![\"Eric](\"http:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/DSC_3272.jpg\")
<\/a>\u201cWhat do you want to make?\u201d<\/p>\n
This was the first question that Eric Renn, founder of SoDo MakerSpace (SMS), asked me when I first visited just over a year ago, and it caught me off guard. I\u2019ve been a professional writer for a decade\u2014first in industry, then in academia\u2014but I\u2019ve never thought of myself as a maker<\/em>. And I had certainly never used the tools and machines I saw, many of them for the first time, in SMS. I was intrigued and determined to learn more about SMS and about the relationship of writing and rhetoric to other forms of making, especially given our field\u2019s interest in materiality and, specifically, in making (Haas, 2007; Powell, 2012; Sheridan, 2010; Sherrill, 2015), tinkering (Craig, 2014; Sayers, 2011), hacking (Ballentine, 2009; Cummings, 2013), and crafting (Prins, 2015).<\/p>\n Over the last year, I’ve been collecting ethnographic data for my dissertation, which is a rhetorical case study of making practices in SMS.* I\u2019ve watched SMS, which had only been officially open a few months when I first visited, grow and evolve. I\u2019ve learned the stories of the makers, machines, and projects in SMS, and I\u2019ve experienced the exhilaration of \u201cgoing from idea to object\u201d\u2014as Eric describes the process of iteration\u2014using technologies I\u2019d never imagined I\u2019d use, like a laser cutter or a 3D printer. And these experiences have changed the way I think about writing and rhetoric. For example, practices of rapid prototyping I\u2019ve observed and discussed with makerspace participants have given me useful ways to approach writing about my research in my dissertation.<\/p>\n I have also seen my own thinking about the relationship of writing and rhetoric to other forms of making change. When I began this dissertation project, I was thinking about how makerspaces might inform or even transform how we teach and study writing and rhetoric. I wondered how studying the making and transfer of knowledge across 3D fabrication tools in a highly collaborative, creative space might help us better theorize and teach rhetorical dexterity as students compose across media, genres, and languages. I wondered how teaching 3D printing alongside alphabetic writing might help students transfer rhetorical skills across modalities and media. At the same time, as I have talked about my project with colleagues and mentors, I\u2019ve been asked many times how and why studying a makerspace is relevant to composition. These were the initial questions with which I approached my dissertation research, and my work toward answering these questions has led me to more questions. These new questions\u2014which I’m sharing below\u2014are the questions that I am considering now as I’m writing the data chapters of my dissertation and thinking about what I’ve learned in the makerspace.<\/p>\n The relationship of writing and rhetoric to making<\/strong>. It has been tempting, in justifying my project to curious (or skeptical) colleagues, to follow the \u201ceverything is writing\u201d (or \u201ceverything is rhetoric\u201d) line of argument described by Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes (2014). But Alexander and Rhodes pointed out that everything is not, in fact, writing, and that we ought to acknowledge the different logics and affordances of different media. In my conversations in SMS, I\u2019ve found that sometimes people see similarities between writing and 3D making, but sometimes they don\u2019t. As I consider 3D making practices in relation to my own writing practices, some of the strategies and terminology\u2014like rapid prototyping (instead of drafting) and failing fast (in addition to or instead of revising), for example\u2014do seem to map onto writing in interesting ways. But sometimes the processes and products of 3D making do more to highlight the differences between alphabetic writing and 3D making. For example, when Tony Loiseleur, one of the makers in SMS, introduced me to the 3D printed object in the above gif, he didn’t describe or name or explain it; he just handed it to me, and I was immediately enthralled with the infinite, kaleidoscopic motion. Even when I asked for a name to describe the object, he demurred, pointing out that “sometimes you don’t have to\u00a0say<\/em> so much as just\u00a0show<\/em>.” (Eventually, when he found it on Thingiverse<\/a> again to print another one, he shared that it’s called a “spatial manipulation toy” there.)