(This is part 1 of the 3 part blog post series on Critical Making that myself and my group created. To see part 2, please follow this link. To see part 3, please follow this link.)
Some people use the metaphor of technology as a ‘pandora’s box’ to emphasize that we cannot predict the impacts technologies may have on human beings and the society. Advanced technology and the increased productivity brought about by the Second Industrial Revolution provided the materials that needed for many ideas to be put into practice. The concepts of designing and making are also much different than ever before, as the extended knowledge and technology removed some restrictions that were put on designers and makers. In modern society, people are surrounded by various products that cover their physical lives, entertainment, and spiritual lives. It is no doubt that designers, makers as well as the materials are playing crucial roles in affecting human behaviors and thinking. There is nothing new about these products. Nevertheless, if we look deeper at the process rather than the finished products, we will find the hidden meaning behind the products.
That also means we need to adopt an approach to help us put the making process in a larger context to analyze and understand. Critical making is the way that we will explore for this eassy, which will help reveal the relationships between technologies and the social life that embedded in designing and making. When talking about critical making, we have seen the majority of the people do not have the knowledge about what exactly it is. Some people even misunderstand it as “critical thinking” or “critical design”, but it is not true. Matt Ratto (2011), who defines the theory of critical making, says that critical making is a practice that interweaves theoretical elements and conceptual work in process (p. 253). In other words, it means that critical making indeed have some relationships between critical thinking (conceptually and linguistically) and critical design (pragmatically), but critical making highlights more the making practice themselves as conceptual work (Ratto 2012, n.p).
As a paramount part of maker culture, critical making is a good embodiment of the hands-on feature that maker culture is rooted in. There is no constrain on who should be the maker, or who could be allowed to engage in making, any citizens that have interested can engage in this open design process to critique and reflect (Ratto 2012, n.p). Ratto (2011) mentions the three stages that a typical critical making project should involve. One stage is to collect information and construct a solid theoretical foundation, where makers figure out and nail down the issues that they expect to explore. The second phase gathers people from different fields and disciplines and provides these stakeholders with different identities a enough space to design and make a prototype. In the third stage, participators start to talk about their ideas about the prototype they made. Through the iterative conversations, they could reconfigure and investigate the new possibilities until they could utilize the model or prototype to express the relevant concepts and problems (p. 253).
We could see that the purpose of critical making is not to create a perfect object. In fact, it is a tool, which supplies the whole society with a space to think through the making practice and think of themselves as makers. As Ratto (2012) emphasizes that critical making is “shared acts of making (p. 253)”, participators are negotiating and constantly improving results based on their joint information in the critical making of a prototype. These shared resources form a perspective of value in design, which inspires participants to construct a creative, critique, and novel reflection on issues (Ratto, 2011; Hertz, 2011). We learn from the process that technology is never neutral, human factors could affect the whole socio-technical system (Winner, 2018).
There is also a debate that whether a prototype can be a strong argument. Compared to the elaborated artifacts, the prototypes do not have the opportunities to be examined by the market and a large number of users. As a result, we cannot make sure if they are effective against other contexts. Galey and Ruecker (2014) argue that there are two traditions of design, one is to make design invisible as much as possible and serve for content. For example, we never realize the chair itself when we sit on a chair. Another one is to design things intentionally and to make users feel the product’s existence, for instance, some shapes of doorknobs are designed to be levers, not be round, because of that design offer convenience for people that cannot use hands but can use elbows to open the door (p.p 2-3). Critical making is more related to the latter, it emphasizes that this process-oriented design can also be an interpretative object and help investigate the semantic and political meaning in the physical making (Galey & Ruecker, 2014; Ratto, 2011). The function of the prototype of critical making is to extend relevant knowledge and skills as well as help conceptual the problems that may reoccur (Ratto 2011, p. 253).
Besides this, another benefit that critical making could bring to us is the tight integration of theoretical structure and practical experience. Ratto (2011) uses a vivid example to explain this connection. For instance, sometimes we feel technologies like web 2.0 are not as free and convenient as they promise to be when we use them. Because on the one hand, we lack relevant professional knowledge (digital literacy). On the other hand, we do not aware of the right we own, or we do not know the ways to make the technologies useful in some constraints (p. 253). People’s experience and knowledge determine how they recognize a product and affect how they use it, but as we explore the relationship between technology, society, and human beings, we realize that the consequence of technology is unpredictable and ever-changing (Verbeek, 2015). That is why we need to adopt critical making as an approach to break the disconnect between theoretical work and practical experience (Ratto 2011, p. 253). In critical making practice, we make and also think.
