In the field of STEM and maker education, educators and researchers focus on the oppor-tunity to develop key 21st century skills like creativity and complex problem solving rather than just digital literacy.17 FabLabs and Makerspaces, with their low-cost and easy to use soft-hard prototyping tools, empower educators to implement constructivist learning environments in which they act as facilitators of personalized and collaborative learning experiences. Within this context, it emerges that digital making – a diverse range of activi-ties through which students learn by making an end product with a technical and creative approach – can become a way of improving education.18 By creating a real solution to a real problem, students become engaged in a more immersive learning experience. Within education, making goes beyond making, becoming a strategy to train people to become active, responsible, and engaged citizens rather than skilled software developers.
This accent on a holistic pedagogy with making and critical thinking at its heart is not far from ideas generated in historical design experiments. Between 1973 and 1975, a collec-tive of artists, designers, and architects that included Ettore Sottsass founded Global Tools in Italy. This multidisciplinary program aimed at deconstructing education, striving to free the individual's creativity from every kind of cultural, social, and technological constraint.
The magazine Casabella, directed by Alessandro Mendini at the time, spread the ideas and educational formats that were ideated by the collective. Mostly they promoted a return
15 School for Poetic Computation, www.sfpc.io.
16 Serena Cangiano,'Coding as a way of thinking Interview with Casey Reas' in Serena Cangiano, Davide Fornari and Massimo Banzi (eds) Open Technologies [special issue], Progetto Grafico n.30 (Autumn 2016), pp. 20-30.
17 Chris Dede, 'Comparing Frameworks for 21st Century Skills' in James Bellanca and Ron Brandt (eds) 21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn, Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press 2010, pp. 51-76.
18 Carmen Bruno, Giuseppe Salvia, Marita Canina, 'Digital Making as a Means to Improve Education', Proceedings of INTED2016 Conference, 7th-9th March 2016, Valencia, Spain.
to the authenticity of manual work. According to Global Tools, education had to stimulate an awareness of the structure of society and in particular, society's use of the education system to perpetuate constraints on individuals.19
Fascinated by autarchy and materials, the Global Tools program included several research tracks such as the Construction track theorized by Andrea Branzi. In one note describing the laboratory, Branzi talks about the use of a 'simple technology' as a way of zeroing in on the artificiality and the intrinsic perspective of every tool. For Branzi, simple technology is material that has been purified of the cultural baggage and predefined concepts that are normally attached to technologies. Situated in Branzi's broader pedagogy, simple technology was an expression of radical thinking in education. Unfortunately, the radical thinking of Global Tools failed after two years of experiments. However, I believe that the concept of simple technology is somehow reenacted in the current practices of digital making, open hardware, and design applied in education. In this context, simple technologies are the open codes, electronics and designs that work as materials to make almost anything with-out any disciplinary barrier and with a critical perspective. The simple open technologies of digital making-based education empower students to be in control rather than be controlled.
Instead of being taught to create another chair, students are taught the mindsets and skills necessary to face the vast societal challenges of today.
Like the designers and artists of Global Tools in the seventies, we too are living in a period of dominant power, yet one that takes the form of a digital panopticon able to shape people's behaviors and lives. As a consequence, the return to making (with a digital perspective) is no longer a nostalgic action, but a survival strategy. How can we design for a contem-porary context if we do not understand how its main material operates? To design for this context, we must learn how to decode and deconstruct the power embedded in everyday technologies. To do so, we must step through a basic process of making that enables us to critically decide how we want our contemporaneity to be built. From this perspective, the return to making in education does not mean stripping out complexity and reducing the role of thinking in the design process. Instead, it suggests that schools are prototypes to validate – before releasing the final solution – the possible ways to contribute to any societal change. Within these prototypes, students should be exposed to updated 'libraries of simple open technologies'. By removing the filters imposed by the private titans of the technological sector, such libraries would enable students to critically include their own perspective as responsible and engaged citizens.
In a 'post-post-it' society, I wonder what the ultimate design toolkit to train the 21st century designer could be. Rather than the usual canvases or user journey maps, this toolkit would feature a set of basic design exercises that help everyone, not only design students, to make things that move, think, communicate, sense, see, compute or augment. These exercises would help students to control technology, to assertively own it as a material, a tool, and a key factor influencing society today.
19 Valerio Boronuovo and Silvia Franceschini (eds), Global Tools 1973-1975, When Education Coincides with Life, Rome: Nero, 2018, p. 39.
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