Reconstituting the Utopian Vision of Making: HCI After Technosolutionism

HCI research has both endorsed "making" for its innovation and democratization capacity and critiqued its underlying technosolutionism, i.e., the idea that technology provides solutions to complex social problems. This paper offers a reflexive-interventionist approach that simultaneously takes seriously the critiques of making's claims as technosolutionist while also embracing its utopian project as worth reconstituting in broader sociopolitical terms. It applies anthropological theory of the global and feminist-utopianism to the analysis of findings from research on making cultures in Taiwan and China. More specifically, the paper provides ethnographic snippets of utopian glimmers in order to speculatively imagine and explore alternative futures of making worth pursuing, and in so doing re-constitute the utopian vision of making.