Hacking & Designing 
Paradoxes of Collaborative Practice

Anja Groten
Originally published in The Critical Makers Reader: (Un)learning Technology

The concept of hacking is not discipline-specific; it is not exclusive to the field of computer programming. For this reason, designers and design educators freely use hacking terminology to describe design.¹ The hacking approach implies a ‘critical and playful design practice inspired by historical and current hacker, net art, “do-it-yourself” and “re-mix” cultures and practices’.² However, I will argue here that this appropriation of hacking terminology by designers misses out on addressing the sociality inherent in hacking practices. Hacking seems enticing, holding out appealing modes of self-determined making. Yet if we ‘critical’ designers flirt with these modes, we also need to interrogate why hacking communities are known to be inaccessible to ‘women, minorities, or other underrepresented groups’.³ We need to move beyond fetishizing the hacker mode of production, and instead investigate the convoluted social construct of hacking—including its frictions and dilemmas.

The Practice of Hackers & Designers

As a designer, educator and member of the Amsterdam-based workshop initiative Hackers & Designers (H&D), I have long identified with modes of hacking. One concrete example is ‘Levels of Autonomy’, a workshop centered on self-driving cars in which participants hack remote controlled toy cars.⁴ By repurposing the switches on the controls, and applying sensors and micro-controllers, the toys slowly transform into miniature self-driving cars, which can follow a line and stop in front of obstacles. The making process is accompanied by discussions about the sociotechnical implications of the self-driving car. Modes of hacking in the context of the self-driving car workshop describe foremost a mentality—a defiant yet playful attitude to making.

H&D is not the only initiative advocating hacking approaches within art and design contexts. Hacking events fill the agendas of many cultural organizations. For these organizations, hacking is a way to emancipate users of technology from being passive consumers to becoming critical makers. However, the implications of hacking remain unexamined in initiatives such as Hack the Body,⁵ Hacking the News,⁶ or Hack Your Style.⁷

The experiment below posits a conversation between two stereotypes: a hacker (H) and a designer (D). This imaginary discussion expresses my suspicions toward designerly approaches to hacking, and questions whether hacking could become a distinguishable and critical form of designing.⁸ The dialogue is based on conversations and personal experiences engaging with hackers,⁹ designers and artists. It also draws from anthropological studies of hacking culture and more recent debates on the hostility of hacking environments.

D: In recent years, designers and design educators have started using hacking jargon to rethink design methods and come up with new approaches for design. H, you are a real hacker. Do you see problems in the appropriation of hacking jargon by designers?

H: I doubt designers actually understand what hacking means. Hacking is not a method you can first learn and then apply. Neither can you conceptualize hacking by means of design. Designers need to learn how to write, read, and fix code. They need to get literate before they can call themselves hackers.

D: So you think designers only look at those aspects of hacking they can relate to, but ignore the others? I would actually argue that designers’ ways of making are not alien to the practice of hacking. Most designers I know use hacking terminology as a way to describe a specific approach to making. Isn’t hacking a way of making?

H: Hacking might be a way of making. But it could be also a way of breaking. A hacker—just like a designer I imagine—finds pleasure in creating. But hacking is more of an attitude than a practice.

D: I can see that. Actually I think it is the attitude you are mentioning that is particularly interesting to us designers. Hackers seem to put forward a self-determined and sometimes unruly attitude to making.¹⁰ You can apply hacking modes to a huge variety of circumstances. That’s why designers freely use hacking terms to describe what they do. Hacking is not exclusive to one discipline, is it?

H: Hacking might be an attitude towards making. But this attitude is tightly connected to the practice of writing software, debugging, running and maintaining systems, which is—and this is important to acknowledge—continuously frustrating! Hackers are exposed to things not working. The hacking attitude that is so interesting for you designers is a direct result of encountering resistance, over and over again. Hackers have developed a tremendous tolerance to frustration because we are constantly fighting code. It is the thin line between frustration and pleasure that is important to understand when describing a hacker’s mode of production.

D: That hacking mode you are describing is in fact something I recognize in my own practice. As designers, we learned how to work skilfully and smoothly. We do things spontaneously, ‘without thinking’ so to speak, drawing on tacit knowledge. There are instances during design processes when this tacit knowledge is disrupted.¹¹ The material or tool can behave differently than expected. That disruption might be pleasantly surprising, or unpleasantly disturbing—frustrating as you said before.

H: There is what is called deep hack mode,¹² which is a bit different than what you describe. Entering a deep hack mode is the ability to enter a state of high concentration. In any case, I object to the idea of chance within hacking. Code is either working or not working. If it’s not working it means someone made a mistake that needs to be fixed. I might fix the code in a straightforward way, or I fix it in ways nobody has thought of yet. The latter is called a good hack.

D: So the fact that nobody has thought about it yet qualifies a line of code to be a good hack? Is it important to you that your code is recognized by others as a unique piece of work? Is there a social pressure involved in hacking?

H: Hacking, as I experience it, is definitely a social activity. Although we might not often meet in person, there is a general understanding amongst hackers that the technologies we are building and using are created by a vast amount of other people. I wouldn’t want to call this social pressure. I want to come up with good hacks in order to contribute to projects greater than what I could produce on my own. By the way, documentation is crucial for code to be reusable by others. I always make sure my code is clean and beautiful before I publish it. If hackers like my code it means what I made is effective. It’s a compliment when someone uses my code.

D: Interesting. So coding is a social practice, but also an aesthetic one?

H: Certainly.

D: So there might be another commonality between Hackers and Designers. Hackers too like to simplify and visually communicate through the work they produce.

H: I get it. You are trying to find out if the hacking approach can be useful across disciplines. You want to gain hacking insights in order to obtain a better understanding of your own discipline. You know, I don’t even care about your so-called design methods. All I want to make clear is that there is more to hacking that needs to be considered. Hacking is not a method. If you dig a little deeper you will come across complex forms of interactions, which shape what hackers produce and how they produce it. You cannot learn hacking like you would learn a skill, a subject, or a method. Hacking derives from and contributes to an ecology. You need to be embedded in the ecology in order to understand its workings. You designers tend to glorify hacking and forget about a whole lot of dynamics that are at play in hacking culture. Hackers cannot be described as a homogeneous group. There are many tensions and contradictions within hacker communities. Some hackers make money, some are activists, some are criminals—yet they might all work together on the same project.

