Making selves through making things

Securely Making "Things" Right

The Internet is already half a century old, but the fear of an incident that will cripple the Web and render its applications unusable is as real as it was in 1988 when the Morris worm—the first of its kind—appeared. Admittedly, the Internet’s architects didn’t anticipate its use for malicious acts. Actually, most of the early design efforts focused on overcoming the technical hurdles of creati...

Making Things Happen

We explore some logics of change, focusing on commands to change the world in such a way that certain elementary propositions become true or false. This investigation starts out from the following two simplifying assumptions: (1) the world is a collection of facts (Wittgenstein), and (2), the world can be changed by changing elementary facts (Marx). These assumptions allow us to study the logic...

From Hacking Things to Making Things. Rethinking making by supporting non-expert users in a FabLab

When discussing maker culture, much attention is dedicated to how making can be beneficial for specific fields (e.g. healthcare, education) or various communities of makers (e.g. educators, crafters). The democratic ideal of personal fabrication and the maker culture movement represented by the growth of open makerspaces (e.g. FabLabs, makerspaces) and online communities (e.g. ‘Instructables’, ...

Boundaries and Selves in the Making of ‘ Science ’

Comments on Woodward, Making Things Happen

I welcome the chance to revisit my review of Making Things Happen and the book itself (Woodward 2003; Strevens 2007) in the light of Woodward’s response to the review (henceforth “Woodward’s reply”). In what follows I hope to provide a surer footing for some of the claims made in the original review, to address the new definition of unrelativized causation proposed in Woodward’s reply, and to e...