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"Otto von Busch examines how power is and can be manifested through the material practice of craft and design. Whereas the state's power takes concrete form in infrastructre such as roads, bridges, pipes, walls, fences, cables and cameras, craft objects and craft practice can be used to challenge the power of the capitalist state. Von Busch draws on the political philosophy of William Morris, Mohandas Gandhi and the Zapatistas to trace crafting's radical potential to disrupt the apparatus of market and state. His case studies of radical crafting around the world include craft practices so controversial they are outlawed: moonshining, lock-picking, shoplifting, smuggling, sabotage, Molotov cocktails and other DIY weapons, medical clinics that operate outside state control and the manufacture of unlicensed medicine in the context of unaffordable pharmaceuticals. Von Busch then turns to more positive and hopeful examples of a radical craft practice, drawing on the ideas of what crafts teacher William Coperthwaite calls "socially valid design," where the cultivation of skills and capabilities intersects with the development of civic praxis and social justice. Referencing the infamous CIA Freedom Fighter's Manual alongside the classic Anarchist Cookbook, he explores how craft can disseminate civic skills and autonomy instead of violence. The book concludes on a hopeful note on how designers can help materialize political "thing-power" as part of a strategic progress towards more democratic incarnations of the civic realm, and ultimately use "socially valid" design and craft to work towards justice and peace"--
List of contents
PrefaceBack to Matter
Activist Making
Affirmative Making
1. Power in the MakingPrimitive Making
Matters and Materials
Making between Matter and Meta
2. State MetaxuMetaxu
State Space - State Matter
State Meta in the Matter
3. Making MattersMaking Leverage
Finding Material Leverage
The Contents of Political Matters
4. Making AgencyMaking Change, Making Resistance
Making Material Agency
Manipulating Meta
5. Doing and sittingSitting is Not Only Sitting
Royal Crafts and Citizen Consumption
Resistant Sitting
Seated Democracies
6. Recursive MattersIntensity vs Scale
Making Means and Ends Meet
Pulsation
7. Strategic ObjectilesMaterial Mobilization
Tactical Presence and its Limitations
Stitch for Senate
8. Material Counter-intelligenceMaterial Intelligence
Artus and Metis
The Cookies of Cunning
9. Brewing DissentControlled Substances, Controlled Crafts
Misuse and Mischief
Buckets of Evidence
10. Designing BackMaking Civics Tangible
Design and Activism
Material Civic Dissidence
11. Trouble Making and Counter-craftsDangerous Makings
Mapping Material Activism
12. Make it SimpleMaking Action Spaces
Making Calisthenics
Stay Matter!
About the author
Otto von Busch is Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design, USA. He holds a PhD in design from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and was previously Professor of Textiles at Konstfack University, Sweden. He has published articles in The Design Journal, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, Fashion Practice, CoDesign Journal, The Journal of Modern Craft, Textile Cloth and Culture, Craft Research, Organizational Aesthetics, Creative Industries Journal and the Journal for Artistic Research, and has contributed chapters on design activism to The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design (2017), The Routledge Companion to Design Research (2015), The Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion (2014), as well as other design anthologies.
Summary
Making hacks into reality. It engages matter in ways that trespass the boundaries between the civic realm and the state-assigned laws. Even with primitive tools and skills, designing and making can break open and repurpose arrangements of power. The proof is that some crafts are so controversial—lock-picking, moonshining, shoplifting, smuggling, sabotage—that they need to be controlled or even outlawed. When designers and makers touch on these contested realms, they run into trouble. This highly original book explores how the material power of design and making can challenge arrangements of agency and domination. Unpacking a series of conflicting cases—from illegal making to the strategic and civic use of crafts to manifest radical alternatives to the current order—it shows how designers and makers can use even basic tools to work towards more.
Additional text
Making Trouble is a fabulous book. It offers an original and timely intervention in scholarly and activist debates and has the added benefit of being beautifully written. I fully expect it will become an instant classic in cross-disciplinary research and contentious political practice.