D: I’m curious; the sociality you are addressing seems to relate to what people call the ‘hacker ethic’—a foundation for dealing critically and creatively with technology.¹³¹⁴ But what you are also saying is, while hackers share a common ethical ground and work together, they also disagree and fight?

H: Yes, but they don’t fight about politics. They fight about code and its principles and I can assure you, they don’t care about politeness.

D: What would you say are the consequences of the diverse intentions and motivations inherent in hacking practices? Do you think that the plurality of different personalities and beliefs enables a productive form of friction?

H: Well that depends on what you consider to be productive, and what is included and excluded when you refer to ‘different personalities’. Friction might actually be a core characteristic of the hacker mode of production. But if you ask under which conditions these practices produce code, you might find that these practices are productive only for those who are resilient enough to expose themselves to direct confrontation. To some people, hacking environments can come across as insensitive, judgmental, and hostile. There are people who are either not used to such environments or who are not willing to work within them. By only looking only at the bright side of hacking culture, there is a danger of overlooking certain characteristics of a strand of makers who—besides their many positive achievements—have also produced alt-right deviations and non-inclusive spaces. Some say that these hostile environments make non-male and non-white makers, or makers above the age of 30, feel unwelcome.¹⁵ ‘There are many examples that demonstrate the hostility women face while working in online hacking environments. In a hate-mail entitled “Death to Women’s Rights” on the [Debian-women] mailing list, a man expressed how much he despised women because they complain there is no[t] enough women in male-dominated but successful fields’.¹⁶

D: Right. I also heard about the recent controversy with the aggressive rhetoric used by Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds.¹⁷

H: Torvalds is notorious for his political incorrectness.

D: He’s been called out on verbal abuse and personal intimidation in his online communication.¹⁸

H: After being publicly confronted by a female Linux developer, Torvalds was forced to revise his ‘code of conflict’,¹⁹ which promoted ‘no-filter feedback and bluntness as the natural and more successful state of open source software development’.²⁰

D: Apart from the ethical dimensions, hacking culture encompasses peculiar pedagogical facets. Hackers promote open access to information, unlimited possibilities for exchanging knowledge, and the right to learn. On the other hand, confrontational rhetorics—I’m thinking for instance of ‘RTFM’ (read the fucking manual)—mark another pedagogical dimension of hacker culture: the importance of technical self-cultivation.

H: The confrontational nature of hackers’ ways of communicating with each other is essential to their modes of co-producing. Only by practicing a radical transparency and directness are hackers able to express—through their work—their positions and along with it, their partiality and omissions. They sustain space for others to confront them.

D: So would you say that the ability to work collectivity is so crucial that hackers will open up the work they produce? How is this openness put into practice?

H: The constant state of exposure—and along with it, a sustained vulnerability—is enabled only through constant and meticulous practices of documentation. Far from covering up our bugs, we openly acknowledge and even explain them. We don’t hide problems.²¹ The virtue of transparency is that it makes actions accountable. The community is built upon social dynamics that are informed by frictional interaction. Those frictions mark hacker culture. Through constant exposure to the possibility of potential disagreement and dispute, hackers are constantly ‘making and remaking themselves’.²²

D: I think I get your point. We can’t talk about hacking without also talking about community, infrastructures, and inevitable cultural codes. The paradoxes you described bring about important frictions within hacker communities, and are crucial to an understanding of the hacker way of working. These frictions don’t seem incidental. No, they’re actively made, widely publicized, and openly negotiated. Instead of idealizing a hacker archetype, designers could learn more from the dilemmas of this maker culture. This, in turn, might help them reflect on the missed opportunities and weak points of their own practices. Designers should disseminate their work in ways that force still-vulnerable processes to be exposed and possibly contested. If we stop clutching so tightly to the paradigm of making ‘convincing work’, and instead embrace the limits of our practices, designers could create our own ecology of frictions.

1 WdKA Minor Programmes / Presentations 2018, https://www.wdka.nl/news-events/minor-programmes-presentations-2018.

2 Anne Galloway, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Lalya Gaye, Elizabeth Goodman and Dan Hill, ‘Design for hackability’, Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques, (2004): 363-366. Also available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221441240_Design_for_hackability.

3 Lint Finley, ‘Linus Creator is Sorry. But Will He Change?’, 17 August 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/linuxs-creator-is-sorry-but-will-he-change/.

4 Hackers & Designers, https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Projects/p/Levels_of_Autonomy.

5 ‘Hack The Body’, Baltan Laboratories, http://hackthebody.nl/.

6 ‘Hacking the News’, MU, http://www.mu.nl/en/about/agenda/hacking-the-news.

7 ‘Hack je stijl!’, Het Nieuwe Instituut, https://hetnieuweinstituut.nl/hack-je-stijl.

8 For instance, H&D claims to engage participants in developing critical standpoints through modes of hacking—by getting your hands dirty rather than a distanced critique of analyzing and reflecting on technological products.

9 Referring to hackers I describe mostly—but not exclusively—software developers within my proximity who use and contribute to Free/Libre Open Source Software (F/OSS). While such hackers are not explicitly political, they are idealistic about the code they write. They gather and build communities mostly on the basis of skills rather than ideologies.

10 Graham, Paul. ‘The Word Hacker’, April 2004, http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html.

11 Donald Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner, San Francisco, London: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1988.

12 Jargonfile, http://catb.org/jargon/html/D/deep-hack-mode.html.

13 Paraphrasing Frank Rieger’s quote ‘Die Hackerethik ist die Grundlage für den Umgang mit den diversen ethischen Problemen, die sich beim schöpferisch-kritischen Umgang mit Technologie (auch “hacking” genannt) stellen’. in Frank Rieger, ‘Hackerethik—eine Einführung Verantwortung und Ethik beim schöpferisch-kritischen Umgang mit Technologie’, Chaos Computer Congress, 27 December 2018, https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-10011-hackerethik_-_eine_einfuhrung/.

