January 21, 2021

Focusing

Enframing

(Distracting)

“Design is telling stories about the future.” Handbook of Cognitive Task Design

Speculative design of artifacts, systems and services can, by painting vividly provocative images of possible futures can rhetorically focus and elicit civic debate. Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas earned more than 15 minutes of fame when he was invited to debate the limits of open source creativity at the Museum of Modern Art this year, after blogging since 2012 about The Liberator, the 3-D printed gun that he fabricated at home then disseminated in the form of fabrication plans on the Internet. Wilson’s Wiki Weapon was conceived as an open source distribution system for downloading plans for making the weapon at home, a so-called “3-D printable personal defense system.” (Bilton)

While the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is attempting to predict and control this nonlinear creative trend, we see sensationalized attempts to evade regulatory systems such as Homeland Security and the need for background checks. Vocal public backlash calling for regulation of the open source movement has added more levels of complexity and lent force to Wilson’s essentially Libertarian point that it is impossible to place regulatory limits on open movements.

Commenting on Dark Wallet, Wilson’s latest rhetorical discursive innovation which he described as a money-laundering service for Bitcoin, and his forthcoming book, Negative Liberty, technology and design writer Rob Walker writes, “What Cody Wilson has kindly done, with both The Liberator and Dark Wallet, is create a tangible provocation: a thing that is also a lens, pulling the tensions between innovation and existing social structures into sharp focus. When you confront The Liberator or Dark Wallet, you have to also confront the fact that, if you are in favor of a completely free Internet and open source movement, you are, by definition, in favor of its more abhorrent uses: child pornography, gun violence, fraud, and more.” (Twilley) At the debate at the Museum of Modern Art, part of MOMA’s Design and Violence project, exploring the ambiguities and contingencies attending open source design, Rob Walker called The Liberator “…an incredibly powerful example of the use of a designed object to force a debate.” (Twilley).  

Every human being is always-already a designer but the affordability of 3-D computer prototyping makes that fact more obvious. Over 5 million guns are manufactured each year in the US alone. What’s new is the intersection of the Maker culture, the diffusion of computer-aided rapid prototyping technology, and ingenious tests of Constitutional definitions of defense, liberty, and the right to bear arms. There is been much debate on the Internet since 2012 over both the instrumental validity aspect — whether a home 3-D printing technology is technically capable of producing a gun that actually fires accurately, as well as the civic dimension of the debate — whether the open source movement can and/or should be regulated. Either way these polemics bring the Modern value of autonomy into tension with the emergent value of communion.

The range of opportunity made possible by the diffusion of innovation in this arena of ‘self prototyping’ as it sometimes called, has attracted early adopters, extreme users and other hackers who are interested in pushing the innovation envelope. As is true in any frontier, the means are value neutral but the ends are anything but. Although it’s long been possible (and legal) to make firearms from scratch, the learning curve in engineering and machining and start up costs were steep enough to be achievable only by zealot hobbyists. Although making accurate and fully functional 3-D printed firearms out of ABS plastic actually remains a significant challenge, it has actually been done successfully (Gayk). Home 3-D printers can now be bought for as little as $500. The democratization of computer aided 3-D printing has distributed the power of home designing, amplifying the inscriptive designing agency of the average individual hacker. “The company MakerBot just opened the first retail store dedicated to 3-D printers in Manhattan’s trendy SoHo neighborhood, where it began selling its Replicator 2 desktop printer for $2,199.”(Regalado).

Novices and professionals are testing the edges of this new open-source creative platform in a wide variety of domains including the technical and material affordances of 3-D printing technologies and material capabilities, regulatory control, political freedom, intellectual property protections, digital rights management profit potential, and perhaps most significant, the leveraging of this phenomenon into a useful civic debate around freedom and limits. On the IP front, Nathan Myhrvold filed for a broad patent for managing “object production rights” through digital rights management (DRM) for 3-D printers.“The patent isn’t limited to 3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing. It also covers using digital files in extrusion, ejection, stamping, die casting, printing, painting, and tattooing and with materials that include “skin, textiles, edible substances, paper, and silicon printing.” (Regalado).

The political, philosophical and legal challenge of 3-D printed weapons is just the tip of the autonomy iceberg. 3-D printed guns have become the focus largely as a result of being the normative tool of contemporary violence, but this debate points to a much more complex consideration of the inscriptive power of designed everyday human choices and behaviors. Gun violence and the sensationalizing of weapons autonomy are but symptoms of much deeper biopsychosocial challenges to our collective ideas about what constitutes the material conditions of human civilization. Art and design are dangerous to the status quo and critically so. In versioning culture, artists and designers put infinite creative and disruptive models into play ranging from the malevolent to the superfluous.

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