On Making

Guest Editors

Patrizia Marti, University of Siena & Eindhoven University of Technology

Joep Frens, Bart Hengeveld, Pierre Levy, Eindhoven University of Technology

Important dates

• Deadline: June 15, 2016 -> July 4, 2016 (extended)

• Notification to the authors: October 10, 2016

• Camera ready paper: October 20, 2016

• Publication of the special issue: mid November, 2016

Overview

Making is hot. A ‘maker culture’ is emerging and a focus on making and skills is retaking a presence in society at its broadest. For example, we see a re-appreciation for the skills in education where there is a growing interest in learning by doing and craft schools re-entering higher academic levels. And also the work of Richard Sennett, Tim Ingold, and Vilem Flusser, to name just a few, has given the skills a new foothold in academia. We wonder if these observations point to a new appreciation of the bodily skills and the first signs of the elimination of the classic separation of body and mind.

“Making” is far broader than skilled manual labor. Making is about understanding in practice, and it is inextricably tangled with an active engagement with the material world and culture. Still, it is important to realize that the notion of making has evolved in different ways from traditional craftsmanship.

The new ‘maker culture’, promoted by fab labs, DIY, maker and hacker spaces, is an utilitarian hybrid of software and hardware ‘tinkering’ that stands far apart from the quality that skilled craftsman of before would bring. Being motivated by self-fulfillment and desire to do good work for its own sake, the makers privilege assembling technologies into physical objects and fabricate new devices. Attention to formal and interactive qualities of the designed objects is not at the forefront of their creations.

However, the maker philosophy has attracted the interest of professionals, educators, practitioners and the academic community for the informal, open, networked, peer-led and shared learning, for its potential to create new pathways into technology development and for experimenting with a new economic model for growth and innovation that is not based on mass production and long production chains.

In this special issue we aim to portrait broad perspective on making, welcoming multidisciplinary contributions and viewpoints. We would like this special issue to be a feast of variety that gives handles on making in as many ways as possible.

Topics of Interests

 We welcome papers on any of the following topics, and related ones:

• Making in theory and practice

• Making & design

• Making in education

• Making as a patina of culture

• Making and the culture of cooperation

• Making economy

• Critical making

• Making as a reflective practice

• Anthropology of making

• The new maker culture

• Design cases

• The art of prototyping

• Interactivity and interaction modality

• Tangibility and embodied interaction

• Crafting the internet of things

• The status of making in society

• Review of the history of making, movements of making

• The scope of making

Submission procedure 

All submissions must be original and may not be under review by another publication.

The manuscripts should be submitted anonymized either in .doc or in .rtf format. 
All papers will be blindly peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers. Perspective participants are invited to submit a 8-20 pages paper (including authors' information, abstract, all tables, figures, references, etc.). 
The paper should be written according to the IxD&A authors' guidelines .

Paper submission page -> link

(when submitting the paper please choose Domain Subjects under: 'IxD&A special issue: 'On Making')

More information on the submission procedure and on the characteristics of the paper format can be found on the website of the IxD&A Journal where information on the copyright policy and responsibility of authors, publication ethics and malpractice are published.

For scientific advices and for any query please contact the guest-editors:

• patrizia.marti[at]unisi [dot] it

• j.w.frens[at] tue [dot] nl

• b.j.hengeveld[at] tue [dot] nl

• p.d.levy[at] tue [dot] nl

marking the subject as: 'IxD&A issue on: On making''.