Considering this context, the research project wanted to explore the possibilities of making in cities of the twenty first century and how making practices can be a tool of connection between people, materials and a place, to regenerate these relations.

As a way to structure the work for the master’s project, the investigation started from a first-person perspective, through an auto-ethnography exploration. This process was then structured in three stages: Understanding, Making and Sharing. With the conclusion of the master’s project and a continued interest around the subjects inquired, it evolved into a continuous independent research project, expanding into a collective exploration, with the proposition of workshops. The concept for these activities is based on the interaction of craft practices with digital tools, mediated by craftspeople and designers. A first iteration took place at Maker Faire Barcelona 2019 event, in collaboration with Jan Madrenas, a Catalan ceramist, and the designer Barbara Drozdek. By understanding participants’ perception, it was possible to improve the proposition and conceptualize different formats of workshops that can be iterated in the future. This paper presents the different phases of the research project, going from the various stages deployed during the master’s project, the personal exploration, to the experience of doing the workshop, a collective exploration.

The opportunity to do the master’s degree made it possible to acquire academic knowledge but also brought the possibility to explore an alternative context of living, settling a novel lifestyle. In the first weeks or even months of living in a new city, everything from one’s everyday life needs to be adjusted. It includes inhabiting a flat with a different layout plan and environmental conditions, in a building with particular codes, in a neighborhood with specific characteristics. The way one moves around the city, the way one feeds themselves and the way one shops for goods are all new constructs in the given environment. The research project emerged from previous reflections on the relations and conventions that people create around their everyday life, which have a direct impact on the environment they inhabit. For this reason, the master’s project intended to examine the current relationship between people, materials and their place. This understanding would enable a future proposition to restore relationships and improve habits and practices, topics very much related to the framework of Transition Design (Irwin et al., 2015). Considering that the learning during the process of the research would be contextualized, situated knowledge, the project deployment happened through auto-ethnography; with two main questions paving the intentions of the research project:

Where are the possibilities of making in the urban context of the twenty first century?

How can making be a tool of connection between people, materials, and a place?

To do the proposed exploration, these intentions were analyzed with the lenses of one making practice, a craft that would enable the complete learning process, from a position of zero previous knowledge to a point of understanding the materials, techniques and relationships that involve the craft practice in that given territory. Pottery making has a deep connection with the Iberian territory and especially with the Mediterranean culture, where Barcelona is located. The proposition to explore a craft from the beginning, allowed the full discovery of the practice and the universe surrounding it – the materials, the tools, the techniques – making it possible to build a material consciousness (Sennett, 2008). As mentioned before, the research was divided into three phases: Understanding, Making and Sharing. In the process of deploying each stage, the relationship with the city of Barcelona was deepened, through visits at studios in different areas of the city – walking the map, as suggested by Lippard (1997) – and by meeting different practitioners of the craftsmanship of pottery making. The spatialization of this experience can be seen in the image below.

II. Making

The Making phase was a moment to explore new creations. Considering the educational context in which the master’s degree took place, which included the facilities of a Fab Lab, this phase’s experiences had a focus on uncovering the emergent practices of making, exploring the new technologies mentioned previously. With the availability of a Fab Lab, a fabrication laboratory part of a global network, it was analyzed how this environment could allow the rise of new making relationships, as most of these makerspaces tend to produce the same outcomes, with very similar, kind of homogenized material expression. Fabrication laboratories enabled people to access rapid prototyping machines, which are tools created by the industry to facilitate steps of the production. However, the network of makerspaces around the world is very much standardized, with the same offer of machines and use of materials. Would this issue be related to a matter of perception of the role of technology and a lack of material consciousness (Sennett, 2008)? Ambra Trotto suggests a possible approach:

In the context of new craftsmanship, a new material consciousness has to be acquired: new materials are today at hand and have to be combined with traditional materials. Because we act in a world in which systems and services have the potential of becoming more and more intelligent, the consequence is that designers have to deal with digital technology, as a material. (p.198)

Thus, the exploration during this phase of the research looked into how makerspaces could thrive as micro-manufacturing platforms in the city, providing a new material consciousness to connect people to their places and empower themselves and their local narratives.