At the same time, Ratto (2011) thinks that this disconnect between technologies and the society is partly because of the arrangement of disciplinary divides (p, 258). It is a long-standing tradition that different disciplines focus on separate aspects. Take the atomic bomb as an example, humanists saw the consequence of the atomic bomb from a cultural and social perspective, but nuclear scientists considered the technical development side of things. The different directions in various disciplines have trained scholars and students to use the different systems and tools to deal with issues from matters of fact perspective. Ratto (2012) quotes Latour’s (2008) discussion about “matters of fact” and “matters of concern” to explain the disciplinary difference. In critical making, designers visualize the matters of concern by conceptualizing the material and practice and get out of the fixed, incontestable, and undefendable box (matters of fact). By adopting critical making, Ratto (2011) expects to achieve “…re-relating the differing dimensions of our relations to objects that are currently divided among various social science disciplines (p, 258).” According to this, critical making can be a useful tool to help overcome the gap within technoscience.
Hertz (2011) is a scholar who sees critical making as a way to improve the technological design. He emphasizes that the uniqueness of critical making is the ‘value in design’ approach. The word ‘value’ does not only indicate the practical value of the technique. It also relates to the value behind the making practice, which can have potential implications on human beings and society. Long Island’s expressways could be an ideal example to show what kind of value should not be embedded in the design process and why the value-oriented design is decisive. Established in the 50s in the United States, the expressways’ overpasses were deliberately built too low to avoid public transportation thus reduced the possibility that the lower-class could go to the beach (Winner, 2018). Until now, after rebuilding many times, the expressways are still accident-prone roads. The value embedded in Long Island’s overpasses reflects the problematic projections of the designer’s wishes, and the influence of the design is huge.
Critical making also helps frame two imperative questions about the design process: what responsibility the designers should have and what the products will enable. Both questions are relating to the designers’ assumptions and evaluations about the technology (Hertz 2011, n. p). Even though in critical making exercises, there should be a guideline or principle which can lead participants to get the result. Ratto (2011) talks about the principle of critical making that shifts from “caring about” to “caring for” (p. 258). For example, students who did not familiar with DRM systems by creating similar systems became aware of how the systems worked. To some extent, they also understand their responsibilities for “the adoption and use of DRM (Ratto 2012, n. p)”. The impacts of the design embody in multiple ways. The ways that people employ new technology influence their lifestyles and society as well as the world. DDT pesticide, for example, was wildly used to kill insects in agriculture and household in the United States. The inventor even won the Noble Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1948 for discovering it. However, the book Silent Spring (Rachel Carson, 1962) disclosed the negative effects of DDT on the environment, and public health hazards. Critical thinking and reflection do not embody in the design and use of DDT. The environment, technology, and people should be treated as a whole by designers. This is also why we advocate that critical making should be widely embraced in academic education, as it enables the sharing and across-disciplines exchange of knowledge and provides opportunities for continuous re-evaluating the position of design within the socio-technical system.
As discussed above, we have already known about the background and theoretical basis of critical making. Also, what value of critical making could bring to education and academic research and why it is so important. However, how could we apply critical making in our daily life? I think ‘Do it yourself’ is a ubiquitous making activity that everyone could engage in, which can always help people have a better understanding of the critical making. Maybe LEGO bricks would be a good example for every person to understand how micro-making functions. For beginners, the first step is to check the instructions and open their minds. People may feel dizzy when they see huge amounts of blocks but gradually, they will get accustomed to building a mini world by choosing the right bricks. They will acquire the knowledge and skills about finishing the project without instructions in the making process. They make and think, and evaluate why some blocks do not fit together seamlessly, and then make changes. What remains the most important factors are the reflection on the material and the act itself that the process provokes.
In general, critical making provides us with a model for better integrating practice and theory. The method reminds me of a famous Chinese saying, “Practice makes perfect (实践出真知[1]).” But critical making provokes a deeper insight, designers’ perceptions and values, and their reflections on projections in the making process value more. The role of the designer is much more important than it seems. Awareness of the soft and hard impacts that technology can have on society and human development can motivate designers to take more social responsibility. In our research project, we also conducted a critical making exercise in relation to the issue of GreenBin in Maastricht. For more information on this exercise, you can follow my colleague Frederique’s blog post. At the same time, we also explore how a critical making project should be like in detail and our prospects for critical making application in sustainability, which can be found in my colleague Rhys’s blog post. Please check all the links for getting more information about critical making!
Galey, A., & Ruecker, S. (2014). How a prototype argues. December 2010. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqq021
Ratto, M. (2011). Critical making: Conceptual and material studies in technology and social life. Information Society, 27(4), 252–260. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2011.583819
Ratto, M. (2012) Open Design Now. Available at: http://opendesignnow.org/index.php/article/critical-making-matt-ratto/ (Links to an external site.). Last accessed 31 May 2019.
Verbeek, P. P. (2015). Cover story: Beyond interaction: A short introduction to mediation theory. Interactions, 22(3), 26–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/2751314
Winner, L. (2018). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Computer Ethics, 177–192. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315259697-21
Hertz, G. (nd). What is Critical Making. Available at https://current.ecuad.ca/what-is-critical-making (Links to an external site.). Last accessed 17 October 2020.
[1] On Practice, Mao Tse Tung, July 1937
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