The Environmental Value Of The Maker Movement (original) (raw)
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The maker movement in Europe: empirical and practitioner insights into sustainability
In recent years, ICT has revolutionized content creation and communications. Today, everybody with Internet access can produce digital content composed of virtual 'bits' and make it instantly available across the globe. The same is now happening to manufacturing for all people with access to tools like 3D printers. This inter-changeability of bits and atoms is being called the maker movement, which started as a community-based, socially-driven bottom-up movement but is today also impacting mainstream manufacturing through increased efficiencies, distributed local production and the circular economy. The maker movement thus has significant promise for increasing social, economic, environmental and technical sustainability, but is it currently living up to this potential? The European-funded MAKE-IT project has examined these postulates through in-depth qualitative and quantitative empirical research.
The maker movement in Europe: empirical and theoretical insights into sustainability
2018
In recent years, ICT has revolutionized content creation and communications. Today, everybody with Internet access can produce digital content composed of virtual 'bits' and make it instantly available across the globe. The same is now happening to manufacturing for all people with access to tools like 3D printers. This interchangeability of bits and atoms is being called the maker movement, which started as a community-based, socially-driven bottom-up movement but is today also impacting mainstream manufacturing through increased efficiencies, distributed local production and the circular economy. The maker movement thus has significant promise for increasing social, economic, environmental and technical sustainability, but is it currently living up to this potential? The European-funded MAKE-IT project has examined these postulates through in-depth qualitative and quantitative empirical research.
Is the Maker Movement Contributing to Sustainability?
Sustainability
ICT has already revolutionized content creation and communications. In principle, today, everybody with Internet access, the right skills and equipment can produce digital content composed of virtual "bits" and make it instantly available across the globe. The same is now happening to manufacturing for everyone with access to tools like 3D printers. This inter-changeability of bits and atoms is being called the maker movement, which started as a community-based, socially-driven bottom-up movement but is today also impacting mainstream manufacturing through increased efficiencies, distributed local production and the circular economy. The maker movement thus has significant promise for increasing social, economic and environmental sustainability, but is it currently living up to this potential? This paper reports on work undertaken by the European-funded MAKE-IT project has examined this question through detailed qualitative and quantitative empirical research, including ten in-depth case studies across Europe and a detailed examination of 42 maker initiatives at Europe's foremost city-based maker faire, supplemented by extensive secondary research. Despite the maker movement's short history, the overall results provide sound evidence of its important though variable contribution to sustainability thus far. In addition, there is a strong gender dimension showing that females are underrepresented both as users and leaders of maker initiatives, whilst female leaders tend to achieve much higher sustainability impacts than their male counterparts. There is also clear evidence that maker initiatives in close collaboration with each other and other actors in city-and region-wide ecosystems are much more successful in achieving sustainability impacts than others.
Workshop on EUD for Supporting Sustainability in Maker Communities
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013
Recently, there has been a proliferation of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) communities that can be generally included in the larger all-encompassing maker movement: Hackerspaces, FabLabs, Transition Town groups etc. Made possible by the new horizons opened by digital fabrication and the Internet, the maker movement has a great potential to foster sustainable living by supporting innovation in this field, facilitating its appropriation and propagating its practical use. However, technology-driven maker communities are often perceived as places for tech-savvy people and have difficulties to attract wider audiences. In this workshop, we would like to discuss how can EUD concepts support sustainability in maker communities by ensuring wider scale access to digital fabrication, supporting user innovation and leveraging knowledge sharing across communities.
Makers’ ambitions to do socially valuable things
The Design Journal
Neil Gershenfeld called the Maker movement the next digital revolution as it placed the means of fabrication on people's desks. This paper looks at makers' ambition to do socially valuable things and critically reflects on their potential impact, whether makers' societal impact can be recognised on micro-, meso-or macro-level. Paraphrasing Schumpeter, who explained innovation as a 'new combination of production factors', social innovation can be defined as a new combination of social practices. To add an empirical dimension, via qualitative research we have explored the expectations and values of makers. We chose to proceed from the concrete to the abstract by approaching 30 Makers with very specific issues they knew from their day-today work and asked them regarding their social ambitions in terms of inclusion, education and environmentalism. Eventually these questions led then to insights on the threads we outlined above.
Eco-Design-Sprint For Makers: How To Make Makers Think About The Sustainability Of Their Products
2018
Digital fabrication provides people with a range of opportunities to produce innovative products. These range from small to large, e.g. micro-controllers, drones, Internet-of-Things-devices, motorized vehicles, orthotics, machines and even houses. The possibilities seem to be unlimited and FabLabs, Maker-Spaces, or similar community places are promoting this development. However, not many of these makers completely consider the sustainability of their products. Quite often, questions of environmental friendly material, manufacturing procedures, or end-of-lifecycle questions are not of major relevance for the maker. To create a new mindset of eco-friendly makers, we set up a so called Eco-Design-Sprint approach and applied this within our FabLab. This approach is based on the idea of Ecodesign (Tischner & Moser, 2015), which leads to solutions that, throughout the entire product lifecycle, optimize performance of desired benefits, minimize negative environmental impacts, or even posi...
