From Workshops to Hackerspaces

The co-creative and cross-disciplinary design approach to making, as exercised by H&D, is not new. At the Bauhaus, the workshop already functioned as the central place where “art and technology were brought together as a ‘new unity’ to meet the design challenges of the period” (Kentgens-Craig, 1998). Equally, this hands-on approach to producing knowledge, paired with a strong sense of collectivity, is an effective way of learning about technology. Touching, soldering, breaking apart, and deploying code are means of acquiring new knowledge and skills, while simultaneously confronting the assumptions, dogmas, and enchantments of dominant technological constructions.

The notion of the workshop referred to in this article does not directly refer to the original meaning of the artisan workshop; however, there is still a level of skill and competency that is shared among workshop participants. Drawing on my own work as a designer and my experience in working with H&D, this article attempts to unravel the phenomenon of the workshop and discuss the limitations and possibilities of this format for learning and unlearning about our reliance on technology, and our assumptions and omissions inhabited by those technologies.

One of these branches, affiliated with technology design, is the hackathon, a format effectively utilizing the “hybrid state of performing labour and leisure” (Lodato and DiSalvo, 2016). The hackathon draws on hands-on iterative prototyping and usually focuses on a specific technology or programming language. Another workshop branch is the participatory design workshop, which is referred to as cooperative design—initially described a user-centered research approach, including workers involved in the processes of implementing new technology in the work environment in Norway in the 1970s.

The participatory design workshop has become a secret weapon for socially engaged designers working in the fields of urban planning, architectural design, and software development. Participatory design practices counter a detached design approach by letting the end-users take part in the design process, rather than approaching them as distant target groups or consumers. The workshop format offers an investigative environment and an opportunity to introduce all stakeholders to the design process in a co-productive manner. In most cases, “the designers’ status as expert confers greater authority in decision-making than laypersons” (Hirsch, 2008). There are also examples of participatory or user-centered design workshops that succeed in democratizing design processes and empowering individuals to exercise control over their environment. However, oftentimes participatory design work- shops run the risk of limiting a layperson’s participation to a “passive role”, such as filling out surveys or joining a focus group. Both these formats exemplify a dilemma of workshops I frequently come across. There is a general notion of the workshop being a highly productive space. However, workshops are often only considered successful if a tangible result has been produced: a product or prototype that can be presented to a wider audience. The hackathon and the participatory-design workshop share a problem-solving approach to making, and therefore miss out on crucial qualities of experimentation, for instance the possibility of failure. Such result-driven working conditions for making disregard the possibility for problem setting, and contingent insights that arise when producing disposals rather than proposals.

In his talk at [MAKE] AIGA Design Educators Conference 2018 in Indianapolis, Matt Ratto described one of his critical making seminars. “Critical making is a term coined by Matt Ratto describing work that combines humanities insights and engineering practices” (Ratto, 2017). In his seminar, students are aware from the outset that they will have to destroy their prototypes once the seminar is complete. It is therefore clear that whatever is made is not regarded as precious. This allowed students to let go of any pressure to produce functional or aesthetically pleasing artefacts. Instead they were able to consider the potentialities and boundaries of the collaborative making process.

Brave designers and design students find an answer in Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), running their own scripts and integrating self-made plugins. The advantage of FLOSS is the accessibility of the source code, which may be copied and appropriated. Due to its open and co-creative character, open source offers far-reaching possibilities for the realm of art and design education. They are uncomfortable and unfamiliar, and spaces of discomfort are usually those where learning takes place. Witnessing tutors and students patiently pondering over their error messages and fixing their bugs had a big impact on both my understanding of and approach to programming, and opened up a whole new range of possibilities in terms of the tools I use, build, and hack.

In his book “Educating the Reflective Practitioner” Donald A. Schön talks about the sequence of skilful judgements, decisions, and actions a maker undertakes spontaneously, without con- scious deliberation, a process he terms “knowing-in-action”. Makers have learned how to do something skilfully and smoothly. They are able to do things “without thinking,” so to speak, drawing on their tacit knowledge (Schön, 1988). I observe those skills becoming publicly discernable during workshop situations. While co-creating—partaking in each other’s ways of doing—habitual methods and skills suddenly become the subject of attention and questioning. The making process, which is familiar to one individual, might fail to meet another person’s expectations of how “things are done.” That disruption can be pleasantly surprising, or unpleasantly disturbing.

Schön calls this surprise effect of errors and disruption while executing a skill “reflection-in-action”. Although Schön talks about the individual maker, I would argue that this spontaneous reflection-in-action also takes place during collective making processes. The makers involved in the process do not solely reflect on something in the past. Reflection can instead happen while something is being produced, and therefore has immediate consequences. Collective interaction constantly influences the thing that is being made. It is shaped and reshaped by contingent disruptions. Those frictions result from the interplay of people’s interactions during a collective making situation, alongside their interactions with the piece of technology that is being made, and the technology that is used to make it.

Shifting the focus away from designed objects and towards the process of prototyping allows for developing a collective understanding of the inner workings of the proposed technology, conditions, and implications the technology has been affected by and will affect. Thomas Lodato and Carl DiSalvo write: “... a distinction needs to be made between the prototype and prototyping, as an activity” (Binder et al. 2012). The object is crucial, but it is a product of the social process of conceptualizing and expressing the wants and needs. The activity of prototyping, then, is dialogic in that its structure is one of exchange and its purpose is the discovery and elucidation of the conditions or factors of a design. (Lodato and DiSalvo, 2016).