Investigating the creation of enduring information imaginaries by “making” with waste
Over the past decade information scholars and professionals have begun to chart an expanding role for libraries in their communities. Moving from content collection and curation towards creative material practice, they have developed spaces for “making” and other dedicated practices of collaborative creative production to provide a home for the people, equipment, and expertise needed to support new forms of entrepreneurial citizenship through making (Willett 2016, Tanenbaum, et al. 2013). These efforts seek to scaffold new forms of community building and material understanding alongside the education of entrepreneurial makers—ultimately tying information practice to commercial interests (Turner 2016, Seyram Avle, et al 2017).
This module draws attention to how creative practices like prototyping produce not only things, but also enduring social arrangements. Although pundits and scholars have celebrated such practices as useful for supporting hands-on learning and technology innovation, other scholars point to their limitations and pitfalls. Seyram Avle and colleagues (2017) point out that making activities may reproduce values like novelty and invention over enduring collective and structural intervention. They show how uncritically adopting such values can obscure the longer-term inheritances and stakes of creative production practices. Kristin Dew and Daniela Rosner (2019) and Cindy Kohtala (2016) likewise show how making gets associated with ecologically damaging ways of working that depend on abundant, labelled, and controllable materials. Together this scholarship exhibits how the make-and-dispose approach can also reify the dominance of Western, settler colonial, and masculinized notions of technology practice.
Readings:
Avle, Seyram, Silvia Lindtner, and Kaiton Williams. “How Methods Make Designers.” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI 17, 2017. doi:10.1145/3025453.3025864.
Dew, Kristin N. & Daniela K. Rosner. “Designing with Waste: A Situated Inquiry into the Material Excess of Making.” Proceedings of 2019 ACM Designing Interactive Systems – DIS 19, 2019. doi: 10.1145/3322276.3322320
Kohtala, Cindy. “Making “Making” Critical: How Sustainability Is Constituted in Fab Lab Ideology.” The Design Journal. 20, no. 3 (2016): 375-94. doi:10.1080/14606925.2016.1261504.
Tanenbaum, Joshua G., Amanda M. Williams, Audrey Desjardins, and Karen Tanenbaum. “Democratizing Technology.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI 13, 2013. doi:10.1145/2470654.2481360.
Turner, Fred. “23. Prototype.” Digital Keywords, 2016, 256-68. doi:10.1515/9781400880553-025.
Willett, Rebekah. “Making, Makers, and Makerspaces: A Discourse Analysis of Professional Journal Articles and Blog Posts about Makerspaces in Public Libraries.” The Library Quarterly. 86, no. 3 (2016): 313-29. doi:10.1086/686676.
Discussion Questions:
- What remnants of making might we deem too small or impractical to reuse? Why and according to whom?
- How do current information and production practices and institutions push against making with leftovers?
- How might we re-situate remnants of making as usable materials again? What infrastructures are necessary for this?
- In what ways could making with waste challenge dominant logics of abundance, extractivism, and innovation?