Humanities scholars now live in a moment where it is rapidly becoming possible – as Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman suggest – for “regular people [to] rip, mix, and burn physical objects as effortlessly as they edit a digital photograph” (Lipson and Kurman, 2013:10). Lipson and Kurman describe this phenomenon in Fabricated, explaining how archaeologists are able to CT scan1 cuneiforms in the field, create 3D models of them, and then send the data to a 3D printer back home, where replicas are made.
Manifesting what Neil Gershenfeld calls “the programmability of the digital worlds we’ve invented” applied “to the physical world we inhabit” (Gershenfeld, 2005:17), these new kinds of objects move easily, back and forth, in the space between bits and atoms. But this full circuit through analog and digital processes is not all. Thanks to the development of embedded electronics, artifacts that are fabricated using desktop machines can also sense and respond to their environments, go online, communicate with other objects, log data, and interact with people (O’Sullivan and Igoe, 2004; Sterling, 2005; Igoe, 2011). Following Richard Sennett’s dictum that “making is thinking” (Sennett, 2008:ix), we note that these “thinking,” “sensing,” and “talking” things offer us new ways to understand ourselves and our assumptions, as do the processes through which we make them.
The practice of making things think, sense, and talk articulates in interesting yet murky ways with our various disciplinary pasts. For example, historians have written about the classical split between people who work with their minds and people who work with their hands, including the longstanding denigration of the latter (Long, 2004).2 In the humanities, we have inherited the value-laden dichotomy of mind and hand, along with subsequent distinctions between hand-made and machine-made objects; between custom, craft, or bespoke production and mass production; between people who make things and people who operate the machines that make things. As we navigate our current situation, we find that a lot of these categories and values need to be significantly rethought, especially if, following Donna Haraway (1991), Sandy Stone (1996), and Katherine Hayles (1999), we resist the notion that cultural and technological processes, or human and machine thinking, can be neatly parsed. We also find that the very acts of making need to be reconfigured in light of new media, the programmability, modularity, variability, and automation of which have at once expanded production and framed it largely through computer screens and WYSIWYG interfaces (Manovich, 2001; Montfort, 2004; Kirschenbaum, 2008a).3
With this context in mind, physical computing and desktop fabrication techniques underscore not only the convergence of analog and digital processes but also the importance of transduction, haptics, prototyping, and surprise when conducting research with new media. Rather than acting as some nostalgic yearning for an authentic, purely analog life prior to personal computing, cyberspace, social networking, or the cloud, making things between bits and atoms thus becomes a practice deeply enmeshed in emerging technologies that intricately blend human- and machine-based manufacturing.4 For the humanities, such making is important precisely because it encourages creative speculation and critical conjecture, which – instead of attempting to perfectly preserve or re-present culture in digital form – entail the production of fuzzy scenarios, counterfactual histories, possible worlds, and other such fabrications. Indeed, the space between bits and atoms is very much the space of “what if …”
Learning from Lego
One popular approach to introducing hands-on making in the humanities is to start with construction toys like Lego. Their suitability for learning is emphasized by Sherry Turkle, who made a study of the childhood objects that inspired people to become scientists, engineers, or designers: “Over the years, so many students have chosen [Lego bricks] as the key object on their path to science that I am able to take them as a constant to demonstrate the wide range of thinking and learning styles that constitute a scientific mindset” (Turkle, 2008:7–8). Besides being an easy and clean way to do small-scale, mechanical prototyping, Lego teaches people many useful lessons. One is what Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible,” an idea recently popularized by Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From: “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future,” Johnson writes, “hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself” (Johnson, 2010:26). As new things are created, new processes are developed, existing things are recombined into new forms, and still further changes – lurking like specters alongside the present – become possible. Johnson (2010:26) uses the metaphor of a house where rooms are magically created as you open doors. Central to this metaphor is the argument that chance, not individual genius or intent, is a primary component of making and assembly. When things as well as people are physically proximate, the odds of surprise and creativity should increase. Put this way, the adjacent possible corresponds (at least in part) with a long legacy of experimental arts and humanities practices, including Stéphane Mallarmé’s concrete poetry, the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse, Brion Gysin’s cut-ups, OuLiPo’s story-making machines, Kool Herc’s merry-go-round, Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, and Critical Art Ensemble’s tactical media and situational performances. Across this admittedly eclectic array of examples, the possibilities emerging from procedure, juxtaposition, conjecture, or encounter are privileged over the anticipation of continuity, certainty, concrete outcomes, or specific effects.
In the case of Lego, the original bricks had studs on the top and holes on the bottom. They stacked to form straight walls, but it was difficult to make things that were not blocky. When Lego introduced the Technic line for building more complicated mechanisms, they created a new brick that had horizontal holes in it. The Technic brick still had studs on top and holes on the bottom, so it could be stacked with regular Lego bricks as well as Technic bricks. But the horizontal holes created new possibilities: axles holding wheels or gears could be passed through them, and bricks could now be joined horizontally with pegs. In newer Technic sets, the Technic brick has been more or less abandoned in favor of the Technic beam. This piece still has the horizontal holes, but is smooth on top and bottom, and thus cannot be easily stacked with traditional Lego bricks. With each move into the adjacent possible, whole new styles of Lego construction have flourished while older styles have withered, even if the history of the Technic beam cannot be unhinged from Lego’s original bricks. Consequently, attending to Legos as processes – rather than as objects conveniently frozen in time and space – affords a material understanding of how this becomes that across settings and iterations. It also implies that a given object could have always been (or could always become) something else, depending on the context, conditions, and participants involved.
It is easy to study how people make things with Lego – both fans of the toy and the company’s designers – because many of them do what Chris Anderson (2012:13) calls “making in public.” Plans for every kit that Lego ever released are online, along with inventories of every part in those kits. You can start with a particular widget and see every assembly in which it was used. People share plans for their own projects. Want a robotic spider? A Turing machine? A computer-controlled plotter? A replica of an ancient Greek analog computer? They are all there waiting to be assembled. A number of free, computer-aided design (CAD) packages make it easy for children and adults to draft plans that they can share with one another. There is a marketplace for new and used Lego bricks. For example, the BrickLink site lists 180 million pieces for sale around the world. If you need a particular part (or a thousand of them in a particular color), then you can find the closest or cheapest ones. Of course, what is true for construction toys like Lego is also true for the modular systems that make up most of the built world, especially when – returning to Gershenfeld (2005) for a moment – digital programmability is applied to analog artifacts. People who start designing with Lego can then apply the knowledge they gain to electronic components, mechanical parts, computer software, and other technical systems.5 Each of these domains is based on interoperable and interchangeable parts with well-specified interfaces and has ...
