Creating synergies between traditional crafts and Fablab Making Exploring digital mold-making for glassblowing

Traditional crafts and the Maker movement have in the last decade to some extent been evolving in parallel, with little intermingling. We held an experimental five day workshop with six experienced craftspeople “traditional” glassblowers while providing modern digital Fablab production apparatus; specifically 3D printers and CNC (Computer Numerical Control) routers to explore possibilities and synergies in working with a traditional craft in conjunction with new generalized digital production possibilities. This paper summarizes seven generalisable takeaways that highlight relevant reflections on the potential for cross-fertilization and learning, enriching the repertoire of both the “traditional” craft and the Fablab, based on a shared interest in exploring aesthetic material exploration and production. Author keywords Making; Fablabs; digital fabrication; traditional craft; craftsmanship; glass blowing; form making; CNC cutting; 3D printing; glass; disruption; synergy Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. CC-BY. Creative Commons Attribution. You are free to copy and redistribute the material provided you give appropriate credit. FabLearn Europe'18​, June 18, 2018, Trondheim, Norway © 2018 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5371-7/18/06. https://doi.org/10.1145/3213818.3213821 Figure 1. Moulding glass in a form made of CNC cut plywood, steam and smoke escaping. INTRODUCTION The Maker movement [11,1] has somewhat been a hobbyist movement initiated by the creative middle class, but is now gaining a stronger foothold within academia [22] as a foundation for learning through making and enabling non-technical people to prototype with technology and materials [24]. Figure 2. Resulting glass artefacts. For Kalil [18] makers are ‘‘people who design and make things on their own time because they find it intrinsically rewarding to make, tinker, problem-solve, discover, and share what they have learned’’. In that sense the ‘maker movement’ signals a broad revolution in manufacturing partly drawing on a resurgence of DIY cultures and returns to ‘crafting’ [12]. Hence, the ‘maker movement’ has flourished through the last decade, not least because of the increased availability of working spaces such as the increasing number of Fablabs [5] around the world. Fablabs, often growing from technologists, hacker culture and computer scientists, utilise computer controlled machines, almost to a fault. It is often easy to recognise an artefact created in a Fablab because of the specific processes available, which form both the aesthetics and the functionality. Laser cutting, 3D print, CNC milling and Arduino are common, other materials and processes less common. The movement has thus evolved in parallel with and, to some extent, without the accumulated knowledge and wider palette of processes and materials available to, “traditional“ craft such as woodworking, ceramics or metalworking. In other words Fablabbing and Making have to some extent evolved in separate “silos”, and while new domains and crafts are increasingly being explored by DIY makers, at the same time as new digital technologies for fabrication are being introduced, there is a possibility that they may grow even further apart. We wondered if it would be possible to challenge this tendency and find ways to build bridges and utilize potential synergies between the two worlds. In other words we need to explore more fully how ‘Making’ is related to the tacit knowledge accumulated by crafting practices [15,17], and transplant this to current understandings of Making in a Fablabbing context. Methodology: Workshop as a shared learning space Traditional learning formats sometimes have the connotations of learning as a transfer of knowledge from a skilled teacher to a student, typically within an institutional frame with clear assessment criteria [8], i.e. concepts like scaffolding [25] and nearest Zone of proximal development [26]. However as Martin [22] points out (see also Ingold on ‘learning to learn’ [16]), another set of qualities are at play in the Maker perspective. Play itself becomes a dominant way of experimenting while learning through Making. The “students” have a substantial say in what and how they are going to make. Learning happens in linked communities across disciplines. Learning within this workshop was thus a product of a shared playful approach to experimenting with techniques across different disciplines. Concretely, the following four principles framed the creative learning process: ● Provide space for multiple stakeholders to have a shared conversation. ● Have a wide array of machinery and tools from both fields available. ● Have skilled technical support structures around both fields as equal participants in the workshop. ● Create a framing to inspire possible outcomes, but give full autonomy to emergent collaborations between different stakeholders. The four principles served as a basis for our research approach. Gaver [6], Redström, Zimmerman [27] argue for research through design as a way to engage with practical design explorations as a route of discovery to create knowledge contributions that are generative for others in their design processes. Methodologically this project has been framed as an open minded discovery process whereas this paper represents a set of takeaways as a simple form of annotations on the overall portfolio of experiments done during the exploration. While the case is about glassblowing, the takeaways are framed in such a way that they are generative for others [7] across a potentially wide range of craft-like disciplines and Maker endeavours. Glassblowing To become a master glassblower requires years of practice. The basis of glassblowing techniques have been relatively consistent for decades. There is a craftsman praxis, generations of embodied knowledge, [23] which partly already defines itself as in opposition to machine and factory produced glass. How do we bring machines and robots into this self-understanding with the framing of possibilities, not threats? Traditional glassblowing is essentially a technique in which a glassblower picks up molten glass from a furnace with a pipe (a hollow metal rod). By blowing into the pipe while continuously turning the pipe, the glass blower is able create a ball shaped form which can be shaped either by expanding it further in forms, or by shaping it by hand with metal tools and wet paper. To gain a greater understanding of the possibilities in a meeting of cultures, ​Fablab RUC coordinated a Maker/Fablab workshop for artists and researchers in glass blowing with and at the ​Glass Factory​, a ‘living museum’ with glassblowing studio facilities. WORKSHOP: EXPLORING DIGITAL MOLD-MAKING The five day workshop with eight participants was held at the ​Glass Factory in Boda, southern Sweden, from September 25th. 2017. We choose to frame the workshop around exploring ways to support processes without fundamentally rethinking the craft of glassblowing. This meant that we focused on how digital fabrication could support glass blowing by developing new tools and forms that could be used in the process of shaping glass at the end of the pipes. Throughout the one week workshop various artists explored many different avenues of mold making, experienced glassblowers teaming up and working with experienced digital practitioners. Multiple participants already possessed some cross-disciplinary skills and knowledge. The agenda circled around expanding the possibility space of the combination of hot glass and experimental CNC cut forms. Figure 3. Display of a variety of experimental static and dynamic digitally produced molds. The workshop had a Maker perspective on two levels. The actual explorations were about the synergies between the digital mold making and the traditional craft. Furthermore, this was done from/with a Maker perspective or method rapid, explorative iterations of solutions we were not sure whether would work, well knowing that the time cost of cutting another, slightly modified form was low. This was in contrast to the ingrained culture and experience of the craftsmen which was that a mold represented days of handwork and damaging one was a major mishap. This approach was an antithesis to a classical purposeful design strategy. We did want to get the design right in a Buxton [3] ‘sketching’ perspective, but there was no utilitarian overarching perspective. The interest was “what will happen we have a bunch of Fablab machines and embed them in a very different context? ” How can this tool be used in interesting ways when working with hot glass? It is thus a “what if” perspective on the Maker movement [10] or an exploratory perspective on research through design [14]. The framing of the workshop had the clear intention of a non-hierarchical perspective of exploring the synergies [15]. There were no expectations of one perspective teaching the other the “right way to do it” instead considering it as two heterogeneous practices with unique knowledge to contribute to each other. The Makers came with a large technical knowledge about digital production and using digital production machinery. The glass blowers came with a large understanding of the intricacies of glass blowing, the material, and the form making traditions. It was important for us to offer these machines “on the glassblowers turf”, offering a political agenda of empowering and agency, not obsolescence, replacement or efficiency. In the Fablab movement, we talk about democratisation of access to machinery for people who previously could not Make, b