Critical Making with and for Communities

Abstract

Critical making, a method particularly useful around "wicked problems"offers the chance to combine practices of making with critical thinking, to explore processes and topics utilizing technologies and materials and thereby learn or, in grassroots communities, create tangible artefacts which have a societal impact. Many of the growing number of makerspaces globally - though by far not the whole "global assemblage"of makers - foster participatory design for and with their communities to identify, highlight or solve local problems, explicitly or implicitly basing their practices on critical design. The term critical making is utilized in innovative scholarship, to describe design approaches, and DIY citizenship. During the 9th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, a workshop was organized by the authors to ground the term in grassroots innovation movements, with a special focus on the Global South, while recognizing the diversity and situatedness of making. Participatory methodologies were used to better understand the terminology of grassroots innovators, to discuss emerging and evolving issues of critical making, participatory design, and maker communities and to further develop the term critical making.