Making (un)making – Guidelines for (un)made objects

Solving the dilemma between the unnecessity of production and the necessity of value creation is urgently sought after since David Graeber pointed out the proliferation of what he called ‘Bullshit Jobs’. Rather than trying to vaguely fill in the century-old production space with empty movements, a strategic shift of the general aim of production is required. Namely, we need to move away from the paradigm of “the more we can produce in a limited time frame, the more productive we are”. It may sound like the famous argument in Environmentalism, ‘less is more’; however, what we are proposing with “(un)making” entails something MORE than that. (un)making is an act of value creation with a special focus on creatively avoiding production. The concept stems from ‘unmaking’ (without brackets), an emerging term in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and design, where they extensively explore beyond the traditional realm of creating perfect objects that last forever. In an instance of unmaking, they attempt to produce 3D-printed objects that decay according to designated patterns of rupture. (un)making has the potential to radically turn around the dichotomy between AI taking away jobs or creating more work. In this panel proposal, the advocate of the concept, Yoshinari Nishiki (a.k.a Inari), introduces a tentative definition of an (un)made object and provides guidelines for the production of such objects.