14 The term hacker ethic, when used by hacker communities such as the Chaos Computer Club, refers back to Steven Levy’s notion of hacker ethic as ‘an ethic seldom codified, but embodied in the behavior of hackers themselves’. Levy, Steven. Hackers. Heroes of the Computer Revolution, London: Penguin Books, 1994 (1984).

15 Ali Spivak, ‘Inclusion Includes You Let’s talk about How Inclusion Benefits All of Us’, Mozilla devroom, Fosdem 2019, 2 February 2019, https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/inclusion_includes_you/.

16 Paraphrasing from: Yuwei Lin, ‘A Techno-Feminist Perspective on the Free/Libre Open Source Software Development’ in: Gender and IT Encyclopedia, Idea Groups, 2006.

17 Jon Brodkin, ‘Linus Torvalds Defends his Right to Shame Linux Kernel Developers. “My Culture is Cursing”: Linux Kernel World is a Hostile Place—By Design’, Ars Technica, 16 June 2013, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/linus-torvalds-defends-his-right-to-shame-linux-kernel-developers/.

18 Linus Torvalds, ‘Linux 4.19-rc4 released, an apology, and a maintainership note’, posting to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, 16 September 2018, https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/16/167/.

19 Steven Vaughan-Nichols, ‘Revised Linux Code of Conduct is now officially part of Linux. With the release of the Linux kernel 4.19 came not just new features and bug fixes, but the new Linux Code of Conduct as well’, ZDNet, 22 October 2018, https://www.zdnet.com/article/revised-linux-code-of-conduct-is-now-officially-part-of-linux/.

20 Nick Statt, ‘Linus Torvalds returns to Linux development with new code of conduct in place: Torvalds took a self-imposed break to rethink his controversial treatment of others’, The Verge, 22 October 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/22/18011854/linus-torvalds-linux-kernel-development-return-code-of-conduct/.

21 See also: Debian-Gesellschaftsvertrag: 3. ‘Wir werden Probleme nicht verbergen Wir werden unsere Fehlerdatenbank für alle Zeiten öffentlich betreiben. Fehlermeldungen, die von Personen online abgeschickt werden, werden unverzüglich für andere sichtbar’, Debian.org, https://www.debian.org/social_contract.

22 Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, New Jersey, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, 1973, pp. 27.

The Workshop and Cultural Production

Anja Groten
Orignially published at Open!

The workshop is a popular framework in cultural production that brings together groups of people from different fields in order to (co-)produce knowledge. Situated between work and leisure, workshops are organized within extra-curricular activities, such as symposia, incubator programmes, and innovation labs. Those activities emerge from public cultural institutions, for-profit festivals and congresses, academic conferences, and small non-profit initiatives. Buzzwords like ‘rapid prototyping’ or ‘agility’ promote high-velocity technological development and imply that the workshop format is a highly productive one. From the perspective of design practice and more specifically, by looking at collaborative approaches to technology design,¹ this paper explores the workshop’s capacity, or lack thereof, to create critical, constructive conditions for designing technology.

Introduction: Workshop-Pop. The Workshop Phenomenon

I was asked by one of my design students: ‘Why does everything have to be a workshop these days?’ The question most probably arose out of a certain workshop fatigue after having gone through a whole semester of weekly hands-on workshops during a practice seminar I taught on collaborative making from 2017–18 in the design department at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.² However, the question also addressed a certain exhaustion of the ‘workshop market’, a workshopization of cultural production, and a general disappointment in what workshops are actually capable of. The format of the workshop offers a framework for social gatherings, producing, and sharing knowledge. However, there seems to be little specificity in articulating its premises, characteristics, and objectives.

Together with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers (H&D) I co-founded with artist Selby Gildemacher and software developer James Bryan Graves in 2013, I make critical inquiries into the complexity of technological constructions and their societal implications through collective processes of designing technology. H&D currently has seven members and is only one of many workshop initiatives in the Netherlands that have started organizing extra-curricular bottom-up educational activities outside of the institutional context since 2010 – each of those initiatives having another angle and focus.³ H&D aims to bring artists, designers, and technologists together by means of hands-on workshops. The most common participant is a freelancer, in between jobs, or having just graduated. H&D has since dealt with web and network technology, computational automation processes, and ‘smart’ technology, in brief and practical encounters.

Although the workshop as understood today does not directly refer to the artisanal workshop,⁴ a sense of competency is still shared with or is to be acquired among participants. This cross-disciplinary making approach was practised at the Bauhaus where the workshop was the place that brought ‘art and technology together as a “new unity” to meet the design challenges of the period’.⁵

H&D has emphasized technology as human-made and inhabiting social orders in its workshops. According to Lilly Irani, Associate Professor of Communication, Science Studies, Critical Gender Studies, Design Lab, Data Science Institute, University of California San Diego, ‘subjects and social orders [are] reproduced and valorized in practices of […] technological production. These forms of technologically productive social life emerge at the intersection of systems of gender, economy, and politics.’⁶ At H&D, situations of collaborative making turn into sites for exercising and challenging positions: opposing, contradicting, and confronting. The hands-on aspect and collaborative modes of production are important. Touching, soldering, breaking apart, deploying code, are means of acquiring new knowledge and skills, but also confronting assumptions of dominant technological constructions in a temporary social context.

Workshop Branches and Deviations

The workshop here refers to a site and situation that hosts groups of like-minded people to meet and work intensively on a specific technological topic in a defined timeframe.⁷ Workshops usually take place outside of the daily work routine. Even if in the workplace workshops are usually positioned as a ‘fun’ disruption to the daily employment obligations.

One branch of the workshop is the hackathon, a ‘hybrid of work and leisure’,⁸ drawing on hands-on iterative prototyping and usually focusing on a specific technology or programming language. Participants are unpaid and work towards concrete solutions in a short amount of time in a competitive setup. At the end a jury selects the most innovative project, which receives a prize. Hackathons have been criticized for exploiting the willingness of participants to perform free labour.

