Unmaking workshop


The Unmaking workshop engages students in the unmaking of technology by taking it apart to its simplest form. Objects and tools are provided with one goal: To deconstruct, disassemble and or reduce the object as far as the tools will take you. This workshop takes a constructivist approach in which learners, when facilitated in a group setting connects and overlaps with several conceptual frameworks that relate to how we learn and absorb information.
The research goal of this workshop is exploratory and experiential, a component of learning in this context that Stephen Sterling argues for as essential for sustainable education (Sterling, 2001, p. 38). A diversity of experiences and, exterior and interior cognitive influences, help shape our understandings of the world and the skills we acquire.

This workshop provides an opportunity for students to actively engage in an activity that might universally relevant to their future learning (designed consumer based technologies and products) but also facilitates an exploration of the insides of these objects and provide and opportunity to question its purpose, construction and philosophical place in the world. The learning that happens within this workshop is emergent and it is this collaborative act of unmaking that can be understood as a “community of practice” that require an active and critical engagement with the process.


Furthermore through this workshop this contextual collaborative exercise, a value based practise might be initiated by having a active discussion with each other in relation to sustainability, materiality, purpose and disposal before even engaging in the act of design. This inquiry based hands-on material practice sparks curiosity  and curiosity as a vehicle for learning leads to discovery.


Students are engaged with ideas that support the realities of undoing what has been done and this work might enable them to better understand and situate themselves within the problem space relative to the ecological issues associated with these artifacts. This process might then reveal the role design might need to play in that process and how they might see themselves in that potential future and and, they may become empowered and they may now situate themselves, may know their capacity relative to the ecological issues associated with these artifacts.