Beyond the Innovation Economy: Retooling Technology, Design, and Engineering Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 8

Abstract

With the aid of key private-public partnerships, manufacturing is enjoying a revival in informal and formal educational settings (Martin, 2015; Muro & Hirshberg, 2017). Though widely praised as democratic and accessible, the modern maker movement has key stakeholders in the military-industrial complex and the global economy whose vested interests in exploitation clash with activists’ demands for equity. Narratives emerging from the maker movement emphasize the spectacle of a new industrial revolution and how the innovation of makers will solve the grave problems of the 21st century. Maker Education is popularly hailed as a STEAM pipeline and entrepreneurial training at a time when militaristic, imperial, and consumer cultures must be critiqued, resisted, and redrawn. Education research on the maker movement is mixed: It both extols the virtues of tinkering (Martinez & Stager, 2013) and also cautions against uncritical adoption of dominant maker narratives and definitions (Vossoughi, Hooper, & Escudé, 2016). In this paper, I argue that the rising popularity of maker, DIY, and craft movements in education both opens the space for and also simultaneously suppresses critical dialogues concerning the democratization of tools of production; transdisciplinary approaches to technology, design, and engineering education; and the demarcation of sustainable thresholds beyond which technologies limit freedom and friendship.

This paper heeds the radical critique of technology and industrial society developed by historian, educator, and theologian, Ivan Illich. In Tools for Conviviality (1973) and its postscript, Energy and Equity (1974), Illich argues for careful analyses of technologies from the position of sustaining the most freedom for all. The social goal, Illich suggests, should not be equal consumption of resources and goods, but rather the democratic articulation of equitable limits to production and consumption. These proposed limits, conceived and practiced locally, aim to reverse the dehumanizing machinery of industrial growth and progress. Crucially, Illich outlines the need for “counterfoil research” into the social relations of technologies, which would help to illustrate parameters within which specific communities could exercise tool design and use without infringing upon the liberties of other communities. Counterfoil research examines the interrelated dimensions in which issues exist, seeks humanizing compromises among multiple tensions, and generates oppositional possibilities against oppressive technologies in order to reconstruct the self-images that accompany advanced technological societies.

In this paper, I illustrate why critical-transdisciplinary approaches to technology, design, and engineering education, as counterfoil research, are essential to more sane, humane, and sustainable teaching and learning practices. Counterfoil research into technology education relies on political ecology that traces product cycles from cradle to grave in order to pose critical questions about material resources, labor, and opportunities for communal autonomy (Petrina, 2000). This paper explores the pedagogical project of developing critical technological and ecological literacies (Kahn, 2010) in maker communities that foreground both the limited capacity of the earth to endure the global capitalist mode of production and the urgency for people to imagine alternatives.

Author

• Jennifer A. Stoops, The Graduate Center, City University of New York