First, it is important to visualize that the process of making with the support of a machine brings a new layer of mediation. When a craftsperson is creating a piece, the elements of production are the materials, their hands and tools that are, in most of the cases, manipulated manually. When it is inserted during the production a machine that is operated by numerical control, like CNC machines, 3D printers and robotic arms, in which they need to be programmed through software, there is a new layer of creation which is the setup of these commands, the parameters that will execute the task required. The creation can be constrained by the restrictions imposed by a code of processes, in software, for example, impeding a full expression of the creator’s intention and subsequently, constraints in cultural expression. Considering these circumstances, it is imperative that makers who use and create digital tools acknowledge these possible restraints and search for manners to work with machines creatively. Therefore, collaborations of craftspeople and digital makers can be very enriching in a scenario of making supported by digital tools. Some researchers are already exploring the topics of cultural expression in a context mediated by digital code. The researcher and author Ron Eglash has been investigating systems that allow the circulation of unalienated value in three domains: expressive value, labor value and ecological value. By collaborating with indigenous communities and urban artisans to develop both a theoretical framework and experimental intervention in the field of generative justice, his research group has been studying the applications of ‘ethnocomputing’. One of their creations was the ‘Culturally Situated Design Tools’ which contain information about a diverse range of cultural expressions in design, including African fractals, Native American weaving algorithms, Latino drum cycle ratios, urban graffiti curves and more (Eglash, 2018). Researchers Pierre Lévy and Shigeru Yamada have done explorations on 3D-modeling and 3D-printing of the Japanese tea ceremony utensils. In their own words, they ‘invite designers and design researchers to look at the potential of new technologies beyond what is classically expected, to consider other cultural perspectives on aesthetics and on making, leading to potential novel practices in design’ (Lévy & Yamada, 2017). Padfield et al. (2018) investigated the potentialities of makerspaces to generate new synergies with craft practices, as in the case of their research, establishing a collaboration with glassblowers, which resulted in the creation of digitally designed and CNC fabricated moulds to blow glass into.

For the exploration in this research project, the equipment available to work in consonance with pottery making at Fab Lab Barcelona was a robotic arm for clay extrusion, in a similar process to 3D printing. The tool for extrusion of clay, attached to the robotic arm, was developed by the researchers of the lab. The robotic arm does the movement following a programmed path and the extrusion tool, attached also to a compressor, allows the passing of the clay through a nozzle. To make an object that will be extruded with the use of a robotic arm means designing the path of movement. It is a process slightly different from the one of 3D printing with a commercial 3D printer. In this case, the object is modelled in a 3D environment and, usually, a software adapts it to the printing. As mentioned before, the software can bring restraints, so the possibility to use visual programming appears to be more interesting, as you design step by step and define parameters that can be adjusted according to the designer or maker’s decisions, allowing a more tailored outcome to their cultural context. This is what happens when using visual programming with the robotic arm, in which the process is much more artisanal. For the development of this project, it was applied a tool of visual programming to create a parametric design, allowing the change of parameters by the designer/maker’s intention. For this experiment, it was designed a parametric dinnerware, or more appropriately, a culture-defined dinnerware, which could be shaped as a plate or a bowl. The design would allow the adaptation of its features according to parameters defined by the user in correspondence to a dinnerware related to a specific culture. The experiments with the robotic arm were limited to the production of artefacts resembling three different culture-defined dinnerwares. A relevant aspect of making with digital tools is that there are no boundaries of information access, allowing for a global exchange of ideas, designs and cultural contacts. It is an aspect that proceeds to blurry boundaries between cultures and could promote ideological homogenization or inadequate cultural appropriation, therefore requesting careful attention. In the case of this research, the purpose of the design exercise was to test the possibilities of a visual programming tool to allow the creation of designs embedded with cultural information, not intending to make claims over other cultures and aesthetics.