Maker Assembly NI: session provocations

1: Making & Peace Building

Kicking off Maker Assembly NI is a session about the politics and nuances of community-facing digital fabrication projects. It will look at how maker cultures are emerging at the grassroots and how local organisations are contributing to the peace-building project currently underway in Northern Ireland. It hopes to reveal how the idea of ‘critical making’ can be adjusted to suit the specificities of different contexts.

Speakers: Adam Wallace & Eamon Durey (Fab Labs NI), John Peto (Nerve Centre)

2: Speculative Making: New Contexts and Futures

As the idea of digital making beds down—and practices become more visible and accessible—what new trajectories are emerging and how are speculative futures being framed? This session hopes to reveal the supports we might need to maintain a critical forecast of making and maker culture.

Speakers: Nora O’Murchu (University of Limerick), Kat Braybrooke (University of Sussex)

3: Governance, Sustainability & Maker Networks    

How are maker networks nurtured and sustained? And how ‘critical' are the governance strategies of the physical spaces and networked platforms that mediate maker networks? This session hopes to somewhat unravel the entanglements of people, places, and things, to better understand how maker culture is being facilitated.

Speakers: Javier Burón (Fab Lab Limerick & Colaborativa), Hannah Stewart (Royal College of Art, Future Makerspaces Project)

4: Critics of the world, create!

Final session to be a making exercise, inspired by the Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska’s (2012) Creative Media Manifesto and Garnet Hertz’s Critical Making zine series.

Facilitator: Pip Shea (Farset Labs)