The following post contains quotes from a research paper written by Salina Christmas a student at University College London in a Core Course in Digital Anthropology. This research paper is about “the implications of rapid prototyping and how ethnography could contribute to an understanding of the challenges ahead”. Our author touches on some core topics discussed in our program and this is one of the few people asking the same types of questions we are.
“There aren’t many anthropological works on rapid prototyping and its 3D printing practitioners. Due to the lack of references, the anthropologist could, primarily, refer to ethnographic works within anthropology that have been carried out on the modes of labour, kinship and sociotechnical systems to inform his research on rapid prototyping.”
This was a valuable piece of advice that will help those interested in further researching 3d printing ethnography’s. Because there is so little written about ‘makers’ and ’3d printing’ or ‘rapid prototyping’ our author suggests that you could look at other aspects surrounding the topic and then relate them to your experiences within the field.
“For three decades, 3D computer aided (CAD) software has enabled industrial designers, architects and imaging engineers to visualise their concepts digitally. The CAD software helps the designer to visualise the artefact he wants to fabricate in image slices. He then exports the design as a stereolitography (STL) file (Onuh and Yusuf, 1999: 308). STL is a markup language used to encode digital 3D models. But the absence of a fast 3D printing mechanism in the past meant that they depended on a handful of “skilled craftsmen” to manually produce the prototypes. This created a bottleneck in the workflow and delayed the product development time. Consequently, designers had less freedom to update the designs, and were discouraged from exploring other solutions before tooling went into production, resulting in parts which at best were seldom optimized, and at worst, did not function properly.”
This quote describes the evolution of the 3d printer and the role it plays in rapid prototyping. Before 3d printers designers were slaves to the few skilled craftsmen that could produce their prototype, slowing down their creative process and often causing the designers to give up on their design because it did not function properly the first time.
“rapid prototyping could affect the classical social structures built around the industrialised work processes as the individual worker begins to assume the roles of creator and producer, worker and capitalist”
What type of affect will rapid prototyping have on the current social structure? The individual can not only be the creator but the producer as well. How is the different from being both a worker and a capitalist?
“Rapid prototyping will challenge a dominant labour system that, since the First Industrial Revolution, has been inflexible. The inevitability of the technology being a ‘desktop operation’ – like computing, musical composition, sewing and inkjet printing – means that the worker who will be “creator and producer” would switch from a machine-based labour to the one focused on tools.
‘… Tool use is authentic and fosters autonomy; one owns and controls one’s own tools and isn’t dependent on or exploited by others. When we use machines, in contrast, we must work at rhythms not of our own making, and we become ensnared in the supralocal relations necessary for their production, distribution, and maintenance. To the extent that we become dependent on machines we do not own, the stage is set for exploitation.’ (Pfaffenberger, 1992: 509).”
This is the foundation for the maker movement. Owning the tools that you use and rely on makes it much harder for someone to exploit you. This shift from machine-based labour to tool based labour is the Maker Revolution.
“The anthropologist also has to look at the modes of knowledge transfer, and how they happen, within rapid prototyping. Rapid prototyping isn’t widely taught at colleges. The principle form for exchanging knowledge for its practitioners is YouTube. Although rapid prototyping is highly technical, the techniques are not acquired via academic journals or educational programmes, but via the informal channel mentioned, and ‘by doing’ at the workplace. To understand why the occupational discourse takes place on YouTube, the anthropologist could consult works on apprenticeship (Brown, 1979; Epstein, 1998).”
As an anthropologist studying 3d printing this quote shows me the value of my work in a field that few have studied by not taking for granted the opportunity to study 3d printing as an ethnographer. Is Youtube just another way of apprenticeship? Now that rapid prototyping is being taught in schools, are we the first to conduct ethnography’s on this topic?
“Crucially, the anthropologist has to determine how disruptive rapid prototyping can be. It has yet to make a big social impact due its inaccessibility. But this warrants the attention of the anthropologist. Any attempts to appropriate the technology for an activity it isn’t designed for, such as art, or food preparation (2), should be monitored closely.”
At the time of this article, 2010, 3d printers were not as accessible as they are now. Now that they have been commercially marketed to the general public we as anthropologists have a responsibility to study and determine the possible negative and positive affects rapid prototyping may have on society.
“The anthropologist needs to appreciate a technology in order to understand it. The processes involved in the interpretative work within ethnography is, like craftsmanship, socially situated (Joyce, 2005). Ethnomethodologically informed ethnography (EM) of knowledge transmission is important in examining the problems relating to technological determinism and design (Crabtree, 2000; Woodhouse & Patton, 2004). For a better appreciation of a technology, the ethnographer should consider ‘studying up’ (Gusterson, 1997).”
What better way to understand a technology as an anthropologist than to participate in that technology. This is exactly what we are currently doing in Making Meaning Matter. We participate in the technology and through this participation we have a better understanding of what it is we are looking at when on the observation side. Can too much participation create biases within your observations?
Here is a download link to the original paper:
christmas_term2_essay_rapid_prototyping-libre
References:
Pfaffenberger, B. 1992. ‘Social Anthropology of Technology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 491-516.
Crabtree, A. 2000. ‘Ethnomethodologically informed ethnography and information system design’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51 (7): 666-682.
Gusterson, H. 1997. ‘Studying up: revisited methodology,’ PoLAR: Political and Legal
Anthropology Review 20 (1): 114-119.
Joyce, K. 2005. ‘Appealing images: magnetic resonance imaging and the production of authoritative knowledge’, Social Studies of Science 35 (3): 437-462.