be aware of the possible repercussions of institutionalizing mainstream maker approaches, and in the case of the humanities, reimagine how (re/un)making might be incorporated into its missions, values, and ethos—and how those may be remade in the process.

[1] Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker,” The Atlantic, January 23, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/why-i-am-not-a-maker/384767/.

[2] Shirin Vossoughi, Paul A K Hooper, and Meg Escudé, “Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity,” Harvard Educational Review 86, no. 2 (2016): 206–232, https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.86.2.206.

[3] Debbie Chachra, “Beyond Making,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), 319–21.

[4] Jack Halberstam, “Bewilderment: Queer Theory After Nature” (Keynote Address, November 17, 2018).

[5] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 112.

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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.