 Hello and welcome back on the X-Hine stage at this very strange RCS3 now on the second day and our next talk is by Aprika and Saad who are going to talk about how to add critical making to your critical thinking to your making. And there was a talk two years ago at 35 C3 when we're still able to meet in person which was already talking about the subject and this now kind of is a follow up and they're going to talk about what we can learn from critical makers and other grassroot initiatives. Yes, the stage is yours. Thank you, Carl. Thank you so much for hosting us here under the tree in X-Hine or maybe not. So great to be here and great to have you all watching in the stream and I hope next year we will meet under trees again and also not under trees at the rocket. So I'm Aprika, I'm part of the Global Innovation Gathering, a big worldwide community that I often describe as the Global ERFA, which most of CCC folks would know as the Erfahrungsaustauschkreis, so knowledge sharing and circle. And so we are also knowledge sharing circle and I'm joined by Saad, who's one of the amazing members of the Association and of the Network of Geek from Singapore. And do you want to quickly introduce yourself as well? Sure thing. I'm based in Singapore normally and last year we had a little talk about with Regina and on critical thinking and critical making, which was actually quite phenomenal. The response was really great and we've had a chance to work on this together with the other gig members, members of the Global Innovation Gathering, which Sandra is also a part. So I'm very happy to be with you a little bit of my background. I'm a tech person. I run a small startup in Singapore and I also help with maker spaces and tech for good and I'm a huge coffee snob. That's me. Other people would call it coffee geek. That works too. Nice. So I think some people now in the stream also see our slides and we are on the first slide and on the second slide you would see a picture of an actual stage and an actual Congress where Regina and Saad last year defined critical making, the topic was two years ago. It's basically yesterday, like pre-pandemic, but it's also 100 years ago, right? So last time you spoke about the topic, you defined it as adding critical thinking to the making. And so we arrive at critical making. And I guess there's like 200 other definitions of this. Which one did you share, Saad? Making with a purpose, I think is the one that fits the best. The idea that skills and experience and knowledge that you have being applied towards something that is constructive and meaningful. And that means very different things to very different people. So depending on the context that you're in, the definition changes quite dramatically, but sort of digging down into it to making with a purpose, understanding what that purpose is, rather than just using your 3D printer for printing your heads all the time, you think about how this could actually help people with customization, personalization, things like that. So that's the sort of thing, the definition that I prefer to making with a purpose. Yeah, that's certainly one of the, yeah, very easy to understand ones also. It's also a very academic concept. And so everybody who's interested in this whole concept and all the different areas of critical making, we highly recommend, or I highly recommend, because Saad was speaking this, I highly recommend to watch the talk by Regina and Saad. It's like one hour long and it will give a very comprehensive and also academic viewpoint of the topic. And today, I think we focus more on what happened since then and what's beyond just the, or not just beyond the concept. So to go to the third slide, you see this is one of the pictures also shared in the talk back then of the global innovation gathering. When we also were still gathering physically with the big blue mobile lab. And I would love to go like for two minutes into what happened since we gathered the last time. So what happened during the pandemic in terms of how did critical making evolve in public perception during the time of the pandemic? Saad, what would you say? Well, I think we've seen a phenomenal response, a global response from makers to meet the needs of what the pandemic has surfaced. I mean, I think there's a phenomenal potential here in the nature of this response, but if we remember about a year or so ago, and I know time is broken because of COVID, but about a year or so ago, there was the shortage of personal protective equipment, PPE, and people came forward in order to try and help. And it wasn't just healthcare workers. It wasn't just social workers. It was anybody and everybody who had skills or knowledge or experience tried to find a way to make themselves useful. And this happening on a global scale in response to something like the personal shortage of PPE drew out a lot of critical makers, as in makers who were quite comfortable with how 3D printers work or how makerspaces work and trying to apply that to a social need, which I think is remarkable in of itself. But on a global scale, I think that that potential is phenomenal there. All of us have had to find ways to adapt digitally and go online and do things remotely. And I really miss having a CCC in person, for example, and the global innovation gathering hasn't happened in person. So I really do miss that. And I'm looking forward to a time where we're able to meet in person again, trying to stay optimistic. But we're still not out of it yet. The pandemic is still very much something we're adapting to, something that we're responding to. And to answer your question, what's changed, I feel, is that people are now more involved. People who are normally sort of in their own makerspaces bubble or in their tech bubble or in their hackerspace bubble are now more involved and more engaged and recognized for the skills to be relevant to a social cause. So I think moving forward, I would like to see us try and tap on that potential as much as possible. