Matt Ratto

Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life

This article provides an overview of a series of experiments in what the author calls critical making, a mode of materially productive engagement that is intended to bridge the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration. Although they share much in common with forms of design and art practice, the goal of these events is primarily focused on using material production—making things—as part of an explicit practice of concept elaboration within the social study of technology.

Institutions for Civic Technoscience: How Critical Making is Transforming Environmental Research

This article explores the changing relationship between the academy and new public formations of scientific research, which we term “civic technoscience.” Civic technoscience leverages tactics seen in critical making communities to question and transform how and who can make credible and actionable knowledge. A comparison of two case studies is used. The first is a grassroots mapping process that allows communities to generate high-quality aerial imagery. The second is an academic-led project using environmental sensors to engage disparate audiences in scientific practice. These two projects were found to differ in their ability to form strategic spaces for community-based science, and suggest pathways to foster more robust relationships across the public–academic divide. By altering power dynamics in material, literary, and social technologies used for scientific research, we argue that civic technoscience enables citizens to question expert knowledge production through critical making tactics, and creates opportunities to generate credible public science.

Introduction to the Special Forum on Critical Making as Research Program

This special issue spotlights the growing diversity of critical making practices in a range of disciplinary contexts both inside and outside of the academy, and begins to develop perspectives that will foster the emergence of critical making as a coherent field. On one hand, we see great value in incorporating material practices into existing information systems (IS) and science and technology studies (STS) research programs. In particular, forms of material engagement can help overcome the ineffectual linguistic bias of traditional critiques of technoscience. On the other hand, we believe that current material practices can benefit from the conceptualization of knowledge and social organization that are foundational to IS and STS research. In this introduction to the special issue we call attention to the mechanisms by which such practices may combine representational and material work to foster and support the development of new knowledge-making communities and institutions. We believe such work can serve as a framework for others engaged in critical making practices to better contextualize and expand the relevance of their work. We intend this special issue to serve as a “stake in the ground” for research on new forms of material-conceptual critique and their incorporation in the repertoire of critical technoscience scholarship.

Critical making hackathon: situated hacking, surveillance and big data proposal

In this workshop we propose to explore issues around big data, data privacy, visualization, sensing, surveillance, and counter-surveillance, through a team-based Critical Making hackathon.

DIY Prosthetics Workshops: ‘critical making’ for public understanding of human augmentation

We reflect on our ongoing series of DIY Prosthetics Workshops intended to engage the public in critical discourse about technology and human augmentation through engagement with prosthetics. The goal of these workshops is to enhance understanding of prosthetic technologies through both conceptual and material exploration. We describe our efforts to capture the makings of our workshop in an open, modifiable “kit” comprising “three Ps:” prompts for reflection, parts for construction, and publics for participation.

Tracing design(ed) authority in critical modes of making

The workshop will consider the ways in which authority is distributed throughout the design process, what kind of authority inheres in design, and also the ways that we design authority into processes and materials. We will explore the relationship between particular critical modes of making and the forms of authority that they construct.

3D-printed prosthetics for the developing world

The growing availability of 3D printing has made it possible for end-users to manufacture prosthetic devices tailored to their individual needs. For example, Project e-Nable (www.enablingthefuture.org) provides parametric 3D-printable prosthetic hand designs. However, the e-Nable hand is an assembly of standardized parts, customized via rigid-body transformations. For cases of trans-tibial and trans-femoral leg amputation, the required prosthetic must blend mechanical parts with a socket that conforms to the shape of the residual limb. The socket design also plays a critical role in minimizing pain by distributing the significant mechanical stresses to appropriate anatomical locations. As a result, design customization is much more challenging.

Information seeking and use in diverse organizational contexts

This session combines individual presentations with a group discussion. The focus of this session and the expertise of this panel bring together ways of thinking about information seeking and use in diverse organizational contexts. Organizational contexts are not uniform. Quite the contrary, they are very diverse in terms of the individuals, cultures, habits, routines, systems and infrastructures within them. The panelists offer varying viewpoints on how to best address information seeking and use diversity in the workplace. Though each panelist offers different perspectives on how to do this, collectively they rally a persuasive need to not assume homogeneity in our understanding and investigation of information seeking and use in organizational settings. Rather, they suggest it would be better to recognize the acute diversity in the individuals, tasks, cultures, technologies, and information practices that exist in organizations today, and to develop models, approaches, and recommendations of information seeking and use that reflect our understanding of this diversity.

Secret Lives of Data Publics : Mixed Reality Smart City Interfaces

Conventional smart city design processes tend to focus on instrumental planning for city systems or novel services for humans. Interacting with data produced by the new services and restructured systems entailed by these processes is commonly done via interfaces like civic dashboards, leading to a critique that data-driven urbanism is bound by the rules and constraints of dashboard design [1]. Informed citizens are expected to engage with new urban information flows through the logic of dashboard interfaces. What datastreams are left off the dashboard of engaged urban experience? What design opportunities arise when dashboard visualizations are moved into the domain of mixed reality? In this two-day workshop, participants will construct prototype mixed reality interfaces for engaging the informational layer of the built urban environment. Using the Unity game engine and the Microsoft HoloLens, participants will focus on generative design in the space of data-driven interfaces, addressing issues of data access, civic agency, and privacy in the context of smart cities. Specific attention will be paid to interfaces that facilitate harmonious co-existence between humans and non-human systems (AI, IoT, etc.).

Denaturalizing 3D Printing’s Value Claims

This chapter examines how 3D printing has been framed as a liberatory technology that confers agency to users on the one hand, and an automated system that de-centers the user on the other. These entangled visions, we argue, can be traced to values that are threaded into 3D printing’s DNA. By historically situating the social context of 3D printing, tracing its roots to the CAD/CAM revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, we denaturalize assumptions about the technology’s users, its modes of interaction, and its societal impact, offering third wave HCI new insights for broadening how it considers context and values.