Aghillo

Recently, there has been a real emergence of what may broadly be called ‘maker culture’, incorporating diverse activities such as open-source hardware, data visualisation, design hacking, interactive products and art installations.

A number of events and communities supporting and facilitating this culture have appeared recently. As an example, Maker Faires now take place in many countries; originating in the USA, the first one in the UK took place at the Newcastle Science Fair in 2009 and was repeated this year, more recently there has been a series of events across Africa. Other examples include the interactive design community forming around the open-source microprocessor Arduino and the Processing visualisation language, events such as Hackerspaces and Dorkbots and groups like the Manchester based Madlab. It has also captured the interest of the literary world through Makers, a novel written by Cory Doctorow. This also fits with a culture around such activities as high-low technology at MIT, the re-emergence of Craft as a social and economic force, Fablabs and in design and fashion hacking.

I’m really interested in how this can support local sustainable (in the broadest sense) development – particularly in integrating traditional craft skills with digital technology skills. This is partly inspired by some thinking around the Bauhaus movement – in particular their ethos of design principles for mass production. However, in this case the design principles would be about taking into account local issues such as local needs, availability of materials, facilities and capabilities. Bauleban perhaps…

I love low-fidelity prototyping – in particular I love the way it often provokes a conversation which wanders well away from the original topic under discussion. The beauty of low-fidelity prototyping is it allows the viewer to fill in all the missing bits from their own perspective – it gives a really personal account of what they would want, on how they are already visualising it. It allows the imagination to run free.

This came back to me whilst at a workshop last week with Daria Loi, Lucy Suchman and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino who were discussing design prototyping. The ethnography work from the UX group at Intel looked interesting – but it seemed to be as much about shaping future markets and selling utopian science fiction stories as it did about understanding social practices. There was much talk of the political economy at work here – big organisations can bring all the clout of the mass media and celebrities to the table. Does this really free the imagination? Or does it simply provide an unavoidable view of the future?

I’ve been looking at graffiti again for The world is your canvas project I’m working on with Kevin Smith – the idea is we’ll  design support for graffiti tagging (see TAKI 183) in the digital space – but you can only tag (and see tags) when you’re in the physical area through your mobile phone. They beauty of this is we get to play with tagging styles (fills, pieces, rollers, wildstyle…) and tagging practices (owning a black book, capping…) We’ll also get to see how we can re-interpret shared spaces and throw in new media types as well. Should be fun!