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, the space we're in at the moment, the Exxine hack and make space was like at the forefront together with, of course, many other spaces in Germany to produce such protective equipment. And if you see around us now, you also see like lots of figurines of, I don't know, Yoda hats, for example, and many other things that bring joy to making as well. And that, for example, help to educate about which tools to use, for example. And then, yeah, looking in what you're doing in Singapore with creating toys for children with disabilities, what you're also sharing in the talk two years ago, where they can interact with like big buttons instead of like tiny, tiny things that they can't really touch and interact with. That's also bringing lots of joy. And it's not only always to counter a pandemic, but it was there before. And now, I think it's very, yeah, more in mainstream. Well, it was for a time more arriving in mainstream that this is really, yeah, a movement or movements to follow and to contribute to as well. So what we often do, and this is the next slide, is we create a Horizon 2020 proposal for things we want to do. And so this is my work, actually, to, yeah, bring in funding that lasts us for two and a half years, for example, in this case, to really further research, to collaborate with researchers as a civil society organisation ourselves and to be able to work together globally on a specific project and on a specific topic. So in the craziness of the beginning of the pandemic, we found that critical making is the one topic that is not very researched and that we can contribute to as a network and also connecting with Regina as part of the TU Berlin and other organisations that you see here with Vicky Factory. That's a global platform for makers to share designs, for example, and to find a community of other designers and makers and the Centre for Social Innovation in Austria and also VTT in Finland. So we produced this project together that got finally accepted by the European Union, which was really nice. And so we're now thankful for getting support for the research we're doing now in critical making. So this was after Congress that we wrote this. And the main goal, and you see this on the next slide, is to help maker communities to work with anyone to contribute to open source innovation. And so from these very complex research frameworks that Horizon 2020 is using, like the responsible research and innovation framework and others, we found that it connects very well with values that also we want to further contribute to, like openness, like inclusion. And so we selected a few of those. We selected gender diversity. We selected young talents, we call it, because in such proposals, you often have to use language that speaks to the funder. And we also selected openness as a very broad term also to research on. And today I would like to show you a little bit of what's already happened, because we're now at the end of the first year of the project and show you a bit what we're up to as well. So to just give you a very tiny glimpse into what we did in the gender work package, we work with different spaces, different makers in several countries. And in this case, I brought two examples of case studies that will be published soon about different spaces. The one is Ms. Baltazar Laboratory in Austria, which I highly recommend to check out. And then there were like many different more and also Exxine. And of course, I need to show that here as we are in Exxine at the moment. And this is super nice, because of course, if you think about gender, many people would assume it's only about inclusion of women, of girls in makerspaces. But of course, it's like to have an understanding of the multitude of genders and also to include everyone also have a nice space for people identifying as male, female and many other genders. And in this case, it's just so nice also about Exxine that they are not saying like we have space for women or we have space for only for a specific kind of nerd. But we want to be very, very inclusive and very safe for everyone. So that's just very tiny examples. You will find online more in our deliverables. We call that the reports that we have to hand in to the European Union and that we then, after handing them in, we take snippets out of these and publish them in a more like human interaction format that people outside of academia can also read better and watch better. Then the next one you see in slide nine is Young Talents, which we basically make about maker education for young people. And there you already find online. And that's the next slide, the review of measures to integrate young people into maker community. And there we looked mostly only at Germany at the moment and want to be creating this for other countries as well. So if you're interested in this part of the project, you can already download like the full report, the first one. But you can also reach out to us and contribute to the next steps. And then the part in the next slide is Openness, which is the one that I want to be talking a little bit more about. Because that's the one where we're mostly working together here. So for Openness, you see in the next slide, there was some academic article now published, which is a literature review on the Openness Practices and which is like very directed for researchers, of course. But we're also starting to make talks like this about what was found out by our colleagues who were doing the literature review. So in the next slide, you see a little bit more accessible. What they found is that Openness, as probably all of you also know, is one of the core values of global maker movements. But as you probably also all know, there are lots and lots of different interpretations and