‘Digital methods’ turn to medium-specific and online avenues for social and cultural research. While these approaches foster empirical media studies, it has become increasingly challenging to ‘follow ...the medium’ and ‘repurpose’ its methods. The prominence of sensory media such as ‘smart’ networked devices (e.g. mobile phones) in mundane practices and their infrastructural dependencies confront media scholars with highly contingent objects of study. Yet, studying such sensor-based devices is crucial, for they enable continuous and unnoticed monitoring of everyday (inter)activity. The article suggests that developing digital methods for sensory media can be understood as specific ‘critical technical practice’ (CTP) by engaging with two toolmaking stories. It draws on and emphasises the fundamental similarity between CTP and digital methods which both aim at conjoining technical engagement and understanding with methodological reflection. The toolmaking stories explicate the making of and the limitations to developing digital methods for increasingly obfuscated mobile sensory media, exploring the possibilities of repurposing their functionality and data. They include building tools for app code analysis focused on apps’ capacity to track sensor data, as well as for ‘sensing’ and analysing network traffic of mobile devices in use. The featured toolmaking then unravels distinctive research affordances, that is, action possibilities for ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ modes of analysis grappling with the technicity of mobile sensory media and their data. We argue that toolmaking as CTP for sensory media studies implies engaging with these media as entangled infrastructures, examining not just their social, but also their technical ‘multi-situatedness’. This involves investigating the ‘liveliness’ of their data, or how it is generated, processed and made sense of. In conclusion, we discuss implications for ‘doing digital methods’ in sensory media research. Toolmaking itself becomes an inevitable form of media research and critique, inviting and challenging researchers to deploy the media’s situatedness for their investigations.
This paper details practice-based research exploring new creative possibilities involving the ceramic extrusion process. The paper begins by providing a short overview of the extrusion technique, ...its characteristics and some contextual coverage of the process. The paper then describes how both tacit knowledge and theoretical material understanding have been used to overcome technical challenges through iterative research cycles and how, ultimately, the aesthetic qualities of the extrusion process have been used to develop a body of creative work. A key theme of the research is how digital fabrication technologies can be used in toolmaking scenarios to deliver innovation with a process that has long been used in craft ceramics but has remained somewhat underutilised.
Studies have examined how managers use strategy tools, but we know much less about how managers create strategy tools de novo. We undertook an ethnographic study of a business facing a wicked problem ...and investigated the sociomaterial practice of collective toolmaking. We identify how strategy toolmaking oscillates between different problem domains and reveal how this manifests process affordances, which are ‘unintended’ by‐products of the toolmaking process. Counterintuitively, by intentionally making a strategic tool, actors unintentionally create a sociomaterial springboard for 'spin‐off strategizing' and ‘the discovery of latent ambiguities’, generating strategic value beyond the tool produced. These insights illuminate how the practice of collective toolmaking can stimulate wayfinding, indirectly helping managers to respond to wicked problems, characterized by high degrees of complexity, ambiguity, and indeterminacy.
Complex manufacturing processes and the absence of repeat effects characterize the toolmaking industry. German-speaking toolmaking companies are increasingly faced with the challenge of having to ...reach the limits of what is technically feasible and are confronted with an erosion of know-how, induced by demographic change. This applies in particular to know-how-intensive areas such as design, CAM-programming and work preparation. There is currently no comprehensive system support in these areas and the knowledge required for planning activities is often only available in the form of implicit technical and empirical knowledge. However, the use of heterogeneous manufacturing technologies requires a profound understanding of technology along the entire value chain. As a result of the very high semantic expressiveness of ontologies, they enable the representation of the most complex data models with logical relationships that go beyond hierarchical subdivision of content. This paper presents a novel agile methodology for the development of domain-specific ontologies in the environment of toolmaking. The methodology makes it possible to integrate the implicitly existing technical and experiential knowledge of employees at an early stage in the modelling process. In particular, the developed methodology extends conventional methods by the identified deficits in terms of knowledge acquisition, iteration and agility, as well as a separate consideration of the life cycle along the ontology of the use phase, taking into account agile methods from requirements engineering. Compliance with various guidelines and requirements is mandatory, such as the formulation of competence questions and the use of a standardised specification document. The iterative approach also ensures the needs-based integration of the characteristics of toolmaking. Furthermore, the methodology enables an early integration of IT structure and user interface for the needs-based design and use of the domain-specific ontology. The validation is based on an example in the mechanical production of a toolmaking company.
Recent discoveries in archaeology and palaeoanthropology highlight that stone tool knapping could have emerged first within the genera
Australopithecus
or
Kenyanthropus
rather than
Homo
. To explore ...the implications of this hypothesis determining the physical demands and motor control needed for performing the percussive movements during the oldest stone toolmaking technology (i.e. Lomekwian) would help. We analysed the joint angle patterns and muscle activity of a knapping expert using three stone tool replication techniques: unipolar flaking on the passive hammer (PH), bipolar (BP) flaking on the anvil, and multidirectional and multifacial flaking with free hand (FH). PH presents high levels of activity for
Biceps brachii
and wrist extensors and flexors. By contrast, BP and FH are characterized by high solicitation of forearm pronation. The synergy analyses depict a high muscular and kinematic coordination. Whereas the muscle pattern is very close between the techniques, the kinematic pattern is more variable, especially for PH. FH displays better muscle coordination and conversely lesser joint angle coordination. These observations suggest that the transition from anvil and hammer to freehand knapping techniques in early hominins would have been made possible by the acquisition of a behavioural repertoire producing an evolutionary advantage that gradually would have been beneficial for stone tool production.