In the cultural and artistic domain, hackathon-like workshops have become popular. In March 2018, I participated in one during a two-day intensive workshop run by a design and technology lab.⁹ Four participants were invited via a personal, informal email emphasizing the experimental character of the workshop and the opportunity to collaborate with a unique group of makers – a writer, software programmer, and a creative coder. I was asked to join due to my expertise as a designer and involvement with H&D. Upon arrival all participants were asked to engage in an introduction game to get to know each other, which required physical exercise. One participant refused, and although everyone had met before in other circumstances, the others went along with it. What followed were two days of intensive brainstorming. The challenge: ‘Create an interactive story that is set in the future. And use code.’ Nothing else was specified. The workshop space was well-equipped: markers, sticky notes, and walls covered with paper to sketch, draft. Throughout it became clear we were expected to produce a functioning prototype – a demo of an interactive installation, which would be presented and tested in public at the end. One hundred people were already invited. Posters and flyers were printed and distributed. The pressure was high. We even received a workshop facilitator, who mediated the ‘idea finding’ process. Drinks and snacks were offered in high frequency. A videographer came to interview every participant about the qualities and challenges of collaborating.¹⁰ The video interviews were published on social media platforms, and the project website.¹¹ The tension grew towards the end of the second day. It became clear we would not be able to produce a functioning prototype in the given time frame. To be able to present a convincing demo to the audience meant that some of the participants would have to continue working on the project after the workshop was completed.

This description of the hackathon-like workshop scenario exemplifies a few dilemmas I have come across. The workshop is generally considered a highly productive space. However, it is often only considered successful if a tangible result is produced: a product or prototype that can be presented to a wider audience. By organizing a public event as concluding moment for the workshop, the organization clearly intended to introduce pressure. The team had no choice besides producing something that a broad audience would understand. Over-facilitation is another pitfall. By introducing mediation, exercises, a wide range of workshop equipment, dominant means of documentation, the – probably well-intended – workshop host establishes a highly controlled environment, diminishing any possibility for contingency. Erasing chance from the collaborative process obstructs other unanticipated forms of value, such as longer term collaboration. The arbitrariness of the assignment (‘Create an interactive story that is set in the future.’) combined with an imposed hackathon-like setup of the workshop (‘And use code.’) implied that there was a challenge that needed to be solved, without the time and space to investigate commonalities and urgencies for producing something together. The workshop was as an end in itself.

Although the term workshop is common both to English and non-English speaking contexts, there is no standardized definition. Conceptions and expectations about what a workshop should produce diverge. Yet distinctions can be made by looking at those branches and deviations – the previously mentioned hackathon being one example. Another is the participatory design workshop, a secret weapon of socially engaged designers working in urban planning, architectural design, and software development.¹² Participatory designers counter the detached design approach by letting end-users and citizens take part in the design process rather than approaching them as consumers. The workshop offers the participatory designer the opportunity to strategically involve all stakeholders in the design process, which enables the designer to take control over decision-making processes. The facilitating designer usually distinguishes ‘between “experts” with technical and managerial skills, and “lay people” with informal or contextual knowledge. In most cases, designers’ status as experts confers relatively greater authority in decision-making than lay persons.’¹³ Some participatory and user-centred design workshops democratize the design processes, empowering individuals to exercise control over their environment. Those workshops, however, run the risk of limiting layperson participation to ‘passive roles’, including filling out surveys and joining focus groups.¹⁴

Workshop Knowledge

H&D workshops pull from ideas of participatory design in the sense that they open up processes of design and computer programming. They are based on the underlying claim that being limited to one’s own subjectivities, own disciplines, the individual maker won’t be able to incorporate the multiple facets of technology design. By working together with (or against) a cross-disciplinary group of makers on practical matters relating to technology design, the constraints of disciplinary thinking are confronted.

In his book Educating the Reflective Practitioner, influential thinker Donald A. Schön who is working on ‘reflective learning’ discusses the sequences of skilful judgements, decisions and actions that a maker undertakes spontaneously without conscious deliberation, a process he terms ‘knowing-in-action’. Makers have learned how to do something skilfully and smoothly. They do things spontaneously, ‘without thinking’ so to speak, based on their tacit knowledge.¹⁵ In workshops those skills are public. In my observation, the premise for collaborative design processes, of partaking in each other’s ways of doing, is that habitual methods and skills are the subject of attention and questioning. By exposing the making process to others, tacit knowledge might be disrupted and called into question. A making process that is familiar to one person might fail to meet somebody else’s expectation of how ‘things are done’. That disruption might be pleasantly surprising, or unpleasantly disturbing. Schön calls the surprise effect of errors and disruption while executing a skill ‘reflection-in-action’. When this reflection happens during the collaborative making process the makers involved do not reflect on something that happened in the past. Instead reflection happens while something is being produced, and therefore has immediate consequences for the action. Similar to collective interaction, the thing that is being made (the thing could be a conversation or a piece of technology), is shaped and reshaped by these contingent disruptions. The friction results from an interplay of people’s interaction during a collective making situation, alongside their interactions with the technology being made and that used to make it.

To give an example: H&D developed an instant publishing software with the title Momentary Zine, which was used in different workshop situations and triggers reflection-through-action quite literally.¹⁶ I A zine is a small-circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images. The Momentary Zine could be described as a publishing-karaoke machine. It uses speech input to instantly produce printed output. By speaking into a microphone, participants can produce a printed publication containing image and text. The user of the zine station goes into direct conversation with the tool, which simultaneously produces the publication. The experience of producing a zine is informed by the immediacy of speaking and instantly creating printed output as well as the confrontation with the shortcomings of the technology. Not every word will be recognized accurately by the software, and the result of the image search might be unexpected. The surprise effect of unexpected texts and images changes the zine output without much deliberation in an improvisational manner.

Workshop Commonalities and Differences

H&D workshops and the hackathon format have the subject of technology design in common as well as the ad-hoc collaborative modes of production and the ambition to create something new. In the context of H&D this might be a new experience, new knowledge, or a new social or material prototype. Different from a hackathon, the aim is not to set up a problem that needs fixing. There is no imposed competitive element, and the focus of the making process does not lie in producing finalized outputs. On the contrary, the artefacts produced during the workshops have the characteristics of disposals rather than proposals – they are side products of a process. In his talk at the 2018 AIGA Design Educators Conference: MAKE in Indianapolis, Matt Ratto, Associate Professor who directs the Semaphore Research cluster on Inclusive Design, Mobile and Pervasive Computing and, as part of Semaphore, Critical Making Lab in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto,¹⁷ talked about one of his critical making seminars,¹⁸ in which his students knew from the beginning that they would have to destroy their prototypes after the seminar. Thus it became immediately clear that whatever was made, would not be regarded as precious. The students could therefore let go of the pressure to produce functional and aesthetically pleasing artefacts. Instead they were able to consider potentialities and boundaries of the collaborative making process.