ways of practicing this. So we can speak about open hardware, which is probably one of the most obvious for many of the people just watching this because it's also something we speak at Chaos Congress all the time. So like sharing what you're making in open repositories, for example, creating very easy tech, like frugal tech, customizing things. So that's all integral part of open hardware, I would say. Then we found other aspects that are strong in the literature as well. Like Openness can also be understood as inclusion and empowerment of, for example, of people with disabilities, but also generally consumers or ethnic minorities. So all different kinds of inclusions that one could think of is very like one of the core things. I think also as like Hacker Ethics is concerned, but that is maybe not always in our minds. And then also very important economic growth, especially if we look at the global scale of the maker movement. So that we have open business models, for example, and high innovation activities and in the field. And so this already shows also lots of tension. So I would like to go to the next slide where you see the tensions identified in the scientific literature. So there's lots of tension between different economic stances like people who want to have their maker practice mostly for leisure purposes, mostly for also uncapitalistic or anti-capitalistic purposes. So this is quite an important tension to identify and also to work around. Then tensions arising from different imaginaries of the future role of making. Like do you use it in a revolutionary sense or in a sense that contributes to the current status of the capitalist system, for example. And then also, of course, always that's maybe the least important finding between individual and collective orientations where you often have like what do I do and what is good for society is something that's always important to go forward with as a discussion. So these are the scientific findings from this article. Not all of them, of course. Please read the article also, there's more in it. And do you want to add something, Sir? Sorry, because you will bring more examples of these different tensions, I guess. Yeah, I mean, my perspective is always the sort of hands-on learning by example kind of approach for the more academic perspective. I turn to Regina and people who are with the academic communities. I can't really speak to that perspective, but to add to what you've already said, I think the nature of the work, at least from my perspective, being all hands-on does meet a lot of resistance with these restrictions of the whole pandemic situation. So I'm hoping that we are going to see more examples of people coming forward with a more constructive mindset and the ability to share, because we've seen examples of this in response to the pandemic. And some of that is now starting to show up in people's mindset. And when people who are normally not so engaged engineering good where I volunteer depends entirely on volunteers. And sometimes people show up once a week, once one weekend a month to volunteer and then they go back into their day-to-day lives and we see them every now and again when they have the time. But in the last few, in the recent past, we've seen a different kind of volunteer, a different kind of mindset that they bring into their work. And it seems a little bit more motivated, I feel. And so the work that we've been doing in the past, this idea of being open and to share and to be able to look into other people's work and try and replicate it. That aspect is starting to be more welcomed by these volunteers. It's not seen as an alien idea. It's not like you have to sort of workshop it and get people comfortable with this idea. And in Asian cultures, that more of that is necessary, I feel. But the remarkable difference, I think, I don't know if this is just me, but from what I've seen, the mindset has shifted and people are more open to trying new things and also sharing what they've tried rather than waiting until they get to a point where something works and then they share it. So the process that they're going through is something that you don't, at least with Asian sensibilities, you tend not to share it. You would think that it's not good enough or it's not fully formed yet. So you tend to keep it to yourself or just a few people that you're working with and it never gets documented, it never gets shared. But I'm starting to see more examples of this. Yeah, I think that's not only Asian problem, but we have it everywhere that you have so many projects or products that people create that are prototypes to a certain stage and then you either don't have time for it anymore or you just feel like you can't finish it and it never gets documented. So that's also one of the issues we found and identified when we met in 2019 in Kenya, in Nakuru with the Global Innovation Gathering in a workshop kind of conference. And we came up with what is shared on the next slide. The principles of sustainable making and sustainable is here not only environmentally but also what you would call maybe responsible or with purpose. So do you want to share a little bit more about that? Well, the process behind this was mind-boggling to me. The sort of energy that was in the room at the time when we were discussing this was sort of, for me at least, very hard to keep up with. And the challenge was to try and encapsulate what the sort of very diverse perspectives that were coming in all at the same time because with the Global Innovation Gathering and many other groups of that sort, there's a lot of diversity and the nature of the people who are working on maker spaces and co-working spaces or startup enterprise type of ecosystems or hacker spaces, they're very socially engaged and it tends to be in response to the local environment in which they exist. So the learnings and the sort of mindset that