The fourth and final part of “The Politics of Making” seminar series was titled FUTURE MAKERS. (The previous seminar parts were Part 1: RAW, Part 2: PLANTSCAPES, and Part 3: CLOUDS, MIST, DUST.) In this semester we speculated on futures of children’s material culture, education, and production. The concept of the Anthropocene brought an increasing awareness on human’s impact on the Earth and beyond, and encourages us to approach the notion of “making” with new sensibilities. Since childhood is a social construct and the meaning of it has always differed across time, places and cultures, in this seminar we explored what kinds of new childhoods the concept of the Anthroposcene inspired. Considering that education is a form of intervening in the future, what material and making skills should we teach the generations alpha, beta and beyond? How can we re-think children’s toys, tools, educational materials as a means to create desirable material futures or cautionary tales?
The semester started with group research we conducted on the present-day tools/toys and materials that are available to children (ages 0 – 8). This study was then sorted and documented multiple times considering different variables over a full-day workshop titled “An Ethnography of Children’s Making.”
Students then derived their personal interests from this process and undertook individual research processes to create art or design works in the fields in which they were studying.