Recently the Makerspace hosted a workshop designed and facilitated by Dr. Linda Huber at Swarthmore’s Aydelotte Foundation. This was a new collaboration for us, and Dr. Huber organized a fun, participatory, and hands-on workshop for students and staff engaged–intentionally or unwittingly–with rapidly advancing AI technologies that may point to a questionable future of sustainability, authorship, and human agency. Just a normal Friday afternoon toe-dip into some casual topics.

Dr. Huber led participants through creative sketching exercises and showed them the basics of linoleum printmaking. She then unleashed everyone on linocut materials and button makers and gave them the opportunity to make their own works on the subject of speculative “alternative” futures (from what they think our current implied technological trajectory may be.) This concept was extended directly from the prompt of the larger Just Tech series that this workshop was presented within.

The Makerspace is open to the community as a whole at Swarthmore and takes on as broad a catalog of projects and problems as possible. Even with that diversity, I still often need to wonder, when planning and programming for the space: what type of project could be a good idea for the space and where are the places/people we would look for those collaborations, outside the more “typical” traffic? This is why this collaboration with Dr. Huber was particularly satisfying, as it got right to the substance of making things and the reasons for doing so, but also pointed toward a much larger motivation and the kind of critical position on technology we try to provoke in the Makerspace. We also made some supercool prints and buttons I would totally rock in public. 10/10 would collab again!