they have and they bring to this particular topic that we're talking about unlocked a whole world of opinions and perspectives and all of that was flooding in into this room after having gone through the sort of ice-breaking thing it was all just pouring in and it was very difficult to sort of sort out what was happening. So the process was a mess. And if you look at the image now it's very neat and clean and tidy but I feel every single aspect of what's being portrayed here is a representation of this diversity in an international on a global scale and all of this was just before the pandemic and the idea of this global perspective bringing it through times of crisis I think is phenomenal. I mean, I could go on and on about it but that's just what I think at the point. Yeah, thank you. And yeah, I also feel it's phenomenal and we tried to replicate these kind of sessions and workshops online and to have big right boards together but yeah, I'm very happy that we also got to build this still in person and so we came up with these five principles of integrate local knowledge, of make things that make sense, of share how you make like that's one of the openness factors of course built for continuity and also include ecosystem services. So look around you and look what's already there and also contribute back to what's around you. And based on these and what we already talked about in critical making we built this project and while I was away for three months and didn't look at any email and recharged this year the project team also updated this for our project. So that we now look at being local and connected have like a social background and what you're doing at the criticality so be reflexive, have an impact and change structures and adding to it the joyful and meaningful that we didn't found in our principles back then which is we of course always think that's part of it, hopefully. So adding some glitter is always necessary. So this from that slide is what we're now working with in the critical making principles basically and where we are also building upon it in the next steps of the project. So I would like to share what we're now working on in the next few months which is on the next slide the critical making mentoring program which is to be starting to have an open call in January or early February and then we'll go through we'll go on for the whole year. So on the next slide you see why are we doing this? We did like a small survey within our own circles and again found that openness also for everybody in the global innovation gathering community is very important value which we knew but it's nice to see it again. And then also the economic opportunities of making are very important. So we're thinking about lower income countries sometimes but also if you look at high income countries there's so many volunteer projects like projects you're doing in your free time that in the end you would like to find somehow a way to further work on them than what is possible without any like economic background to add to it. And then also inclusion was recognized again as an important topic like including for example people with lower technical skills and also for example having making more accessible for people with disabilities. So we're looking at that and on the next slide you see I'm trying to live up to the value of sharing early like one of those online mindboards of whiteboards of seeing what we want to be doing in the year in this project where we're having mentoring workshops throughout the summer and we will hopefully in the end have an amazing demo week or demo day where we also give a reward for people who participated and we're still in this last phase of co-designing that program to prepare the open call. So I'm inviting you watching now already to watch our space to maybe apply for the program or share it also with others who could be interested in it. And last but not least, I would like to share a few tools and resources we're currently assembling. So one of the things we're preparing for the next two months I think is toolkits for researchers and for makers. And you see on the next slide one example of a tool for makers to learn about open hardware and I hope you all know this already but if not check out this open hardware makers program. It's an amazing resource to learn like the basics of open hardware. We collected you see on the next slide lots and lots of different resources for people to look at and this is just the first page of a long list that we want to publish in the next weeks for people to look at and to add to. And then the last bit I want to be sharing is the self-reflection slider tool. And this is what you find on the slider tool page and where we also look at the different categories of the principles and where we use this tool once we start with the mentoring program for people to just reflect back on their own making on their own projects and where we have the idea that this would be like a game and sad you created that idea together with a few other people also in Singapore to just have like a needle to spin and then you don't always answer it in the same like one after the other question but you can really make it also a little bit more fun. So on the next page you see how this was created also from messy slides back when we were meeting in person and so how it evolved. And on the next slide you see some guiding cards that should help you to actually think about what to ask yourself like how do you think about what makes sense or how do you think about being self-sustainable and to share a few questions around this. So you in the end have like a card game that you can have in every makerspace and you can make a workshop around it and work with other people in the makerspace to speak about that. So and then on the last page you see how to follow the project and how to contribute to it also in the VikiFactory community and