<\/p>\n Furthermore, I find that there is more going on than humans persuading other humans with linguistic, gestural, or 3D rhetoric: there are interactions between humans, machines, and objects that challenge the subjectivity, individuality, and intentionality traditionally associated with the rhetor\/writer. And while some of these entangled, more-than-human interactions also describe the highly networked and distributed ways in which we write, I have become less convinced that we should expand definitions of “writing” and “rhetoric” to include the more-than-discourse and more-than-human and more compelled, instead, to attend to the entangled and differential processes by which things like “human,” “machine,” “writer,” “maker,” and “rhetoric” come to be recognized as such (or not recognized as such). This has led me to ask methodological questions like<\/p>\n Inclusivity and Access<\/strong>.<\/em> One thing I\u2019ve been struck by, in my conversations with people in SMS and in my research on conversations in the maker movement, is the tension between goals to democratize access to fabrication technologies and the reality that SMS, like the maker movement, tends to skew male and white (Maker Media\u2019s own research on maker faire participants confirms this). Eric and his colleagues at SMS are aware of this issue and have expressed from the beginning a commitment to making the space inclusive for women and people of color.<\/p>\n Clarissa San Diego, a co-founder of SMS and an international community strategist specializing in growth hacking and community management for hardware, IoT, and maker industries, is passionate about diversity in tech. She believes the lack of diversity in hardware\u2014including the 3D fabrication technologies associated with the maker movement\u2014is an issue of environment, of \u201cseeing someone like you.\u201d (Sylvia Martinez [2015] made a similar observation<\/a>.) While Clarissa and her colleagues engage in the work of advocating for more diversity, others, such as Debbie Chachra (2015)<\/a> and Amy Nguyen (2015)<\/a>, have pointed out that the privileging of the kinds of making associated with the maker movement and the tech industry in general is a gendered privileging of traditionally male practices. And as Sarah Fox, Rachel Rose Ulgado, and Daniela Rosner (2015) have observed<\/a>, feminist hackerspaces are emerging to provide alternatives to male-dominated hackerspace environments. Furthermore, as Kate Losse (2016)<\/a> has noted, “failing fast” and “failing upward” are entangled with privilege: especially being white, male, and connected to capital. This suggests to me that as we consider the exciting and expansive possibilities of exploring 3D fabrication in relation to writing, we should also consider the ways in which these technologies and the practices and values surrounding them are not neutral. This has led me to ask questions like<\/p>\n These are some of questions I\u2019m pondering, and I hope to hear from you\u2014in the comments here, and in future conversations\u2014your thoughts on these questions and what questions you\u2019re considering.<\/p>\n *My study was reviewed and exempted by my institution’s Human Subjects Division.<\/p>\n References:<\/p>\n Alexander, J., & Rhodes, J. (2014). On multimodality: New media in composition studies<\/em>. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English\/Conference on College Composition and Communication.<\/p>\n Ballentine, B. D. (2009, Fall). Hacker ethics & Firefox extensions: Writing and teaching the \u2018grey\u2019 areas of web 2.0.\u00a0Computers and Composition Online<\/em>.<\/p>\n Banks, A. (2006). Race, rhetoric, and technology : Searching for higher ground.<\/em> Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.<\/p>\n Chachra, D. (2015). Why I am not a maker. The Atlantic<\/em>. Retrieved from http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2015\/01\/why-i-am-not-a-maker\/384767\/<\/a><\/p>\n Craig, J. (2014). Makers and makerspaces: Teaching composition in a creative economy. Pearson<\/em>. http:\/\/unwrite.org\/pearson\/<\/a><\/p>\n Cummings, R. E. (2009). Lazy virtues: Teaching writing in the age of Wikipedia<\/em>. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.<\/p>\n Fox, S., Ulgado, R. R., & Rosner, D. K. (2015). Hacking culture, not devices: Access and recognition in feminist hackerspaces. In Proceedings of CSCW \u201915<\/em>, March 14-18, 2015, Vancouver, BC, Canada. http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1145\/2675133.2675223<\/p>\n Haas, A. (2007). Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice. Studies in American Indian Literatures 19(4): 77-100.<\/p>\n Maker Media. (2015). Fact sheet. Retrieved from http:\/\/makermedia.com\/press\/fact-sheet\/.<\/p>\n Martinez, S. (2015). Making for all: how to build an inclusive makerspace. edSurge<\/em>. Retreived from https:\/\/www.edsurge.com\/news\/2015-05-10-making-for-all-how-to-build-an-inclusive-makerspace<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\n
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