Digital fabrication and its cultivated spaces promise to break disciplinary boundaries and enable access to its technologies and computation for the broader public. This paper examines the trope of “access” in digital fabrication, design, and craft, and illustrates how it unfolds in these spaces and practices. An equitable future is one that builds on and creates space for multiple bodies, knowledges, and skills; allows perceptual interaction and corporeal engagement with people, materials, and tools; and employs technologies accessible to broad groups of society. By conducting comparative and transnational ethnographic studies at digital fabrication and crafting sites, and performing craft-centered computational design studies, we offer a critical description of what access looks like in an equitable future that includes digital fabrication. The study highlights the need to examine universal conceptions and study how they are operationalized in broader narratives and design pedagogy traditions.
An increasing awareness of the potential biases and problematic impacts of digital technologies is driving a renewed focus on social responsibility and ethical considerations within the fields of engineering and the computer and data sciences. Similarly, a renewed sense of complicity in our socio-technical environments has encouraged scholars from a range of design, humanities, and social science disciplines to engage more directly in public-facing work, often through prototyping, exhibitions, and hands-on educational activities. This special issue on hybrid pedagogies contributes to this developing and ongoing conversation in a resolutely interdisciplinary way.
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