Shifting the focus away from designed objects towards prototyping allows for the development of an understanding of the inner workings of the proposed technology, its conditions and implications. As Thomas James Lodato and Carl DiSalvo write: ‘[…] a distinction needs to be made between the prototype and prototyping, as an activity. … 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.’¹⁹

The potential of the workshop as a space for experimenting with new forms of social and technological interaction lies in its being an iterative process, constantly in flux. This makes it a difficult format, maybe impossible to fully control or reproduce as a model. If seen as social prototypes that require attention and iteration, workshops can create conditions for work to be produced, processed, disassembled, and possibly disregarded.

Frictional Encounters in Collaborative Making

At the moment of encounter with technology and with each other, the collaborating makers share their understandings as well as misconceptions about the many facets that come into being while using, designing, and building technology. Working together with (or against) a cross-disciplinary group of makers, constraints of disciplinary thinking are confronted, dissonance triggered, and uncertainties released. The temporary publics (of collaborators) potentially question the design process while it is happening and might counteract assumptions made during otherwise isolated, individualized design processes.

The H&D workshops – but also those of similar workshop initiatives such as Re-learn or Open Set – are organized without an imperative of consensus, which distinguishes them from more common forms of participatory design workshops.^{20 21} Discussions and disagreement about the implications of the examined technology are common and welcome during H&D workshops, as with Momentary Zine. H&D submitted a workshop proposing the publishing device to the annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM)²² The proposed workshop tool incorporated proprietary web APIs. In computer programming, application programming interfaces (API) are closed and controlled systems, a set of definitions, protocols, and tools for building software. For the Momentary Zine project H&D used different APIs, one for the translation of speech to text, and one to fetch images from the internet, using the web API provided by Google, which caused some controversy. Although the LGM’s code of conduct states the conference exclusively promotes the development and use of free and open source software graphics applications, H&D decided to put forward the Momentary Zine and passed the preceding review process.²³ At the workshop’s outset it was apparent that we had implemented Google APIs in the software, which caused an immediate conflict. Our choice for using the Google API technology was seen as provocative and unacceptable in the open source community. Two participants left the workshop site after clearly and openly opposing and disregarding our contribution to the conference. Around fifteen participants remained – a sufficient amount to continue. The Momentary Zine became centre point and documentation tool of the discussion about proprietary software being unacceptable in the context of an open source conference. Less disruptive voices were able to contribute to the debate. Yet the two adversaries should be credited for their disruption, an instance of productive confrontation that allowed everyone present to reflect on their position as makers within the open source community. The microphone became a moderating device, facilitating and documenting the discussion and zine production.

This workshop illustrates friction that changed the conditions for workshop production. Although we had planned another path, we were commonly pleased with the course and outcome. The dissonance and resistance of the two workshop participants who decided to leave, had made an important impact on the workshop, and informed the zine production. The zine was not produced – as we expected – in togetherness, and did not follow the editorial path we had designed beforehand. Neither did we expect the workshop to become a platform for unheard voices, expressing frustrations about the dogmas of their community. The success of the workshop could not be measured by the accomplishment of consensus nor by completeness of the output that was generated. However, the discrepancy of the presence of the Momentary Zine as much as the articulated opposition enabled a productive conversation about the ‘elephant in the room’: the inclusion and exclusion mechanisms of idealized technology, such as open source software.

In answer to the question of whether the workshop is productive, it does not guarantee a marketable product, nor a resolution to a problem. The likelihood of a tangible outcome is not increased with more props, competition, or time pressure. The unique situation of the workshop is the possibility for makers to encounter each other and confront their own and other makers’ ways of making. As Lilly Irani states: ‘Hackathons sometimes produce technologies, […] they always, however, produce subjects.’ ²⁴ While publicly exposing making processes, workshops that focus on collaborative and cross-disciplinary technology design can bring about aspects of technology, such as social orders, positions, and frictions. A makers’ tool will be exposed. Witnessing a maker work with open source as opposed to proprietary software, for instance, makes apparent that a tool is not only an idealistic choice, but that it has consequences for work routines and collaborations.

The workshop’s capacity to produce critical and constructive conditions for designing technology lies in the tacit and reflective knowledge that is made public and therefore accessible to participating makers. The potential for disruption of the making process paired with contingency and the possibility of dissension provokes socio-technological literacy. If understood as sites where differences between makers and their ways of making might unfold, workshops can facilitate temporary critical publics, which potentially disrupt the otherwise isolated and individualized design process, and challenge the maker’s assumptions about how things should be made.

