Relating to materials in digital fabrication: Transform materials to transform yourself

Abstract The paper aims at investigating how children relate to and make sense of different materials in digital fabrication workshops. Our analysis focuses on how their ways of relating produced different: (1) becoming of the materials, (2) becoming of the to-be-designed project and (3) becoming of the children-as-makers. To this end, we present six vignettes of representative situations encountered in two digital fabrication workshops with primary school children. We used these cases as a foreground to open some initial paths for methodological reflections on digital fabrication in education and its potential as a terrain to work on personal transformative processes.

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