Local Connection Through Making: From Personal to Collective Exploration

Abstract

This paper for Making Futures’ sixth issue, under the theme of People, Place, Meaning: Crafting Social Worlds and Social Making, addresses reflections from the presentation of the research project Local connection through making at the 2019 conference and subsequent reflections. Moreover, it presents its unfolding, as independent ongoing research around making practices in the twenty first century and what can be learned from past and alternative perspectives of human creation, material culture, and embodied knowledge. The research started as a master’s project, done through an auto-ethnography exploration of one practice – pottery making – and as an exploration of the territory of the city of Barcelona and the agents involved in the work with clay, both in traditional and innovative ways. The research was deployed in three stages: Understanding, Making, and Sharing. As part of the Making phase, the project assessed the possible interactions of craft practices and Fab Lab makerspaces, as potential spaces of making in the urban context, open for their communities. One of the outcomes of the Sharing phase was a toolkit suggesting interactions between a crafts-approach to making and new digital tools. This was later put into practice with a workshop done in the Maker Faire Barcelona 2019 event, in collaboration with Jan Madrenas, a Catalan ceramist, and the designer Barbara Drozdek. Participants were invited to create a bowl from clay, learning traditional techniques, as coil construction, and later to interact with digital tools, exploring 3D scanning and the making of digital 3D models out of their creations. This activity was fundamental to understand participants’ perception of physical and digital activities and how this could inform the state of our societies in relation to materiality, as people are driven into a much digitalized world. The results and reflections around this activity are presented in the paper. Additionally, it addresses topics related to the global x local debate and knowledge transmission and access. The intention is to possibly pave new narratives in regaining a connection to making and consuming at local level, which later can be reflected on a global scale, attending to UN’s Sustainable Development Goals; especially the ones dedicated to ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’ and ‘Responsible Consumption and Production’.