Critical Making: Powering Inclusion and Openness.
Together, we add scientific insights into the potential of the maker movement. We focus on critical and socially responsible making, and show how global maker communities can offer new opportunities for young talents of all genders to contribute to an open society via open source innovation.
What We Do
Gender. Co-creating measures to counteract the existing gender imbalances and guidelines for gender awareness in maker spaces and in online spaces.
Young Talents. Engaging young people in maker spaces and exploring educational tools that build skills for responsible research and innovation.
Openness. Strengthening the social responsibility of the open hardware movement through a mentoring programme for open hardware business innovations.
Meet our Community
We Connect Makers in a Global Network with more than
140,000 people
9,000
projects
190
nationalities
6 core values of Critical Making
- Open: Critical Making promotes open collaboration, including the sharing of skills and knowledge. It boosts creativity in the ecosystem of makers by making processes and results accessible.
- Local & connected: Critical Making is happening locally, working on the ground and adapted to a particular socio-cultural context. Thereby, critical making implies an engagement with local communities as well as global networks – thinking globally and making locally.
- Social & Diverse: Critical Making reflects on the social dimensions of making, the living realities of those persons involved and concerned, as well as the ethical implications of their work. Critical Making thereby addresses societal challenges and needs. That’s why it is so important to strive for diversity and inclusiveness.
- Reflexive: Critical Making re-thinks and re-constructs the dominant mainstream maker culture from a critical stance, reflecting on underlying power structures and their implications.
- Impactful: Critical Making aspires to really make a difference. It seeks to improve life and build a sustainable future.
- Joyful & meaningful: Critical Making is still about the joy of and in making, but adds meaning to it. What is made critically is made with a specific purpose of individual or social kind.
“Bringing critical thinking into technology development“
Technology has become ubiquitous, and the negative societal effects are showing. One way to address this and to create sustainable futures is by learning from interdisciplinary techniques of responsible innovation by critical makers and other grassroots innovation communities. This is what Critical Making is about.
Regina M. Sipos – Research Associate and PhD Candidate, Technical University of Berlin
“Pause, make and unmake”
It’s this Critical Making with others that gives me the space to pause, make and unmake. And hopefully it also does this for the collaborators with whom I work.
Dr. Angelika Strohmayer – Northumbria University, School of Design
Join us to co-create an inclusive, open Global Maker Community.
Critical Making 