Critical Making Evaluation Report
Creators: name: Åkerman, Maria
name: Saari, Hanna
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: maker movement

description: Critical Making project has studied the social responsibility of making and explored together with makers new ways to foster gender inclusion, engagement of young people and openness of making. The project design is based on participatory research methods and a reflexive-interventionist research approach. We have engaged makers throughout the project to co-design the case interventions and co-create the project results. Our particular aim has been to engage people who are often underrepresented both in making and research collaboration, including women and caretakers, people from resource-scarce communities and makers from the global south. Following from that, the evaluation of the responsibility of our own project activities has been essential throughout the project implementation. Furthermore, one of the key aims of our interventionist-reflexive approach is to produce results that are both academically robust and meaningful for the maker communities and thus impactful. This evaluation report presents the results of the evaluation of Critical Making activities first from the point of view of responsibility (RRI) and then explores the impact pathways of project activities. Most of the frameworks developed to investigate responsibility in research and innovations (RRI) fail to grasp the particularities of grassroots innovations. To respect the principle of two-way learning between the Critical Making researchers and the maker community, we evaluated our research practices with the Critical Making reflection tool that is based on the sustainable making principles originally developed bottom up by the GIG maker community and further elaborated for a reflection tool during the Critical Making project. Although not initially designed for research purposes, it fits well for Critical Making as the project aims to concretely contribute to more responsible making. The tool introduces five dimensions of social responsibility to be evaluated: 1: Integrate local knowledge, 2: Make Things That Make Sense, 3: Share How you Make, 4: Build for Continuity and 5: Include Ecosystem Services. The evaluation indicates that Critical Making succeeded well in dimensions 1-3 which relate to engaging makers in co-designing and co-creation, responding to the needs of maker community to produce results that are relevant for makers and to share them in multiple formats through multiple channels in order to make them accessible for the community of makers. We also managed to engage often underrepresented and even marginalised groups such as people living in refugee camps or women from the communities of global south into collaboration and offer them support to elaborate bottom up their own projects, while at the same time gaining valuable insights for research. This was due to systematically applied co-design, co-budgeting and co-creation approaches in all the case actions as well as in the elaboration of the conceptual Critical Making Responsibility Framework from theoretical tool to an online game tailored for makers. The project also made attempts to build for continuity (Dimension 3) by acting with existing maker networks such as GIG and Wikifactory which continue to use and share the project outcomes after the end of the project. With regards to including ecosystems, the project performance was not as strong as with the dimensions of social responsibility despite several measures to support environmental sustainability, including support for the projects aiming to solve the problems caused by resource scarcity or environmental pollution for example. The impact pathways of Critical Making were evaluated with regards to the six impact goals that were specified by the consortium after the first phase of the project. These were: To support the critical making community creation, To promote inclusiveness in making, To promote critical making education, To promote openness in making, and Raising awareness of critical making. Similarly, to the responsibility evaluation results, our impact evaluation indicates that Critical Making has succeeded to run impactful activities and produce results which have been relevant and well received in the maker community due to the systematic co-design and co-creation approach. For example, we have managed to promote the awareness of critical making and diversity of voices heard within the making community with inspirational stories and active participation in different forums of discussion. Furthermore, we have provided concrete guidelines for inclusive making, critical making education, openness in making and responsibility evaluation. Our evaluation also shows that our case actions have contributed to upskilling among the people engaged in WP3 interventions and mentoring programme and that way had an empowering impact, both in terms of livelihood and agency within the community. In addition, practical impacts, the academic results of the project have received good response. For example, a paper presenting the Critical Making Responsibility Framework in the FAB17 conference in 2022 won the best paper award. Due to the short project period of 2,5 years, the last research articles on the openness and community engagement dimensions of RRI are still in process during the writing of this evaluation report. The results of the project provide an excellent basis to continue contributing with these results to the academic RRI discussions.