In collaboration with Global Innovation Gathering, I had the opportunity to mentor a group of makers and innovators during the Critical Making Programme, an initiative by European Union’s Horizon 2020. My session was called Share How You Make, and was described as “guidelines that provide a framework for openly documenting everything about the project’s making.”
This was a fun session to design and facilitate. I’ve fallen on developing documentation naturally through my work as an industrial engineer, and I enjoy the idea of communicating correctly at a technical level, even at personal and existential levels. By the latter, I mean that documentation is a source of value and meaning: we share what we make because we believe it is valuable for us, for others, and even for the planet.
During the session, I outlined my personal experience and that of other makers with whom I work, the challenges and benefits of documentation, human considerations to take into account when working alongside communities, and technical recommendations to share how we make things, including version control tools, the use of editable formats and designing user flows for future readers.