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July 2023 - European Commission Report
The Critical Making Open Hardware Mentorship Program aimed to support global makers and innovators in shaping a sustainable future of making. Over nine months, 18 mentees received guidance and input from our esteemed teachers on critical principles of the sustainable making framework for their projects: Make Things That Make Sense, Share How You Make, Include Ecosystem Services, Integrate Local Knowledge, and Build for Continuity. This report is twofold:
1) it documents how to design and run the open hardware program, which is open and free to be adopted by other organisations worldwide.
2) It includes an Open Hardware projects catalogue featuring the project documentation resulting from the mentoring programme. The catalogue features an inspiring range of open-source hardware projects in the context of open-science hardware, social innovation, and environmental sustainability. The twelve projects show a diversity of used materials, needs that inspire the solution, complexity and production-readiness. All projects show a short description, pictures, relevant RRI dimensions, the lead maker, the materials and the tools needed.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7924525
July 2023 - European Commission Report
Critical Making has been exploring the maker movement’s potential for social and responsible innovation. By engaging directly with the communities in participatory research processes, the consortium aimed to show how maker spaces and maker practices can offer new opportunities for young makers of all genders to contribute to an open society via open-source innovation. Next to the academic insights, Critical Making also brought forward several very practical findings, mainly targeted towards makers and makerspaces. We call it the “Critical Making Wundertüte” with online and board games, a manifesto, an educational box and much more.
It includes:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8116625
December 2022 - European Commission Report
This document is the final report for CoAct’s consortium Communication and Dissemination (WP8) activities led by the Global Innovation Gathering e.V. (GIG). During the last 36 months, CoAct delivered the Citizen Social Science concepts and practices to more than 1,6 million people, using a wide range of communication strategies and tools, combined with intense resilience and creativity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Furthermore, a strategy focused on constant feedback between global and local using digital communication tools contributed to the disseminated ideas and actions reaching a far wider audience than the ones around consortium partners. This document includes partners’ communication and dissemination activities and analyses CoAct actions, channels, and tools to convey the project and disseminate its results. It also presents the work’s overall progress based on the key performance indicators related to communication and dissemination.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7650503
Frontiers Sociology, 18 March 2021
Makerspaces—informal shared spaces that offer access to technologies, resources and a community of peer learners for making—across the globe initiated a rapid response to the lack of medical hardware supplies during the global pandemic outbreak in early 2020 caused by the Coronavirus (COVID-19). As our health systems faced inexperienced pressure, close to collapsing in some countries, and global supply chains failed to react immediately, makers started to prototype, locally produce and globally share designs of Open Source healthcare products, such as face shields and other medical supplies. Local collaboration with hospitals and healthcare professionals was established. These bottom-up initiatives from maker networks across the globe are showing us how responsible innovation is happening outside the constraints of large profit-driven industries. This qualitative study presents five cases from a global network of makers that contributed to producing personal protective equipment (PPE) and healthcare-related products. We draw our cases from the experiences in Careables, a mixed community of people and organisations committed to co-design and making open, personalised healthcare for everyone. With the presented cases, we reflect on the potential implications for post-pandemic local production of healthcare products and analyse them from a social innovation perspective. These global experiences are valuable indications of transformative innovations that can reduce dependencies on international supply chains and mainstream mass production.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.629587
Masters dissertation. Honourable Mention for best dissertation of the year - Faculty of Administration Sciences - University of Pernambuco
August 2018
This research aims to identify the degree of innovation of Pernambuco cultural entities with community insertion, classified by BRA-LAW No 13.018 / 2014 as Culture Points. At the outset, a bibliographic study traces the etymology of innovation and its relation to sustainability and the Creative Economy, being Culture Points a part of it. Next, we analyse the investments in innovation in Brazil from the 1930s up to the 2017 Budget Law. Subsequently, it presents a set of existing innovation measurement tools and, from these, a mechanism is proposed to measure the degree of the entities concerned. An online questionnaire followed by semi-structured interviews applied in 33 state entities is analysed using the tool known as the Innovation Radar. It is perceived in the end that the organisations have a low degree of innovation, mainly because they do not understand the product of their work as marketable or the conceptually non-innovative aspect of cultural traditions.
Keywords: Innovation. Social innovation. Indicators of innovation. Creative economy. Cultural Policies.