• 1 Technology design is a term used to describe the design of technology as well as the engineering process. In Adversarial Design, Carl DiSalvo uses the term in examining the ways that ‘technology design can provoke and engage the political’. Carl DiSalvo, Adversarial Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
• 2 I use the terms maker and making in referring to workshop participants who have different practices and educational backgrounds mostly in the fields of design, art, and computer engineering. When I refer to the maker as workshop participant or participating maker I refer to a maker as part of a specific workshop situation.
• 3 Amid ‘the current direction of academic institutions, and the attempt to rethink the structures and spaces of learning on a fundamental level’, Tom van der Putte and Tim Ivison assembled and analyzed extra-curricular initiatives exploring education as political engagement. See Tim Ivision and Tom van der Putte, ed., Contestations: Learning from Critical Experiments in Education (London: Bedford Press, 2013).
• 4 According to Dictionary.com the word ‘workshop’ [work (noun) and shop (noun)] dates back to 1555–65 and refers to the space in which things are crafted or repaired. As a seminar or discussion group emphasizing exchange of ideas and demonstration and application of techniques, skills, etc., origin dates differ; the same dictionary cites the first use as 1937. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/workshop.
• 5 Christina Volkmann and Christian de Cock, ‘Consuming the Bauhaus’, Consumption, Markets and Culture 9, no. 2 (June 2006):130.
• 6 Lilly Irani, ‘Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship’, Science, Technology, & Human Values 40, no. 5 (April 2015):800–01.
• 7 Ibid.
• 8 Thomas James Lodato and Carl DiSalvo, ‘Issue-oriented hackathons as material participation’, New Media & Society 18, no. 4 (April 2016): 544.
• 9 The foundation Lava Lab, which profiled itself as a design and technology lab, was founded by the Amsterdam-based commercial design company Lava and dissolved in 2017.
• 10 See video documentation, if then / what now: the making of, June 2018, https://vimeo.com/273102715.
• 11 See workshop website, If Then What Now, April 2018, http://www.ifthenwhatnow.nl/.
• 12 ‘Participatory design’ – or cooperative design – is a term and practice originating in 1970s Norway, where user-centred research ‘introduced the notion of worker participation in decisions about technology’ within their work environments. Susanne Bødker, Kaj Grønbæk, and Morten Kyng, ‘Cooperative Design: Techniques and Experiences From the Scandinavian Scene’, in Participatory Design: Principles and Practices, ed. Aki Namioka and Doug Schuler (New Jersey, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 4.
• 13 Tad Hirsch, ‘Contestational Design. Innovation for Political Activism’, PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2008, 23.
• 14 Ibid.
• 15 Donald A. Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1988).
• 16 The code for Momentary Zine is available at: https://github.com/hackersanddesigners/momentary-zine.
• 17 See 2018 AIGA Designer Educators Conference: Make, http://make2018.aigadecconference.org/.
• 18 ‘Critical making’ was coined by Matt Ratto in 2007 to describe work that combines humanities insights and engineering practices, https://criticalmaking.com/matt-ratto/.
• 19 Ibid.
• 20 See Realearn, http://relearn.be/2017/ and Open Set, http://www.openset.nl/.
• 21 ‘These projects [participatory design projects] blur distinctions between technical and nontechnical considerations, and emphasize deliberation and consensus-based decision making.’ Tad Hirsch, ‘Contestational Design. Innovation for Political Activism’, PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008, 24.
• 22 See Libre Graphics Meeting 2016, https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2016.
• 23 See ‘Code of Conduct’, Libre Graphics Meeting, https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/lgm/public-documentation/code-of-conduct/.
• 24 Ibid.

Position Paper Critical Making^[1]

Florian Cramer, Lucas Evers, Akiem Helmling, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Marie-José Sondeijker, Janneke Wesseling with comments by Roland van Dierendonck, Shailoh Phillips, Ana María Gómez López, Shirley Niemans, Loes Bogers, mthom057, Yuri Westplat

1. Why “Critical Making^[a]”?

As a result of globalization, social and technological developments, we increasingly witness practices that cross the disciplinary boundaries of art, design, engineering and technological making^[b][c] and (artistic) social intervention. Sometimes these practices unfold within established contexts of art spaces, design culture, technology labs and activist projects. [Explain the urgency of contemporary socio-/​technological/​cultural/​political developments that makes artists/activists redefine their practice/​​leave the confines of their traditional disciplines.] Increasingly, however, they leave their respective boundaries^[d][e]; for example, when contemporary art spaces are used for political assemblies^[f][g][2] and Internet anonymization services,^[3] when social design and community art becomes neighborhood activism^[h][i],^[4] when a media design grows into a technological development project for empowering contemporary artists^[j][k].^[5] Often, the positioning of these projects as “art”, “design”, “technology”, “activism” is merely tactical (or even opportunistic), tailored to the now-existing institutions and discourses^[l][m] [n]which are still acting within the categories of the Western 19th and 20th century arts. ‘Critical Making^[o][p]‘ has the potential^[q][r] of giving these practices a common name. ^[s]Originally coined in the context of design culture and do-it-yourself technology,^[6] it gathers (a) practices that are defined by a common characteristic of criticality^[t][u][v][w] rather than a common disciplinary and institutional context^[7] and (b) work approaches and attitudes of thinking-through-practice.^[8]

Through the latter, Critical Making does not only cut through the disciplinary divides of art, design, activism and technology.^[9] In Critical Making, there is no longer a divide between critical theory and artistic practice, but the practice itself is critical and philosophical.^[x][y] In this regard, Critical Making corresponds with contemporary philosophies that question the divide between idea and matter^[z][aa].^[10] But where this thinking still manifests itself in the classical format of written theory, Critical Making negates the dichotomy between making and thinking^[ab][ac].

2. Where does Critical Making take place?

To date, Critical Making – as coined by Matt Ratto and Garnet Hertz – refers to design practices that critically engage with technology.^[ad][ae] Open Source cultural production therefore is a general characteristic of Critical Making. This may entail alternative forms of authorship and copyright, as well as a reconfiguration of traditional linear design workflows of conceptualization, construction and distribution. ^[af][ag]Distribution, in this context, includes multiplication and archiving. In networked Critical Making processes, all these efforts can take place simultaneously and anywhere^[ah][ai].

Critical Making in this sense is not confined ^[aj][ak][al]to particular sites. While Critical Making, in Ratto’s and Hertz’ original perspective, had the Maker^[am][an] movement and its Maker spaces (i.e. FabLabs, hacklabs^[ao][ap] and other public workshop facilities for distributed, personal digital fabrication) as its points of departure, their concept has become highly inclusive and therefore emancipated itself from this specific context^[aq][ar].

In our project, we experimentally take the concept of Critical Making outside the Maker movement and Maker spaces into the larger, general field of contemporary art and design practices. The question is: Can Critical Making reinvigorate the concept of criticality^[as][at] in art and design theory and practice, in a technologically informed cultural field? Can existing art and design practices conversely radicalize the criticality of Critical Making? And how can this be made constructive?^{[au][av][aw][ax]}

3. Why an arts perspective on Critical Making?

The notion of Critical Making is not specific to art and design, but potentially encompasses any practice that combines making with criticality. This inclusivity – which many art and design movements fought for in the previous century^[ay][az] – is without doubt an asset of Critical Making. Still, we think that a more specific arts perspective might not constrain, but will enrich the Critical Making discourse with two specific qualities: artistic research and criticality of discourse.

