‘Making’ is one of the latest buzzwords in education. It is a highly malleable ‘container’ term that travels between different disciplines in art, design and engineering. Makerspaces carry quite a load of utopian promises: opening up technology, bringing (power) tools to the people, bridging the digital and the analogue, preparing the next generation for the future – nothing short of a fourth industrial revolution, with an emancipatory impulse to match. But is this a real revolution, or just a new phase of capitalism, bringing new mechanisms of control and exploitation, new ways of distracting and alienating people?

This project approaches these general issues in a very particular context, based on six months of fieldwork at Bouwkeet, a socially engaged makerspace in Rotterdam for youths aged 10-15. Put simply, this makerspace is intended to be a tool for empowerment. I have closely observed the activities at Bouwkeet in order to pinpoint the main challenges for makerspace facilitation in this context and have developed a toolkit for the facilitator’s training. If we mind the gap between what people say (the rhetoric of the maker movement) and what they actually do (the empirical practice), some fundamental issues arise as to how to introduce ‘making’ to those who are unfamiliar with the practices and traditions of (digital) crafts. What promises, potentials and limits does ‘making’ hold? How can we tap into the potential of ‘making’ as a toolbox for opening paths that do not just reproduce the structures of the status quo but serve as support structures for a critical, constructive, destructive engagement with the material world? For crafting a future reconfiguration of the relation between subjects and objects?

There are certain complex problems – capitalism, the rampant growth of technology, machine learning – that do not start or end in makerspaces, but do cause a lot of trouble and manifest in the micro-sphere. Zooming out, scaling from the micro to the macro, from practice to theory, from the local to the global, I also explore the nature of ‘wicked problems’ and the macro-level challenges pertinent to getting started in makerspaces. Moving from the micro to a meso-level cartographic analysis of the problems, I provide the contours for a ‘tentacular pedagogy’ to navigate and scale the troubles.

Tentacular pedagogy draws together a pool of tools and strategies to stay with the trouble, to face it, deal with it, to be smart about where to put the pressure and ‘stupid’ enough not to adapt to market forces. To work with the centrifugal power of knowledge dissemination and the Janus-faced nature of tools, which simultaneously shape both object and subject. Getting out of this mess requires an updated understanding of tools and technology, of teaching and learning; a rethinking of what it means to ‘make’ something which matters. Awareness of the trouble opens up the possibility of transforming ‘making’ into ‘futurecrafting’, that is, making trouble and taking collective responsibility for our influence on the shape of the material world yet to come.

External critic: Thieu Besselink