Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Critical Making (Critical Making: Studying RRI Principles in the Maker Community)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-04-01 do 2023-06-30
More specifically, Critical Making aimed to achieve the following objectives:
1. Improve the scientific knowledge on RRI in grassroots innovations
2. Increase gender awareness in maker communities
3. Involve young people in makerspaces, increase their interest in science and innovation
4. Foster responsibility in the open hardware movement
5. Manifest grassroots innovation in the RRI discourse
6. Elaborate guidelines and recommendations for transformative innovation policies
We achieved our main expected results as foreseen; these were:
- Extension of scientific knowledge on RRI
- Uptake of responsible innovation principles in maker communities
- Better education of young social innovators
- Higher gender-balance in the maker communities
- Increased democratisation of science
- Foster transformative innovation policies
We gain new scientific insights into RRI practices in grassroots innovations by: 1) RRI and GIM were merged into the CMRF, which was used as an analytical tool to assess maker projects and processes; it is now available as scientific framework for further analysis of grassroots innovations; 2) It was turned into a practical reflexive game for makers to reflect on their making practices, including RRI aspects; the usage of the tool by global makers is expected to impact their practice; 3) we suggested a new RRI key, namely community empowerment, to the international community of RRI and STS scholars and received positive feedback from the academic audience.
The Critical Making project worked on an updated version of the Critical Making principles together with the maker communities. These principles have been taken up in the various outputs of the project, especially those dedicated to the maker communities; it includes the various guidelines (the Critical Making Wundertüte) as well as the CMFR that was turned into an online game for makers. The reflective questions in the game are aligned with the principles and the game logic encourages players to collect stickers that relate to these principles. The practical outputs of the project have already received interest from maker communities and other projects.
Critical Making has the potential to future-proof education. We identified challenges and opportunities for Critical Making in education and developed solutions to overcome the difficulties to integrate Critical Making into school curricula, for example by expanding existing curriculum topics by maker tools and meta-level discussions to reach the goal of fostering digital skills and critical thinking simultaneously. Our educational tools and guidelines, incl. manifesto and the educational box, are now being distributed to relevant stakeholders to continue creating impact for young people.
The Critical Making guidelines for makerspaces elaborate how to become open and welcoming spaces that offer equal opportunities to all people, irrespective of their age, gender, origin, ability or socio-economic background. The assessment towards the end of the project by internationally distributed makerspaces showed the considerable impact that the mere reflection of such recommendations can have on makerspaces around the globe to become more inclusive places. One of the core strengths of the Critical making manual is that it does tackle gender alongside many other dimensions of social exclusion, and thereby takes an intersectional stance towards inequalities and underrepresentation and is more regionally diverse than what we find in literature.
Our academic results of the project have received good response. For example, a paper presenting the Critical Making Responsibility Framework in the FAB17 conference in 2022 won the best paper award. The results of the project provide an excellent basis to continue contributing with these results to the academic RRI discussions.
Critical Making contributed to the democratisation of science: 1) the application of truly participatory methods allowed people to be an active part in the research process that had never done any research before; they are however experts in their fields and contributed in new and unexpected ways in the co-creation of research artefacts that are now turned into common goods, such as the particle guidelines. In addition, some of our co-researchers actively contributed to our academic outputs. 2) we see great potential for the democratisation of science in Open Science Hardware. It has already proven that it can help to overcome current shortages in scientific equipment and support the engagement in the scientific process more widely, e.g. outside of well-funded research institutions. The 3D printed wireless digital stethoscope from the Critical Making mentoring programme is one such example that contributes to the democratisation of science.
Our findings contribute to a better understanding of transformative innovations in local contexts. We identified dimensions particularly important for maker projects of the Global South in terms of community empowerment, such as learning the creative use of resources under scarcity (responding to the needs of community), increasing situational awareness, learning to manage community relations and relations to broader society, access to new skills and knowledge for the disadvantaged citizen groups, and the support of sharing and knowledge exchange. There is a potential of uptake of these findings in innovation policies, but it is a long-term process.