Digital fabrication courses that relied on physical makerspaces were severely disrupted by COVID-19. As universities shut down in Spring 2020, instructors developed new models for digital fabrication at a distance. Through interviews with faculty and students and examination of course materials, we recount the experiences of eight remote digital fabrication courses. We found that learning with hobbyist equipment and online social networks could emulate using industrial equipment in shared workshops. Furthermore, at-home digital fabrication offered unique learning opportunities including more iteration, machine tuning, and maintenance. These opportunities depended on new forms of labor and varied based on student living situations. Our findings have implications for remote and in-person digital fabrication instruction. They indicate how access to tools was important, but not as critical as providing opportunities for iteration; they show how remote fabrication exacerbated student inequities; and they suggest strategies for evaluating trade-offs in remote fabrication models with respect to learning objectives.
CCS CONCEPTS• Applied computing → Education; • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models.
Why is the solution the end point to a problem? While many in HCI and design have examined the impulse to solve problems—the solutionist or techno-solutionist mindset—we examine the logic that binds the solution and the problem together as a pair. Focusing on the timely and consequential problem of systemic racial injustice, we think through the paradoxical possibility that the pairing of the problem and solution (so often treated as the default in design and HCI) perpetuates the very conditions we seek to improve. With Calvin Warren’s profound Afro-pessimism, we recognize how the tools used to solve structural inequities around Black life are constructed with inequities themselves. The problem-solution therefore is a dead end. We use this paradox as an invitation to rethink ongoing efforts to seek equity and justice more broadly, setting out a fragile but hopeful path for HCI and design.
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