Making Trouble

Making hacks into reality. It engages matter in ways that trespass the boundaries between the civic realm and the state-assigned laws. Even with primitive tools and skills, designing and making can break open and repurpose arrangements of power. The proof is that some crafts are so controversial-lock-picking, moonshining, shoplifting, smuggling, sabotage-that they need to be controlled or even outlawed. When designers and makers touch on these contested realms, they run into trouble. This highly original book explores how the material power of design and making can challenge arrangements of agency and domination. Unpacking a series of conflicting cases-from illegal making to the strategic and civic use of crafts to manifest radical alternatives to the current order-it shows how designers and makers can use even basic tools to work towards more.

Otto von Busch is Associate Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design, USA. He holds a PhD in design from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and was previously Professor of Textiles at Konstfack University, Sweden. He has published articles in The Design Journal, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, Fashion Practice, CoDesign Journal, The Journal of Modern Craft, Textile Cloth and Culture, Craft Research, Organizational Aesthetics, Creative Industries Journal and the Journal for Artistic Research, and has contributed chapters on design activism to The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design (2017), The Routledge Companion to Design Research (2015), The Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion (2014), as well as other design anthologies.

Preface
Back to Matter
Activist Making
Affirmative Making
1. Power in the Making
Primitive Making
Matters and Materials
Making between Matter and Meta
2. State Metaxu
Metaxu
State Space - State Matter
State Meta in the Matter
3. Making Matters
Making Leverage
Finding Material Leverage
The Contents of Political Matters
4. Making Agency
Making Change, Making Resistance
Making Material Agency
Manipulating Meta
5. Doing and sitting
Sitting is Not Only Sitting
Royal Crafts and Citizen Consumption
Resistant Sitting
Seated Democracies
6. Recursive Matters
Intensity vs Scale
Making Means and Ends Meet
Pulsation
7. Strategic Objectiles
Material Mobilization
Tactical Presence and its Limitations
Stitch for Senate
8. Material Counter-intelligence
Material Intelligence
Artus and Metis
The Cookies of Cunning
9. Brewing Dissent
Controlled Substances, Controlled Crafts
Misuse and Mischief
Buckets of Evidence
10. Designing Back
Making Civics Tangible
Design and Activism
Material Civic Dissidence
11. Trouble Making and Counter-crafts
Dangerous Makings
Mapping Material Activism
12. Make it Simple
Making Action Spaces
Making Calisthenics
Stay Matter!