About Minor Makers Lab

The semester course (Dutch: minor) Makers Lab: Making as Research is a 30EC interdisciplinary undergraduate elective course at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

Welcome! In this interdisciplinary course, you will research societal issues and their relationship to technology and design through reflective and critical experimentation with various techniques, tools and materials in the university’s digital fabrication workshop. During the 20 weeks to come, we will engage in collaborative, critical making activities and reflection, that will help you critically question the norms and values that inform existing product designs, branding strategies and technologies. Who benefits from a given design? Who doesn’t? Could it be different? By asking these questions we aim to open a design space with room for difference and alternatives, on a conceptual level as well as product level.

An important part of understanding the politics of designed objects, is to start understanding how they are made, and be able to tweak, hack, modify and/or make your own. You’ll learn to creatively and critically use, modify, deconstruct and analyse both tools and materials. You’ll learn to make explicit which values are reflected in your design decisions and those of others. Together, we’ll discuss why they might not benefit everyone in the same way (if at all). By developing what if...? questions you will open up the design space for radical new product and design ideas to take shape, that are informed by values and ethics, as well as aesthetics, material knowledge, environmental awareness and inclusive user needs.

Week 1-10

The first weeks are dedicated to in-class exercises, discussions and weekly assignments to cover a range of concepts, modes of collaboration, design tools and digital fabrication techniques such as vector drawing for the laser cutter and plotter, design for 3D printing, molding and casting with handmade bioplastics, and of course electronics. Every week, we will focus on different themes and a different technique that you will explore practically and conceptually in a hands-on assignment and class tutorials, and through the production of a weekly class zine (a small publication). Your documentation of this work is the deliverable upon which you will be graded during the formative assessment in week 10.

Week 11-20

The second half of the minor is dedicated to team research projects in collaboration with external partners and/or researchers affiliated with the university’s research labs (eg. Fashion Technology Lab, Visual Methodologies, Citizen Data Lab, Crossmedia, Institute of Network Cultures and others). You will not be asked to provide a solution - something you might be used to! - but instead, to research and come to thoroughly understand an issue through methods for critical making. You might do this by for example:

1. examining the norms and values at work in the development and uptake of different technologies, especially focusing on practices within your own discipline;

2. tracing how it was in the past and how it is done in other places in the world;

3. researching the role of tools, materials and production processes in this issue, and

4. imagining how it might be different, and materialize that potential reality in the form of speculative and critical yet real prototypes or material explorations and samples.

The quality of your material and conceptual research, documentation and presentation during the class expo are the criteria used to determine your final grade for the course. You will participate in a class expo, prior to the summative assessments.

For more detailed information, and an outline of projects from previous years, please take a look here.