where we will also be launching the calls on these platforms very soon in the next year which is basically tomorrow. And if you're watching this in January it's maybe already there or in February. Now I would say Carl can come back. Yes, thank you very much for the talk. Before now we have a few more minutes for a quick Q and A session. And before we start that I want to remind the viewers and listeners that you can ask questions for this talk using Twitter and Mastodon using the hashtag rc3xhine and you can also ask questions on IRC on Hackint using the channel rc3-xine. And we already got a few questions in and many of them are asking where they can find more information. So you already showed the link just now. Is everything you talked about can be found on there I think? Not everything is published yet. Many of the things I just showed are also still work in progress. And if somebody is eager to have it immediately we can of course share our internal boards with people but otherwise we always continuously publish things on the website to find, yeah. Okay, so the people just have to follow you on Twitter and look at your website and reach out directly to you. Then the next question I got here was what is frugal tech exactly? Do you want to answer that? It's an interesting question. I mean, if depending on who you ask it'll probably get co-opted as a new buzzword or a hashtag especially if you talk to the VC venture capitalist sort of world. But the way I see it is sort of like borrowing from the disruptive mindset where you look at what is available in the marketplace and find a lower cost alternative for it. And when you look at the assistive tech marketplace when you work with persons with disabilities and you look at the devices that are available they suffer from high prices because of supply and demand and you have a fairly small or relatively small market and the cost of production of a specialized device is quite high. So the products that you find in the assistive tech marketplace tend to be very expensive. And when you look at it it could be as simple as just like a button which you just press the button and something happens. And the button itself costs like $65 and it doesn't quite make sense to me that this is a thing but that is what you will find in the marketplace. So to answer the question I think frugal tech or frugal innovation is to sort of think outside the box of the normal or at least the established workflow of making a product that is this expensive to take the end price or the user perspective as the starting point and then figure out the value chain from behind it or the cost of production from that point onwards. And in a maker space that happens all the time you are working with things that you're not entirely sure of. So instead of starting with something really, really expensive you start with something that is cheap and cheerful something that you can have lots of if you break one it's okay you can always try it on another one. And then when you're confident with that you translate what you've learned into something that's a little bit more expensive. So that I think approach speaks to I think what people are calling now frugal tech or frugal innovation. My very short answer would have been that's just low cost because the easiest I would be able to come up with but that's way more colorful now I hope for everybody. Yes, and thank you for the great explanation. The next question we have is how does this movement or how do you include people who are not that interested in politics or the political side of making and just want to build cool stuff? How do you do that in Singapore? Well, Singapore is very easy because the political scene in Singapore is quite how should we put this? Not very exciting. And I don't really care much for politics either whether it be like the government level or internal politics within large companies I just don't have the mental capacity for wrapping my head around that. So I really like to just do things. And I find that with a physical thing it's easier to talk about something it sort of crystallizes what your ideas are even if the thing is made out of posted notes or cardboard or cable ties and duct tape just having that little physical tangible prototype helps focus the attention on the thing that you're trying to solve. So the conversation I find becomes solution oriented rather than ideological or process or about manufacturing principles or design ideologies or even political ones. So I find that it doesn't work all the time but having something tangible really helps to sort of bring that point back to the solution that you're talking about. Yeah, and adding to that, there's always like so many different levels of politics. So maybe you're not interested in global or national or whatever politics but you're still interested to help your own community around you. So if you look at, I don't know, sensors for air quality or if you look at providing Republic Wi-Fi for people or all these things are very political in one way and very, not very political in another way like depending on how you want to look at them. So I think there will be like areas to contribute for anyone like whether it's for their own grandma or whether it's for like a whole school class in the end, that's not so important. Okay, very interesting. So I think now our time for Q&A is almost over. So I want to thank both of you again for having this really interesting talk here at our X sign Lichtungs stage and want to thank all the viewers for watching. And our next talk will happen in a bit more than an hour at 4 p.m. It's the Kars Radio 247 reverse engineering, Kochen, Nen, Breakpoints. And I hope we'll see you all there. Yeah, and maybe one last tiny commercial if you're still there. Go to the open hardware happy hour and also go to on the last day to the prototype fund hardware announcements. So don't miss that.