12. Artikkelit / Articles

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Browsing 12. Artikkelit / Articles by Department "Department of Design"

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  • Anticipated environmental sustainability of personal fabrication
    (2015) Kohtala, Cindy; Hyysalo, Sampsa
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
    Distributed manufacturing is rapidly proliferating to citizen level via the use of digital fabrication equipment, especially in dedicated “makerspaces”. The sustainability benefits of citizens’ personal fabrication are commonly endorsed. However, to assess how these maker practitioners actually deal with environmental issues, these practitioners and their practices need to be studied. Moreover research on the environmental issues in personal fabrication is nascent despite the common perception that the digital technologies can become disruptive. The present paper is the first to report on how practitioners assess the environmental sustainability of future practices in this rapidly changing field. It does so through an envisioning workshop with leading-edge makers. The findings show that these makers are well able to envision the future of their field. Roughly 25% of the issues covered had clear environmental implications. Within these, issues of energy use, recycling, reusing and reducing materials were covered widely by environmentally- oriented participants. In contrast, issues related to emerging technologies, materials and practices were covered by other participants, but their environmental implications remained unaddressed. The authors concluded there is a gap between different maker subcultures in their sustainability orientations and competences. Further research on the environmental aspects of real-life maker practices and personal fabrication technologies now could help avert negative impacts later, as the maker phenomenon spreads. This knowledge should also be directed to developing targeted environmental guidelines and solutions for personal fabrication users, which are currently lacking. Potential also lies in seeking to enhance dialogue between pro-environmental and new-technology-oriented practitioners through shared spaces, workshops and conferences.
  • Collaborative futuring with and by makers
    (2014) Hyysalo, Sampsa; Kohtala, Cindy; Helminen, Pia; Mäkinen, Samuli; Miettinen, Virve; Muurinen, Lotta
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
    Maker spaces and maker activities offering access to low-cost digital fabrication equipment are rapidly proliferating, evolving phenomena at the interface of lay and professional design. They also come in many varieties and change fast, presenting a difficult target for, for instance, public authorities, who would like to cater for them but operate in much slower planning cycles. As part of participatory planning of Helsinki Central Library, we experimented with a form of collaborative futuring with and by makers. By drawing elements from both lead-user workshops and participatory design,we conducted a futuring workshop, which allowed us to engage the local maker communities in identifying the issues relevant for a public maker space in 2020. It further engaged the participants in envisioning a smaller prototype maker space and invited them into realising its activities collaboratively. Our results indicate that particularly the information about future solutions was of high relevance, as was the opportunity to trial and elaborate activities on a rolling basis in the prototype space. Insights about more general trends in making were useful too, but to a lesser extent, and it is likely that these could have been gained just as easily with more traditional means for futuring.
  • Designers by any other name: exploring the sociomaterial practices of vernacular garment menders
    (2018) Durrani, Marium
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
    Studies around the cultures of design indicate a mutually constitutive relationship designers share with materials when in practice. However, professional designers are not the only ones experiencing proximate relations with materials. With the recent emergence of community-based repair workshops, non-professional designer practices of fixing things, like garments, reveal sites of active material tinkering aiding transitions in current clothing disposal patterns. Using qualitative research methods and a sociomaterial theoretical lens, this paper takes the mending activities of non-professional menders in communal repair workshops in the city of Helsinki, Finland, as its point of departure. The study identifies these menders as vernacular menders and explores their dynamic practices to reveal the situated, embodied, routinized yet creative process of mending. The created outputs by the vernacular menders result in what is termed as informal design and point towards extending mainstream conceptualizations on design and creativity. In such a way, suggesting new insights on sociomaterial-enabled practices emerging around the brims of professional design.
  • The Story of MIT-Fablab Norway: Community Embedding of Peer Production
    (2014) Kohtala, Cindy; Bosqué, Camille
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
    MIT-Fablab Norway was one of the first Fab Labs ever established, in northern Norway in 2002. Despite this auspicious beginning to a network that is rapidly growing, surprisingly little has been written about the genesis of the network or the Fab Lab itself. We therefore aim to contribute to this knowledge gap with a narrative account of our independent ethnographic research visits to the Lab. We combine our researcher perspectives, which are informed by, on the one hand, Aesthetics and a phenomenological understanding and, on the other, Science and Technology Studies, with Design Research bridging both. Our account aims to richly describe the Lab’s unique profile in the MIT Fab Lab network as a socially shaped entity and product of a particular time and place. Most salient in this narrative is the role of its charismatic founder, whose stories and metaphors become vehicles by which we come to understand how a Fab Lab forms its own identity, balancing the relationships with local stakeholders against those with the Fab Lab network; how it promotes certain principles and values of peer production; and how it represents itself to both maker insiders and outsiders. While situated and particular to this Lab, our interpretations may have implications for the trajectories of other Fab Labs and makerspaces, as well as our understanding of peer production as a new paradigm.