In human evolution, cognitive niche construction has been a focus of much attention. This interest stems from how our behavior has accelerated the development of human cognitive functions, thereby ...leading to brain growth and further cultural evolution. Many studies have demonstrated similarities between the cognitive bases of stone tool production and language. However, how art, a typical modern human behavior, is related to these behaviors remains unclear. A comparative study of the drawings of human children and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, suggested that the latter have differences in the visual imagination of pareidolia, which may be related to language acquisition and the origin of art. However, some examples exist of chimpanzees’ imagination through representational play via manipulating objects. In this study, we consider the phylogenetic development of object play, tool use, toolmaking, language, and art in the process of human evolution from the perspective of cognitive niche construction with examples of chimpanzee representational play.
In the last years, Additive Manufacturing, thanks to its capability of continuous improvements in performance and cost-efficiency, was able to partly replace and redefine well-established ...manufacturing processes. This research is based on the idea to achieve great cost and operational benefits especially in the field of tool making for injection molding by combining traditional and additive manufacturing in one process chain. Special attention is given to the surface quality in terms of surface roughness and its optimization directly in the Selective Laser Melting process. This article presents the possibility for a remelting process of the SLM parts as a way to optimize the surfaces of the produced parts. The influence of laser remelting on the surface roughness of the parts is analyzed while varying machine parameters like laser power and scan settings. Laser remelting with optimized parameter settings considerably improves the surface quality of SLM parts and is a great starting point for further post-processing techniques, which require a low initial value of surface roughness.
Purpose
This study examines how carbon tools, including carbon accounting and management tools, can be created, used, modified and linked with other traditional management controls to materialise and ...effectuate organisations’ response strategies to multiple interacting logics in carbon management and the role of sustainability managers in these processes.
Design/methodology/approach
This study utilises the construct of accounting toolmaking, which refers to practices of adopting, adjusting and reconfiguring accounting tools to unfold how carbon tools are used as means to materialise responses to multiple interacting carbon management logics. It embraces a field study approach, whereby 38 sustainability managers and staff from 30 organisations in New Zealand were interviewed.
Findings
This study finds that carbon toolmaking is an important means to materialise and effectuate organisations’ response strategies to multiple interacting carbon management logics. Four response strategies are identified: separation, selective coupling, combination and hybridisation. Adopting activity involves considering the additionality, detailing, localising and cascading of carbon measures and targets and their linkage to the broader carbon management programme. In adjusting carbon tools, organisations adapt the frequency and orientation of carbon reporting, intensity of carbon monitoring and breadth of carbon information sharing. Through focusing on either procedural sequencing, assimilating, equating or integrating, toolmaking reconfigures the relationship between carbon tools and traditional management control systems. Together, these three toolmaking activities can be configured differently to construct carbon tools that are fit for purpose for each response strategy. These activities also enact certain roles on sustainability managers in the process of representing, communicating and/or transferring carbon information knowledge, which also facilitate different response strategies.
Practical implications
The study demonstrates the various carbon toolmaking practices that allow organisations to handle the multiple interacting logics in carbon management. The findings provide suggestions for organisations on how to adopt, adjust and reconfigure carbon tools to better embed the ecological logic in organisations’ strategies and operations.
Originality/value
The authors identify how carbon toolmaking materialises and effectuates organisations’ responses to multiple interacting logics in carbon management.
This paper details practice-based research exploring new creative possibilities involving the ceramic extrusion process. The paper begins by providing a short overview of the extrusion technique, ...its characteristics and some contextual coverage of the process. The paper then describes how both tacit knowledge and theoretical material understanding have been used to overcome technical challenges through iterative research cycles and how, ultimately, the aesthetic qualities of the extrusion process have been used to develop a body of creative work. A key theme of the research is how digital fabrication technologies can be used in toolmaking scenarios to deliver innovation with a process that has long been used in craft ceramics but has remained somewhat underutilised.
•We investigate how risk managers become influential.•We carried out a five-year longitudinal study at two UK-based banks.•We examine toolmaking practices: how risk managers adopt, deploy and ...reconfigure tools.•We highlight three important characteristics re: how risk managers engage with tools.•There are two characteristic modes of operation, compliance experts and engaged toolmakers.
This paper, based on a five-year longitudinal study at two UK-based banks, documents and analyzes the practices used by risk managers as they interact and communicate with managers in their organizations. Specifically, we examine how risk managers (1) establish and maintain interpersonal connections with decision makers; and how they (2) adopt, deploy and reconfigure tools—practices that we define collectively as toolmaking. Using prior literature and our empirical observations, we distinguish between activities to which toolmaking was not central, and those to which toolmaking was important. Our study contributes to the accounting and management literature by highlighting the central role of toolmaking in explaining how functional experts may compete for the attention of decision makers in the intraorganizational marketplace for managerially relevant information. Specifically, as risk management becomes more tool-driven and toolmaking may become more prevalent, our study provides a more nuanced understanding of the nature and consequences of risk management in contemporary organizations. An explicit focus on toolmaking extends accounting research that has hitherto focused attention on the structural arrangements and interpersonal connections when explaining how functional experts can become influential.
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