Sharing Society. The Impact of Collaborative Collective Actions in the Transformation of Contemporary Societies. Proceedings of the International Conference Sharing Society (Bilbao, May 23-24, 2019), 2019
The democratization of technology, education, content and community building brought by Fab Labs and other Maker laboratories increases the possibilities for designers to acquire more technological and practical skills, for makers to evolve their design attitude and capabilities, and for amateurs to acquire both technological and design skills. In this way, Open & Distributed Making and Design initiatives create collaborative collective actions: distributed among several actors, several approaches, several locations and laboratories. The Maker Movement is often based on community-based initiatives that can be found on three levels: 1) a global community local events like Maker Faires and laboratories like Fab Labs with a complex social structure; 2) local communities that form in and around local laboratories such as Fab Labs; 3) the communities that form around the development of projects, especially the ones that are shared with open source digital tools openly as Open Design. Furthermore, the ability of this phenomenon of bridging the local and digital dimensions constitute a reason for identifying such movement as a clear example of digital social innovation: people, projects and organizations that use digital technology to tackle social and environmental challenges with a leading focus on social or environmental impact over financial return and a dedication to openness, collaboration and citizen empowerment. What is the social impact of Maker initiatives? How can we assess their value in terms of collaborative action and social innovation? Understanding their impact would help them in their awareness, communication and management towards sharing societies. We evaluated an existing dataset of 69 Social Impact Assessment (SIA) frameworks in order to understand how they can be applied and to which kind of initiatives. After this evaluation, we elaborated directions for future work towards compiling such framework into a composite index that the common elements of such frameworks in order to provide a simplified and standardized measurement tool with guidelines for its development into a digital platform accessible to Maker initiatives, for self-assessment. Furthermore, we propose directions for future research, especially for the evaluation of such index and platform with an action research approach and the involvement of all types of stakeholders: civic society, research, business and policymaking. This approach would enable Maker initiatives (but also researchers, businesses and policymakers) to understand what they could have in societal change and economy and therefore improve the way they are organized, develop projects, do research, interact with stakeholders and demonstrate their value. This would, ultimately, help Maker initiatives in better define who they are as both individual makers and as communities of makers and labs.
2021
Making" and the Fourth Industrial Revolution have been extensively investigated in the last few years. Several pieces of research have been carried out on the topic of fab lab networks and makers movements; in many cases, these studies highlighted problems of their economic sustainability, stressing-however-their cultural-related role. Nowadays, it is evident that Makerspaces and Fab Labs do not only produce physical goods, but they also develop knowledge and relationships, which are expressed through physical productions and activities. The European Union has been particularly interested in the study and development of innovative ecosystems, which might serve as levers for sustainable growth, because of their focus on co-creation and the involvement of different groups of stakeholders. SISCODE Horizon 2020 project was developed according to this European requirement. Within the SISCODE project, a co-creation methodology for societal challenges was proposed and tested throughout ten pilot projects carried out by Living Labs, Science Museums and Makerspaces, and Fab Labs. In this paper, we are going to present the three pilot projects developed by three Makerspaces and Fab Labs (Polifactory (Milan), Maker (Copenhagen), and Fab Lab Barcelona) and discuss main insights on co-creation practices.
2020
During the last decades, economic, social and technological phenomena have influenced the role, importance and perception of cities and regions. Cities and rural areas are increasingly divided because of manufacturing and its globalisation; digital technologies in manufacturing are introducing more automation in factories, reducing thus the workforce and aggravating these phenomena. But at the same time, the Maker Movement connects these two opposites by adopting such digital technologies with an open approach, enabling a distributed manufacturing ecosystem based on individuals and communities such as Fab Labs, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces that work locally but that are connected globally. How can we measure the impact of Maker initiatives over cities and regions? This article addresses this issue with a research through design strategy that connects both design research and practice focusing on a) a theoretical context that connects peer production, manufacturing and cities and reg...
Making things in Fab Labs: a case study on sustainability and co-creation
Digital Creativity, 2016
Digital fabrication laboratories (such as Fab Labs) are a global initiative of workshops that offer open access to technologies to produce objects from beginning idea to final production. Fab Labs encourage open and free knowledge-sharing among ‘experts’ and the general public. Claims are being made about community-based digital fabrication workshops transforming practices of design, innovation, production and consumption, while describing positive impacts on the environment and social goals. Research that examines such claims is sparse. This paper explores realities of using digital fabrication technologies within a Fab Lab. It draws on a case study that describes practical outcomes of a design workshop in which a multidisciplinary team engaged in issues of sustainable design and processes of co-creation to design and fabricate a prototype. This experience provides insight into the impact of digital fabrication technologies within a sustainable and co-creational design context and critical reflections are presented. Katja Fleischmann, Sabine Hielscher & Timothy Merritt (2016): Making things in Fab Labs: a case study on sustainability and co-creation, Digital Creativity, DOI: 10.1080/14626268.2015.1135809. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14626268.2015.1135809 Keywords: Fab Lab; sustainability; co-creation; digital fabrication technologies