Christine Henseler, Union College
Atsushi Akera, RPI
Ellen Foster, RPI
1:00-1:30 Invited Speaker: Jentery Sayers, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Victoria,
“Prototyping as Inquiry in the Arts and Humanities”
Presentations:
Ellen Foster, RPI
Jenn Karson and Doug Webster, University of Vermont
Ariel Nereson, Vassar College
John Rieffel, Union College
Margot Vigeant, Bucknell University
Maker spaces draw on many different cultural elements, from the traditional crafts, to high-tech entrepreneurship, to urban countercultures and even class-based oppositional movements. While there are also clear humanistic and aesthetic dimensions to the movement, both in the artifacts produced in maker spaces, as well as in the institutional forms created to support maker spaces, these two aspects of maker spaces have yet to receive full articulation.
At the 2015 Union College Symposium, we’d like to convene a NY6 Think Tank session for exploring the humanistic and aesthetic dimensions of the contemporary maker spaces movement, and of maker culture as a whole. We are fortunate to have as our opening speaker Jentry Sayers, editor of “Making Humanities Matter. His talk will be on “Prototyping as Inquiry in the Arts and Humanities””and will help set the tone for the activities to follow. This will be followed by brief presentations by those who have been involved in creating maker spaces with the “issues” (and opportunities) surrounding the arts and humanities that have arisen in the design and development of their spaces. (We will be using a modified Pecha-Kucha format—15 slides @ 20 seconds each). We will then divide up into teams that will be tasked not only to explore, but to create (i.e. make) solutions for the issue or issues they identified through a variety of structured activities ranging from concept generation to the aesthetic rendering of their ideas, and documenting these ideas both through auto-ethnography and the collection of our output. As consistent with the concept of the NY6 Think Tank, our ultimate goal will be that of producing a public article, blog, performance piece, installation, and/or student exercises and learning modules that will help disseminate the ideas that we produce during this hands-on concept-building session.