Making Trouble

Design and Material Activism

Otto Von Busch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350162563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design History & Criticism

Making hacks into reality. It engages matter in ways that trespass the boundaries between the civic realm and the state-assigned laws. Even with primitive tools and skills, designing and making can break open and repurpose arrangements of power. The proof is that some crafts are so controversial-lock-picking, moonshining, shoplifting, smuggling, sabotage-that they need to be controlled or even outlawed. When designers and makers touch on these contested realms, they run into trouble. This highly original book explores how the material power of design and making can challenge arrangements of agency and domination. Unpacking a series of conflicting cases-from illegal making to the strategic and civic use of crafts to manifest radical alternatives to the current order-it shows how designers and makers can use even basic tools to work towards more.

1 Power in the Making

I often hear people claiming that design and making are “powerful” and “political”—but in what way? The design of a missile or fighter jet is undoubtedly powerful and also political. Their use even more so. An industrial machine, a car, or a vacuum cleaner is too. A lock, a bench, and a chair? Or a PET bottle, a cookie jar, and some tape? It seems the intensity differs.

Machines, products, and objects all manifest tangible relationships. Tools interfere in the connections people make with their surroundings, modifying the bodily capacities of those who have access and use them. By manipulating the immediate surroundings, our agency shapes matter, which influences us back. In a very practical way, the process and outcomes of making affect the distribution of agency across the social field. Who has the power in making, who becomes more powerful, and how does matter play a part in this process?

This becomes especially clear when making becomes part of conflicts. One example can be street protests, where the voices and bodies of people turn to the public to express their views. Sometimes these means are amplified with signs, flags, and megaphones. Attention is needed to a political issue. Tensions may rise as protesters try to increase their impact, using their bodies to interfere with other public functions, traffic, or infrastructure. Typically, the police force appears to preserve the status quo as protesters now start breaking laws that are set to keep order. Fences, uniforms, nightsticks, handcuffs, tear gas, and water cannons become means to break up the protest. The conflict between the parts is heightened. It is a typical scene that emerges all over the world; sophisticated tools for riot control are set against the ill-protected bodies of protesters who are calling for their voice to be heard.

Yet, also protesters prepare themselves for what they know is coming. An example can be the improvised armors of the Spanish activist group Las Agencias, a collection of reinforced garments they jokingly call “Pret-a-resister.” Here, plastic water bottles are rigged with tape to the body, to the chest, shoulders, and arms, protecting against the blows of the nightsticks. One type of street-level citizen-making, with materials from the local deli, is set against the police force’s sophisticated design, equipment, and training. There is an uneven power relationship in such conflict, and by making a water bottle armor, Las Agencias highlights the vulnerability of the protesters.

As posited by craft theorist Jessica Hemmings, when tracing the political impact of craft or making, one should pay attention to how the powerlessness of craft is a factor for its perceived power.¹ The domesticity of craft appears very different than the political power manifested in public. For example, domestic crafts that comment on war create another form of tension than a movie, a poster, or a flag. A war-rug, body count mittens, or embroidered slogans, all highlight the tension between the tranquility and softness that craft connotes and the harsh reality they appear in.

A similar tension appears when we encounter simple repurposed domestic products in protests worldwide. From the simple umbrellas in Hong Kong and primitive riot shields made from cut-apart plastic trash bins with duct tape handles, to more sophisticated gas masks made from plastic PET bottles, iconic from the Taksim Square protests in Istanbul. When street protests repurpose peaceful everyday products, the proportions of conflict are heightened. Something happens when bringing these materials into street protests, especially when set against police forces’ militarized equipment and violent tactics.

The improvised crafts for street protests may seem like an extreme, or at least an exception, when it comes to making practices, but start making, and you immediately run into trouble. Making seems to attract all kinds of trouble. On the one hand, materials just don’t want to do what the drawing so elegantly suggests, and ideas don’t render so ideal as the maker wants it. But also, just put your new creation out on the street, and people will react in unpredicted ways. As you start making, don’t ask for permission, as you may soon find social protocols, laws, and regulations that point out just how disruptive your new thing really is, even if it is unpretentious and plain. Building regulations, warranties, insurance policies; the confines of craft start coming out of the woodwork as soon as you get carving into the everyday.

Primitive Making

What interests me is the trouble of everyday and straightforward things. Drawing from Eric Hobsbawm’s classic study on the political agency of social bandits and peasant organizations, whom he calls primitive rebels, what a reader will find in this book is a journey through some of the material agency and insurgency of primitive makers.² It is primitive because it is the making with elementary hand tools often found at home, using the ubiquitous materials of the introductory design workshop, and not requiring any advanced skills. Like in Hobsbawm’s study, the primitive signifies a more fluid than hierarchically institutionalized practice, organized while not necessarily structured or incorporated. It should not be confused with “primitive arts” and does not imply the othering of indigenous practices or a romantic perspective of a less mediated connection with the world.