The liaison between thinking and making characterizes Critical Making as well as artistic research as it was established as a new academic discipline at the end of the 20th century. Artistic research typically involves practices in which textual and artistic approaches are closely interrelated. In artistic research, the researcher produces writing that critically reflects on the making, while conversely the practice informs and feeds into the writing.^[ba][bb] How artistic research may expand the vocabulary of Critical Making will be subject of further investigation.

Traditionally, contemporary art has had an edge over design in regards to the rigor of its critical discourse. Drawing on critical theory, conceptual art and institutional critique have radically addressed issues of gender, class, ethnicity and even questioned art as such, in its aesthetics, ethics, economics and politics. There needs to be research on the extent to which this radicality can inform expanded notions of Critical Making.

Conversely, the Open Source and DIY practices of Critical Making can be constructively used to question under-reflected and under-criticized modes of production and distribution in contemporary art: authorship, intellectual property, ownership, privileges of participation. ^[bc][bd]

4. Where our project aims to make a difference

In our research project, we will address the following new questions^[be][bf]:

• How can art, design and technology fulfill a critical and reflexive role in society^[bg], including “the possibility of revealing and challenging power relations” (Mouffe, Agonistics, Thinking the World Politically, 2013, 81)?^[bh]
• How can aesthetics still play a role^[bi][bj], other than as surface aesthetics of consumer culture and of commodification based on advertisement?
• We observe that the 21st century creative industries^[bk][bl] as a hybrid of art, design and technology have largely subsumed 20th century art and culture under economic terms. Critical Making offers an alternative logic of including creative disciplines into an overarching concept that is not economically, but socially and artistically driven. ^[bm][bn] Can Critical Making be truly critical by overcoming the industry logic^[bo][bp] of techno-optimistic makeability?

Concluding questions to be addressed, partly taken from visitor feedback:

• How do we position making?
• How do we understand criticality? (See related text in full project description)
• Can Critical Making be a pedagogy?
• To which degree are our points descriptive or prescriptive?
• Who needs a new concept?
• Which difference do we make to existing concepts of Critical Making?
• How far can histories of Critical Making be extended into the past?

