Critical Technical Practice in Grassroots Innovation: Proposals of Change through Indonesian Collective Intrinsic Design

By: Regina Sipos

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Synopsis: This book extends the term Critical Making to the critical technical practices of grassroots innovation communities in the Global South, specifically in Indonesia. Recent socio-technical shifts in an era of participation have led to the rapid growth in the number of makerspaces and the revival of open-source movements. These promise to improve the technological capabilities of everyday citizens and democratize innovation. With academia's growing interest in grassroots approaches to democratic design experiments, the book explores how communities engage with intrinsic design and infrastructuring to address local, place-based challenges through technology development and appropriation. It records how innovation emerges from the ground up and results in self-directed, sustainable change and investigates critical technical practices and related sociotechnical imaginaries to uncover techno-solutionist promises and the ideological colonialism of technological development. It focuses on autonomous, intrinsic grassroots design processes, as this shift of perspective from participatory to intrinsic design allows researchers to better understand critical-material practices previously neglected by academia.