“Critical Making”

Matt Ratto and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, who were the first Canadians to print a gun, are proponents of “critical making.” Say what?

The idea is that, in order to study emerging technologies, people should physically engage in creating them. The goal is not to build better gadgets. It’s to understand how technologies fit into society. Mr. Ratto sees critical making as a bridge between the study of technology that goes on in humanities and social-science circles, and the engineering work typically conducted outside that world. He’s part of a group of scholars pursuing similar approaches. Their work goes by a variety of names: critical design, adversarial design, participatory design, speculative computing.

“We’re really interested in the claims that are made about 3-D printing,” Mr. Ratto says. “The 3-D printing of the gun–we did that in order to take ourselves through the process, not just to examine what other people had done but to see from our own embodied perspectives what it felt like, what types of work were required, how was the result seen and experienced. And what kind of conversation would it kick off.”

“From our own embodied perspectives”. Roll that around in your brain for a bit. Then think about “virtual sex” versus the embodied kind. Then have a stiff drink.