• [1] http://pad.riseup.net/p/critical_making
• [2] Jonas Staal, New World Summit (2012-2017), Occupy movement presence at Berlin Biennial 2014
• [3] Trevor Paglen/Jacob Appelbaum, Autonomy Cube, 2014; !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Random Darknet Shopper (2014-2016)
• [4] Jeanne van Heeswijk, Freehouse (1998-2017); Black Quantum Futurism, Community Futures Lab (2015-2017)
• [5] Danja Vasiliev/Gottfried Haider/WORM, Hotglue & Superglue (2009-2017)
• [6] Matt Ratto, DIY Citizenship, MIT Press, 2014
• [7] Garnet Hertz, Critical Making zines (2012)
• [8] Matt Ratto in We Make Things, documentary by Ryan Varga, 2011 (9:30-10:53). In a paper, he defines Critical Making as ”a mode of materially productive engagement that is intended to bridge the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration” (Ratto, Matt, Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life, in: The Information Society, vol. 27, issue 5, 2011, 252).
• [9] But also through the divide between practice as the “base” and theory as the “superstructure” that has shaped Western thinking and culture from Platonism to Marxism
• [10] including pragmatism, actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology and New Materialism
• [a]Anon: How do we position ‘making’? What is motivating people to act critically?
  Genealogy of Critical Making.
  Moments of intersection between art and science, pre-net collectives, anonymous collectives.
• [b]Roland van Dierendonck: No, SCIENCE. It’s more about CONTEXTUALISING  that what is MADE in terms of criticality/within feasibility, the scientific knowledge.
• [c]legitimate concern, but outside the scope of our particular project. This question is, with a focus on technology, addressed in the original Critical Making research of Matt Ratto and Garnet Hertz.
• [d]Shailoh Phillips: What’s the scope? What’s the problem?
• [e]Explain the urgency of contemporary socio-/technological/cultural/political developments that makes artists/activists redefine their practice/leave the confines of their traditional disciplines.
• [f]Ana María Gómez López:
  – Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, Forex, for different takes on activism
  – Think Tania Bruguera, for ex. if you want other examples of working with immigrant communities in the United States and elsewhere
  – Again, for even earlier examples of artistic forms of activisim using technology and design, think of collective initiatives such as Peter Fend and others in Ocean Earth, or even Group Materialś actions around AIDS (including critiques of government funding and pharmaceutical industry.)
• [g]Great examples, will be included in final version of the document. We will leave them out for now to keep the discource of the project more open for applicants to the researcher positions.
• [h]Ana María Gómez López: Again, Group Material is an excellent example pre-Internet.
• [i]Will be included in the final version.
• [j]Roland van Dierendonck: You don’t mention the Critical Engineering Manifesto.
• [k]Will be included in the final version.
• [l]Shirley Niemans: This is quite problematic even when “critical making: in some form is part of the curriculum of – let’s say – a design school – hard to change the existing paradigm, and existing or ‘selected'(?) boundaries between disciplines (design vs. art, applied vs. autonomous).
• [m]It is true that these boundaries exist and will not go away in the four years of our research project. However, the task of this research project is to look forward and develop radical visions that others may implement in curricula and institutions.
• [n]Shailoh Phillips: This is the context, the launch point.
• [o]Loes Bogers: The interpretation of “critical” isn’t specified, maybe clarify the tradition [of] Frankfurter Schule?
• [p]Excellent remark. – We covered this in the original project description and may include this text here again. In the project description, we refer to Frankfurter Schule as well as to specific practices of critical art and design. The ambition of this research project is to treat both “criticality” and “making” as practices to be researched and potentially given new meanings.
• [q]Shailoh Phillips: Why? What is the urgency?
• [r]Will be answered above with the clarification of the social/political/technological developments that motivate Critical Making practices.
• [s][Waag artist-in-residence]: If you are in the critical position you aim for.
• [t]Ana María Gómez López: Against what? Take note of your own criticism towards creative industries.
• [u]Indeed, this criticality chiefly marks an opposition towards creative industries and, by implication, neoliberalism at large. [We will add this in a later version of the paper.]
• [v]Shailoh Phillips: Is criticality something that is conjunctive, connecting, umbrella? Also divisive!
• [w]see remark above.
• [x]mthom057: only?
• [y]Not only, but this is an important observation to make.
• [z]Shailoh Phillips: How does this relate to the rise of new materialism, imment philosophy (Barad, Deleuze, Haraway, Braidotti)?
• [aa]Good point, these authors will be included as references.
• [ab]Shailoh Phillips: Why was it installed in the first place? Why is it pervasive?
• [ac]Complex question that concerns the whole history of Western thinking since Parmenidis (via Platon, the enlightenment etc.) Excellent question, we need to find a way of how to address it within the limited space of this paper.
• [ad]Loes Bogers: For Ratto, it’s also a lot about learning, as a pedagogy of sorts. Is that a concern in the project?
• [ae]Excellent question – learning processes are intrinsic to Critical Making processes (as we are experiencing right now in the open process of writing this paper). But since the focus of our research process is not on pedagogy, we cannot predict yet to which degree these learning processes will remain implicit or become more explicit (in the sense of a comprehensive meta reflection of the learning processes encountered in this project).
• [af]Ana María Gómez López: There are examples of artistic production that offer new modes of intellectual production/authorship where artworks are made accessible by being instruction-based, circulate freely, and demystify artistic production. – Look at N55, a Danish group that exclusively produces manuals. – Also, it is worth noting that there is a DIY history already in the arts pre-maker culture which is diverse, be it in 60s conceptual art, activist subcultural zine production, (based on older technologies of Xerox reproduction), or even blue-chip recognition inititatives such as Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Do-It-Yourself Manual. (Applies also to page 1/bibliography in the beginning).
• [ag]Excellent examples again that will be included in the footnotes and citation references of the final document. However, we do have discussions about the inclusion of Obrist as a Critical Maker (which for example concerns his method of text production where it is not clear to which degree a staff of editorial assistants is involved).
• [ah]mthom057: What might a networked critical making process entail? i.e. in time, space, notions of community/public?
• [ai]We will delete the sentence you refer to because it is too unspecific.
• [aj]Shailoh Phillips: prescriptive? descriptive? Who needs a new concept?
• [ak][needs longer thought process on our behalf.]
• [al]There is a clear need for a new concept of criticality in contemporary art (if we just take the current Venice Biennial and Documenta as examples). The same is true for design and technology development.
• [am]Shailoh Phillips: Overcoming schizophrenia: “makers” (Dutch, HBO) versus “thinkers” (university). Critical making as a way out of the pillarization of disciplines.
• [an]Agreed. The position paper still needs to explicate the particular Dutch cultural context and connotation of making-vs-thinking.
• [ao]Roland van Dierendonck: open bio labs
• [ap](for us: included in the notion of the hacklabs)
• [aq]Shailoh Phillips: By whom? How? Why?
• [ar]Critical Making Zines by Garnet Hertz – will ad them as a footnote.
• [as]Shailoh Phillips: What do you mean by criticality? [Irit] Rogoff?
• [at]See the first question by Loes Bogers.
• [au]mthom057: How does this differ from participatory art?
• [av]Participatory art is neither critical by definition, nor in much of its practice.
• [aw]Shirley Niemans: To what end?
• [ax]”productive” has been replaced with “constructive” (following the suggestion of Shailoh Phillips)
• [ay]Loes Bogers: Where are they in this paper? Should they be mentioned? (Situationism, Fluxus, [cyber]feminist art practices?) Which do you align with?
• [az]Not included in this paper because it is meant to be a discussion paper, not a historically complete coverage of its subject. Related to the comments by Ana Maria.
• [ba]Ana María Gómez López: This is the point where I would have the strongest criticism regarding the need to include more on art + science collaborative examples. Happy to share more if you find it relevant.
• [bb]We refer to the specific concept of artistic research as an academic discipline (see the changed first sentence in the paragraph), not generally to research done by artists by themselves or in collaboration with scientists.
• [bc]mthom057: Are there any thematic examples?
• [bd]examples in footnotes (Situationist International, Telekommunisten, Assembly and others)
• [be]Roland van Dierendonck: [Add bullet point] New history of art in context of ‘Critical Making’.
• [bf]not the scope of this position paper.
• [bg]Roland van Dierendonck: then also about how art is presented, for example outside of institutions altogether, check Norman White.
• [bh]Shirley Niemans: “HOW can [….]?” – It seems a bit rhetorical. What is the kind of answer we/you want? Still a confirmation.
• [bi]Shirley Niemans: Idem – “HOW can […]”?
• [bj]agree
• [bk]Shailoh Phillips: Creative industries is a neoliberal notion: one virtue – it doesn’t discriminate between disciplines. -> reclaiming CREATIVITY.
• [bl]agree
• [bm]mthom057: What activates members of society to engage in critical making?
• [bn]Question is beyond the scope of this position paper.
• [bo]Yuri Westplat: What if the answer is YES?
  (a) How do we take this further? Is it a METHOD we can LEARN and APPLY? And so change the industry?
  (b) How do “we” break out of the “art bubble” movement? [and into] -> business -> government -> science
• [bp]Indeed this is not the right question with which to conclude this paper.
• [bq]Ana María Gómez López: My main comment is first to offer praise to you for citing artworks bibliographically. – I find this to be quite positive. However, this is also where I would encourage you to look at much earlier examples of critical making in the arts, which would give this new concept deeper roots. Think of examples such as E.A.T. developed with Bell Labs (interestingly a corporate-sponsored program that encouraged collaboration between artists, scientists, and technology experts with no interest to prototype a product for the market, but only for unique art projects and events).
  I would also encourage other examples of artworks that make this bibliography more robust, which I have noted throughout this paper (in no particular order of importance and woefully incomplete).
  In general, contextualizing these project in braoder art-historical contexts that be broader than the artas of making you cite explicitly (Net Art, Land Art, Environmental Art, Bio Art).
• [br]Roland van Dierendonck: Also add Paolo Cirio’s “Loophole 4 All” or Norman White.