Mar 19, 2019 - International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development (IJISD), Vol. 13, No. 3/4, 2019
This paper discusses the concepts of social and technological innovation to analyse their relations and contradictions. After a long period in which innovation was related to social processes, it has been linked to technological and economic development in the last century. Social innovation has acquired a restrictive meaning and is defined by many as actions to combat social exclusions and environmental degradation promoted by technological innovation. This study suggests a vision for innovation and its influence on environmental sustainability through a bibliographical analysis demonstrating how innovation processes are techno-socially related. It uses an analytic matrix that compares these concepts to understand how socio-technical innovations promote environmental, social and economic sustainability. In the end, it recommends more studies to determine and measure the innovative sustainable practices of an organisation in both the social and technological spheres.
https://doi.org/10.1504/IJISD.2019.100399
Jan 25, 2019 - 35C3 – Refreshing Memories. Chaos Computer Club e.V. / Ach je Verlag
This paper summarises the session “The Critical Making Movement: How using critical thinking in technological practice can make a Difference” held at the 35th Chaos Communication Congress between 27-30. December 2018 in Leipzig, Germany. It begins with a short history of the maker movement, summarises current societal impacts achieved in makerspaces and criticism directed towards maker culture. The paper then offers critical thinking to rethink professional practices conducted in makerspaces to achieve a more reflective approach and utilise the resources available in makerspaces for a society-oriented and citizen-driven course. The origins of such critical-making practices are touched upon, which lie in critical technical training, critical design and critical engineering. All 3 - briefly summarised in this paper - influence current critical-making streams in academia and citizen-driven projects. The paper also offers insight into current examples of academic syllabuses, research and citizens’ bottom-up projects. Two cases are further elaborated to inspire more grassroots critical-making research: EngineeringGood, Hack-a-Toy workshops in Singapore, and LabCOCO with Contos de Ifa in Brazil. ISBN 978-3-947720-31-6
Sep 14, 2017 - Lições de Empreendedorismo / EDUPE
A book chapter that beckons entrepreneurship as an instrument that enhances competencies, arousing the interest of reading by different audiences: be they academics or professionals from other branches and market segments, aiming, initially, to talk about the relationship between entrepreneurship and the market. ISBN: 978-85-7856-212-0
Apr 1, 2016 - Gamevironments / Bremen University
Interview with Ricardo Ruiz about 3Ecologias and their work on Contos de Ifá.
November, 2012 - Observatório de Mídia e Religiosidade / CCCU
It is an observation, consolidation and interpretation project on the media´s role in the construction – or deconstruction – of a society´s rights to worship and expression of religions as guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It seeks to analyse and understand religious intolerance potentiation by the media´s dominant role. Its mission is to produce and disseminate information and opinions and at the same time, carry out formative and informative actions on the subject.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8246600
Sep 7, 2012 - Peixe Morto / i-Motirô
Chapter in a book with texts about the history of Brazilian digital culture, media festivals like Mídia Tática Brasil, Digitofagia, and Submidialogias; philosophical issues like matter and nature, or digital ecology; it also discusses computer recycling, techno-magic rituals, sex on the internet, among other topics.
Aug 9, 2011 - Ideias Perigozas / Ed. Córrego
A book chapter discusses digital education’s methodological actions in traditional communities in Brazil.
Oct 30, 2009, Furtherfield Magazine
“Some years ago, the elements (ideas, conceptions, practices, people) that compose the current (so-called) Free Culture movement was appropriated by the bureaucrat and the capitalist. The ones that made use of the technologies and available media to the creation of actions that provided the debate on new perspectives of possible social arrangements (obtained by tools such as free licenses, networks of communication, and open-source software) are today digested by the old apparatuses and social mechanisms that once they have used and questioned. They participated, many times unconsciously, in a “socio-professional training” to occupy the same functions established for the maintainers of a system that is distant from what we imagine as a possible human grouping, even more, distanced from freedom.”
January 2009 - Editora Peirópolis
Co-translation into Portuguese of Richard Barbrook’s Imaginary Futures. In it, the author reflects on technological development, considering its political motivations and economic objectives, as well as its social repercussions, and connecting information from the fields of science, technology, economics, politics, history and mass communication. Barbrook challenges new generations to seize the power of the Internet, resist the status quo policy and use the most powerful communication tool of the moment to shape their destiny. His message is that if we don’t want the future to be what it used to be, we must invent our revolutionary future.
January 2008
in Apropriações Tecnológicas - Emergência de textos, idéias e imagens do Submidialogia#3 / EDUFBA
Chapter in a book that aims to promote the study and discussions on theories and practices of Brazilian digital media.