workshop wasn’t organized to produce a better button through collaborative idea generation. As organizers, we didn’t record the circuit diagrams. We didn’t produce a step-by-step tutorial, to instruct future button-making pursuits. By certain design standards, then, the button workshop failed.

However, the Riot Alliance brought together a group of makers who, rather than waiting for a better world, started here and started now.

Endnotes

1. Bell, G. and Dourish, P. Yesterday’s tomorrows: Notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 11, 2 (2007),133–143.

2. Gibson-Graham, J.K. The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. 1st University of Minnesota Press ed. Univ. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2006; http://public. eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord. aspx?p=310866

3. Lindtner, S., Bardzell, S., and Bardzell, J. Reconstituting the Utopian vision of making: HCI after technosolutionism.

Proc. of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2016, 1390–1402.

4. Port wood-Stacer, L. Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism. Bloomsbury, London, 2013.

5. Wheeler, E. The political stitch: Voicing resistance in suffrage textile. Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings 758.

Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2012.

6. Cash, F.B. Kinship and quilting: An examination of an African-American tradition. The Journal of Negro History 80, 1 (1995), 30–41. DOI: 10.2307/2717705

 

Samantha Shorey is a Ph.D. candidate in communication at the University of Washington. Her ethnographic research focuses on the women technology designers, artists, and students who are part of the maker movement. → [e-mail]

Sarah Fox is a Ph.D. candidate in human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington. She conducts research at the intersection of design intervention and inquiry, and examines how feminist ideas move through technology cultures.

Kristin Dew is a Ph.D. candidate in human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington. Her research explores digital craft through the practices of tiny-home and traditional woodworking communities.

made, she reflected on the conflicted stance of her activism. She had been finding it difficult to remain tender to those around her while feeling angry about the contemporary political climate. To Amy and others in the group, softness in material became a way to explore the potential for softness in aspects of her political life. The button Amy built used the familiar feminist symbol of a closed fist, with each of the fingers replaced by a different pattern of floral fabric.

The fabric swatches the participants used in their button imagery also served a technical role. To assemble the buttons, we used a heavy cast-iron button machine that pressed plastic film across aluminum pin backs. Conductive copper tape connected the LED stickers to the battery anchored on the pin back.

Knowing only the basics of electrical engineering, we had designed the half-built system with the help of a student working for a start-up who frequented the makerspace.

The batteries that powered the LED stickers needed to be insulated from the conductive backing with small pockets.

First constructing them of masking tape
and then clumsily stitching them by
hand, we had only four battery pockets
for our 20 participants. When one of
the makerspace’s master costumers
saw us frantically trying to stitch the
pockets, she leapt into action. Though
she hadn’t previously been part of the
button-making activities, she organized
two workshop participants to jointly
produce the pockets on the sewing
machine. By using fabric, we were able
to engage new skillsets in creating
technical objects—skillsets beyond our
own abilities, with strategies beyond
our imagining.

For Kristin, this imperfect design helped to rehearse other readings of failure in technical practice: as an opportunity for vulnerability and shared experience.

I fiddled with the LED sticker and tape, placing the sticker so the cow’s right eye was glowing. I struggled to make a solid connection that wouldn’t ground on the back of the button, the foil tape crumpling and tearing easily before I could connect it. Susan had gotten hers working, showing me how. My frustration and clumsiness as a novice with the conductive materials became a site for further connection and collaboration.

Given the circuit-design challenges of the metal button-backs, the Riot Alliance workshop could have served as an event to hack an industrial button press. Throughout our few hours together, we indeed created many processes for accomplishing light-up capabilities for traditional buttons. Yet the button-making

DOI: 10.1145/3140567 COPYRIGHT HELD BY AUTHORS. PUBLICATION RIGHTS LICENSED TO ACM. $15.00

A group of attendees gathered around the button-making machine.