What do you know about Maker Culture?
- Give you an introduction to:
- Its history
- Some of the politics surrounding it
- Some of the things people do with it.
- Introduce and Demo the Arduino Microprocessor
- Maker Culture, Maker Movement, MakerFaire
- Hackerspaces
- DIY
- Fabrication
- Maker Faires – there have been some in Portland.
- Also Make Magazine
- Mostly Projects
- Featured Makers, Historical and Contemporary
- MATERIAL CONSCIOUSNESS – Richard Sennett, a philosopher
- No sense of how we connect with technology.
- Blackbox idea: lots of technology that is literally “screened” from us. We don’t know how it works.
- Knowing materials through technique, through the fact that it registers our presence, and through our identifications with it.
- Move from merely abstract knowledge to hands-on forms of knowledge.
- Next go to HISTORY.
- Rebellion against standardized forms of making.
- Textile Mills after Napoleanic wars
- Powered spinning or weaving of yarn from cotton
- Monday/Saturday 6AM-8PM
- No Safety Measures, amputations and deaths were common (those who couldn’t work merely lost their jobs).
- One Mill at Cork – 60 mutilations in four years.
- Many workers were children (during 1830s, average age was 10)
- Long hours of doing the same thing all day.
- “dark, satanic mills” – Blake.
- Luddite Rebellion
- Rebelled against new developments in industrial technology
- Threatened to replace artisans w/ low-wage workers
- Mechanical knitting machines
- Ned Ludd allegedly smashed two frames in 1779
- Luddites fought the British army, smashed mills.
- Parliament made “machine breaking” a capital crime w/ the Frame Breaking Act of 1812.
- Usually seen as against technology, but really against the emergence of low-wage work associated w/ standardized manufacturing.
- Quotes from Marx: Note, that he had an optimistic view of technology. Makers distinguish between efficient forms of monetization and artisanal associations with technology.
- Blake never a Luddite, but searched for more artisanal associations with technology.
- 1757-1827
- Wrote poetry, but also illuminated them and created watercolors.
- Thought he could speak with the dead and see angels in trees.
- Known for his printing method.
- Mythologized it.
- Printing House in Hell.
- Illuminated Printing – from Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, but allied w/ new printing technologies.
- Owned his own printshop. Would often work for commission during the day and do his art during the evening.
- This is what one of his printing plates looked like.
- Illuminated Printing inverted intaglio printing process
- Intaglio: where images are cut into the surface of a plate and then the cut line holds the ink.
- Illuminated: use an acid-resistant wax to create image backwards, acid creates negative, then ink is transferred by the raised surface.
- William Morris (1834-1896)
- admirer of Blake
- founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement: international design movement, appealed to medieval and folk forms of decoration.
- Wrote some of the first fantasy novels
- created early socialist movement in Britain
- forerunner of environmental movement.
- The Dream of John Ball (1888) – incorporates a lot of Blake’s design work.
- About the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381
- Victorian socialist time-travels to the middle ages.
- Private press published this first edition w/ Morris’s designs.
- Created artisanal, printed textiles
- Snakeshead printed textile from 1876. Rejected chemical aniline dyes which were really popular in the 19th C
- Emphasized organic dyes – indigo for blue, walnut shells for brown, madder for red.
- Wanted to create alternatives to industrial production methods, which he saw as horrible for the poor and as polluting the environment.
- Next talk about POLITICS
- Political artists in the fields of design and computational making identify w/ term critical making
- Coined by Matt Ratto of U Toronto
- Idea that thinking is a hands-on process
- Also, that design or made-objects can comment on politics in some way.
- One of Ratto’s projects was to 3d print a working gun
- Response to Cody Wilson, libertarian and director of an R&D firm who created the design.
- How does the government regulate guns that can be printed?
- How do we track them w/out serial numbers?
- How do we detect them in metal detectors?
- Do we make designs illegal? Are designs a form of speech?
- Design directed against forms of public surveillance.
- Mark Shepard’s CC-D ME Not Umbrella uses LED lights to disrupt facial recognition software on CCD cameras.
- Shepard wanted “images of city streets that are nearly unrecognizable.”
- Example from Carl Di Salvo’s book Adversarial Design, where he discusses how design can engage in confrontational forms of political practice.
- Most interesting notion for me, is the idea that objects have a political life and a political influence
- particularly when so many of them are embedded in systems of surveillance or sending and receiving data.
- Let’s take a 5 minute break and come back and talk about Arduino!
- Hold questions until after the demo session. Next we move to an introduction to ARDUINO.
- Arduino a microprocessor used in many of the projects in the Maker movement.
- Introduced in 2005
- Over 700,000 were produced in 2013.
- Wanted it to be available to the open source community, rather than a proprietary technology.
- Lots of different variations. The most simple one is the Uno.
- Uno has
- LED indicators
- Manual Reset Button
- USB type-B port to connect to computers
- External power source
- Several pins for holding lights or wires to other components.
- Here are just a few of the components you can integrate. Main one we’re going to use today is the LED light.
- Arduino (like all programming) is really about controlling electrical current.
- Really good for teaching programming.
- Breadboard used to create circuits w/out the need for soldering.
- Resistors help to limit amount of current going to a device.
- Motors and servos help to provide negative feedback to translate current into precise mechanical control.
- Do quite a bit w/ Arduino.
- Simple Project: Translate temperature sensors to digital temperature readouts.
- Much more complicated project.
- Did at DHSI this past summer.
- Rebuilt 80s Missile Command cabinet.
- Used Makey Makeys and Raspberry Pis, and an emulator. Originally thought of using Arduinos.
- Former made more sense, but similar basic idea.
Demo Time!