Critical Making Baseline

The term “critical making” has brought the principle of making (or, to briefly summarize, the extension of DIY culture through technology) closer to the framework of responsible research and innovation (RRI) not only in academia and design, but also in grassroots innovation movements (GIM). Such responsible innovation approaches reveal themselves in the maker culture’s commitment to openness, reflexivity, and its collaborative innovation processes. However, a framework that allows researchers to examine RRI principles in GIM has not yet been developed, and transdisciplinary scientific insights are necessary to better understand the processes of maker communities. Whether makers and maker communities follow the principles of RRI in other aspects, has also not been studied so far. These are thus the main goals of this project.

The aim of this report is to support the endeavor outlined above by situating the term critical making in relevant scientific disciplines, summarizing the state-of-the-art of critical making and understand the opportunities that lie within grounding critical making in grassroots innovation processes for the Critical Making Consortium. As the Consortium aims to work with the grassroots innovators who “make critically”, the report also aims to identify participatory methods that will allow academic and non-academic co-researchers to collaboratively explore and improve responsible research and innovation (RRI) processes within those grassroots innovation practices.