With my colleague Prof. Katja Thoring and some of the students of her “scientific publishing” class at the MAID program in Dessau we attended the conference at HBK Hamburg. One of my favourite talks was by Florian A. Schmidt, a former fellow student and co-contributor in our publication from 2010 “critical mass”. Not only because we are friends but because he was able to take the auditorium along in his narrative about the maker culture and the crowds, his talk left me with lively images and ideas. Equally rich was the journey by Florian Walzer through the development of the greek term “banaus” to the current understanding of a maker or crafts person. The greatest discovery for my own interest was Prof. Heidrun Allert from Kiel who was talking about pedagogy and design from a perspective of philosophy. She explained the definition of “double loop learning” and stuck in my mind with the sentence: to find oneself useful through making. There were plenty more talks from especially social science specialists that for my taste were a bit too abstract in the context of the theme, yet they all delivered very important statements and insights. Great conference with lots of learnings!

>> program Politik der Maker

With a ferry the participants of the conference were brought to an estate outside town to attend the talks of designers and craftsmen from all over Europe at Mt. Edgcumbe House. They had several tracks so of course I couldn’t hear all of the talks, thus focused on the pedagogy track. I learned a lot about the current discourse in the field and realized, that not so much had happened since I was into the topic back in 2008/09. Happy to have met Tomas Diez who runs the FabLab in Barcelona and Camille Bosqué who works on her PhD about Hackerspaces. Amazing keynotes by Gareth Neil about his attempt to build non-carbon footprint furniture  and by  Jaideep Prabhu introducing the indian design approach “jugaad”.

>> Making Futures Conference

The project is presented for the next 6 months in Frankfurt, then moving for another 1/2 year to Berlins museum of Communication.
>> DIY – Die Mitmachrevolution

I was invited to do a session about the isopt project on the festival. It was very interesting to discuss the topic of open design and participation with people who are somewhat familiar with the topic because we could really dive into details and questions about general concepts and learnings from such apporaches.

>> interview by Anja Krieger
>> atoms&bits festival