Maker Culture is the second theoretical and methodological pillar from which this course draws. Maker Culture within a digital paradigm takes several guises --  Hackivism, DIY Culture, Critical Making -- to name but three. Maker Culture has its roots in traditional arts and crafts, in tinkering, in building, in using one's hands as a way to think, to express, and to design. What Burdick et al in Digital_Humanities calls 'thinking through practice (Burdick, 2012, p. 13). In the fields of Digital Humanities or Digital Cultural Studies, this involves designing new structures, new software, new systems, and new modes of interaction to exploit technology in the service of cultural production. It also provides an alternative route for theorisation in which theories flow from practice (Klein 2019, p.25).

Matt Ratto's concept of 'Critical Making' (coined in 2008) probably comes closest to what we are attempting to achieve in this course. Ratto defines critical making as a practice that highlights 'the interwoven material and conceptual work that making involves'. Critical Making also emphasises value-sensitive and values-in-design, which are recurrent themes in this course (see also Bogers & Chiappini, 2019). These themes will be explored through the case studies, scenarios, and exercises that connect, as Raito explains, 'humanistic practices of conceptual and scholarly exploration to design methodologies' (Ratto, 2012, n.p.)

Within a maker-culture approach, process is equal to product: from generating new hypotheses to creating new data infrastructure. Central to any critical making project is how it embeds within it critical reflection. This reflection is at the heart of the development process, connecting ‘technological systems and practices to critical scholarship and ideas’ (Ratto & Ree, 2012). As frequently critical making projects do not follow a standard development process, the iterative design cycle that is at the heart of a design thinking approach allows for prototyping within a user-centric feedback loop.

Critical making emphasizes the shared acts of making rather than the evocative object. The final prototypes… are considered a means to an end, and achieve value through the act of shared construction, joint conversation and reflection” (2011, p. 253)

Earlier this year, the IGNITE project and the Research School for Media Studies in the Netherlands had the pleasure of hosting Ratto for a keynote in our online summer school. In the video below he explores both the concept of Maker Culture as well as specific instances of how he has used it, particularly within classroom settings.

Perhaps more relevant to the ways in which the balance between our physical and digital lives were upended due to Covid19,  Ratto's evaluation of the RCA/Imperial Event, Systems of Learning, demonstrated that students had difficulty relating the object they had created to the context surrounding it without the help of a facilitated discussion (2011), further highlighting the importance of the process of creation, the importance of critically analysing the design and making processes to solve current and future socio-technical issues. This brings us back to the argument made previously, that critical making emphasises value-sensitive and values-in-design, which are recurrent themes in this course. It strays away from the common assumption that Critical Making is an art practice, while Ratto believes we should pull back from that connotation and view it as a practice of exploration



Exercise: read the statements below and fill in the missing words

References

• Abner, Kayla (5 March 2019). 'Transformation in Digital Humanities'. ICommons Knowledge. https://publish.illinois.edu/commonsknowledge/2019/03/05/transformation-in-digital-humanities
• Burdick, A., Drucker, J., Lunefeld, P., Presner, T., & Schnapp, J. (2012). Digital_Humanities. Cambridge, MASS: The MIT Press
• Galey, G. Ruecker, S. (2010). 'How a Prototype Argues'. Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 25, No. 4. pp.405-424.
• Klein, J. 'The Boundary Work of Making in Digital Humanities'. In J. Sayers (Ed.) Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities. (pp. 21-31). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Ramsay, S., Nyhan, J., & Vanhoutte, E. (2013). Who's In and Who's Out. In M. Terras (Ed.), Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader (pp. 243-246). Surrey: Ashgate.
•  Liu, Alan.“‘Why I’m In It’ x 2 — Antiphonal Response to Stephan Ramsay on Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism”. https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/why-im-in-it-x-2-antiphonal-response-to-stephan-ramsay-on-digital-humanities-and-cultural-criticism
• Ramsay, S., Rockwell, G. (2012) 'Developing Things: Notes towards an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities'. In M. Gold (Ed). Debates in the Digital Humanities. (pp.75-84). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Society, 27(4), 252-260. doi:10.1080/01972243.2011.583819
•  Ratto, Matt (2012) Open Design Now. Available at: http://opendesignnow.org/index.php/article/critical-making-matt-ratto/. Last accessed 31 May 2019.
• Ratto, M., & Ree, R. (2012). Materializing information: 3D printing and social change. First Monday, 17(7). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v17i7.3968
• Sneha, P. 'Making Humanities in the Digital' In J. Sayers (Ed.) Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities. (pp. 57-67). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
•  Staley, D. (2019) 'On the "Maker Turn" in the Humanities'. In J. Sayers (Ed.) Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities. (pp. 32-41). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.