Primitive making also signifies a relationship to the more popular connotation between making in general and the strand of do-it-yourself (DIY) practices that have emerged under the term maker culture. Over the past decades, what were previously amateur DIY practices have been infused with Design Thinking buzz and have become maker culture, made popular with Make magazine’s launch in 2005, and celebrated as a “Third Industrial Revolution” or an “entrepreneurial revolution” of garage tinkering.³ Marked with a special Maker Faire event at the White House on June 18, 2014, this cultural phenomenon aligns well with the Silicon Valley startup culture. It has long also taken on political language. For example, in the efforts to bring a DIY mindset to technology like in the “Maker’s bill of rights” published in Make magazine in 2005, a political tone is set to the act of making, yet simultaneously aligning it within a realm of unregulated and free/open labor, binding this type of practice to unpaid volunteering. Today, this type of entrepreneurial making and hacking can be found in ubiquitous hackathons, seductive training grounds for precarious labor, that frame cultural expectations around the labor of making as “innovative” and “cool,” and thus rightfully paid little and without any chance for organization or unionization.⁴

The reason to focus on primitive making is to mitigate a drift toward technological tendencies in the branded “making” where the term increasingly connotes microcontrollers, robots, drones, and the prolific gadget-centered consumer-making of Silicon Valley. I thus use primitive to limit a technological drift where, for example, “critical making” primarily deals with technologies commonly used in hackerspaces. Yet, these efforts are certainly praiseworthy, and I subscribe to their radical pragmatic position of possibility, breaking through structures, that I also see inherent to design work: a can-do pragmatism emphasizing that things can be different!⁵

It is in relation to the technological and abstract drift I emphasize the primitive; it is about the appropriate technology for the introductory workshop course. As we will see further on, the primitive element also signifies an ascetic use of technology in teaching for the educational purpose of getting closer to the material properties and the recalcitrance of matter—its potential to align as well as resist. But again, we can also use the term to think of an ascetic use of technology in the Greek meaning of ascetic, as a form of “exercise,” a training or practice to find the appropriate levels of effort and use to reach the intended goal. It is primitive and appropriate because it does not waste or produce surplus; it uses minimal surplus technology, minimal surplus metaphysical abstraction, and minimal surplus subordination. We will come back to some of this later.

Concerning the more corporate parts of maker culture, the term primitive can also help emphasize social and historical conditions that necessitate creativity and the dignity of survival. Making is a practice beyond the commodity-centric hypes framed by mainstream maker culture. It suggests an agency, inventiveness, and ingenuity that emerge from basic tooling, the possibility of an egalitarian inclusiveness that comes from tight circumstances.⁶ In line with Hobsbawm, the primitive in making signifies a sense of uninstitutionalized, or even undomesticated, potential of bottom-up appropriation—that making can be a “wild thing” in the sense of design historian Judy Attfield’s classic study of the unruly life of objects.⁷ If wild things are “things with attitude” (as Attfield has it), primitive making is a making with attitude (disrespectful to the hagiographic tendencies of design)—an attitude not to be domesticated but to learn and build from.

But before we move on, let’s take a step back. In its most rudimentary form, we can imagine a scenario of primitive making. A ball has gotten stuck up in the tree, just a few feet higher than I can reach with my hands. A primitive tool is needed, and I search around on the ground to find a fallen branch I can use to extend my arm’s reach to poke the ball so it falls down. Some branches are too short or too thin to do the work. But I soon find one to use. However, it a bit too wide, has many small twigs and leaves, so it gets stuck on the other tree branches as I try to reach the ball. To make the branch less cumbersome, I start breaking off the twigs until only the core branch remains, and with this I can finally reach the ball. Even without building anything new, the task has been accomplished with straightforward means, repurposing a fallen branch into a poking-a-ball-out-of-a-tree-stick.

Matters and Materials

What has happened along the way in the scenario above is that I have turned the matter of found wood into the material of a stick. The wood is the same matter, but as I twisted off the twigs and leaves, I infused the properties of the branch with my human intention, refining it to align with my objective of getting the ball out of the tree. Without these modifications, I could not have used the branch to reach into the tree to poke the ball down. Or, to be a bit clearer in the definition, the matter of the branch (the raw substance of the tree) became the material of the stick (the matter in relation to human agency and intentions). To put it differently, matter is the wild part of “raw material,” before it is domesticated into cultured materials, aligned with human purpose.

When I build things, I most often engage materials. For example, the wood I use in the workshop is planted, nursed, cultivated, harvested, and milled into a format that aligns with the standard use of the material, even if it is just a rough sawn two-by-four (often called “construction lumber,” a term that reveals its purpose). A particular type of tree is selected, planted, and grown in conditions deemed favorable for its use, flitch cut, cut for grade, or quartered. The tree is cut down when it has reached the right height. It is then milled to bring out the best properties of the matter for its use as material (for wood lengthwise along the fibers). The properties of the matter are in league with the intended practices of its use, which relates not only to its practical use but also to transport, environmental regulations, trade agreements, and price; all parameters are part of domesticating matter into material. Even if I just need a plank to use as an improvised cutting board, the wood I will find in my local hardware store will probably be pine or cedar, not ebony or sandalwood.

Matter is subjected to the power of human intentions, harvested, refined, and modified under a regime of use and purpose. Yet, as is often apparent at the workbench, even if cultured, materials are frequently feral; they “have their own will.” As I work on a piece of matter with my tools, using it as material, the matter fights back. The wood split from an unseen crack, the textile fibers curl up with the moisture of my hands, or I may encounter a law of physics unknown to my experience (such as when introduced to h...