Makers as a New Work Condition Between Self-employment and Community Peer-Production

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

* Article: Makers as a New Work Condition Between Self-employment and Community Peer-Production: Insights from a survey on Makers in Italy. By Massimo Menichinelli, Massimo Bianchini, Alessandra Carosi, et al. Journal of Peerproduction, Issue #10: Peer Production and Work

URL = http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-10-peer-production-and-work/peer-reviewed-papers/makers-as-a-new-work-condition-between-self-employment-and-community-peer-production-insights-from-a-survey-on-makers-in-italy/


Abstract

By Massimo Menichinelli, Massimo Bianchini, Alessandra Carosi et al.:

"Peer production has emerged as a new and relevant way of organising the work of distributed and autonomous individuals in the production and distribution of digital content. Increasingly, the adoption of peer production is taking place not only in the development of digital and immaterial content, but also in the design, manufacturing and distribution of physical goods. Furthermore, Open Design and Open Hardware projects are developed, discussed, manufactured and distributed thanks to digital fabrication technologies, digital communication technologies, advanced funding initiatives (like crowdfunding platforms and hardware incubators) and globally integrated supply chains. This new systemic dimension of work is possible, among other factors, thanks to local facilities like Fab Labs, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces (that can be generally called Maker laboratories), where individuals can gather and form communities with other people, designing and manufacturing together. Generally, these people are referred to as Makers and, while their existence is still an emergent phenomenon, it is widely acknowledged that they could exemplify a new modality of work. We investigated the knowledge, values and working dimensions of Makers in Italy with the Makers' Inquiry, a survey that focused on Makers, Indie Designers and managers of Maker laboratories. This research generated a first overview of the phenomenon in Italy, improving the knowledge of the profiles of Makers; an important step because Makers are usually defined in a very broad way. Furthermore, we investigated their profiles regarding their values and motivations, in order to understand how much Makers engage in peer production or in traditional businesses and whether their working condition is sustainable or not. Finally, we compared these profiles with data regarding traditional designers and businesses and the national context. Given the recent nature of the Maker movement, the focus of this article is on providing a first overview of the phenomenon in Italy with an exploratory analysis and with comparison with existing related literature or national data, rather than contextualising the Maker movement in sociological and political contributions. Far from happening in a void, Italian Makers have a strong relationship with their localities and established industry. Therefore, this is a recent evolution, where Makers work with a broader palette of projects and strategies: With both non-commercial and commercial activities, both peer production and traditional approaches. The activity of making is still a secondary working activity that partially covers the Makers’ income, who are mostly self-employed working at home, in a craft workshop or in a Fab Lab in self-funded or non-commercial initiatives, where technology is not the only critical issue. As a conclusion, we identified current patterns in the working condition of Italian Makers. The data gathered shows some interesting information that, however, could be applicable only to an Italian context. Nevertheless, the survey could be a starting point to compare the same phenomenon in different countries. Therefore, we released the survey files, software and data as open source in order to facilitate the adoption, modification, verification and replication of the survey."


Excerpt

Details on the ITALIAN MAKERS’ INQUIRY: A NATIONAL INVESTIGATION ABOUT A NEW CONDITION IN ITALY

"The term “Maker” and the whole global ecosystem of Maker laboratories are recent phenomena and this aspect is even more relevant in Italy, where the first (temporary) Fab Lab was established in 2011, several years after many other countries had one (Menichinelli and Ranellucci, 2015). In order to explore the social, economic, cultural and technological dimensions of Makers in Italy, we set up the Makers’ Inquiry as an online survey developed during 2014. The Makers’ Inquiry was developed and coordinated by the Department of Design of Politecnico di Milano, in collaboration with the Make in Italy CBD Foundation and the Make in Italy Association; it was also supported by the DESIS Network.

The survey analysed Italian Makers in terms of which skills and capabilities they have, what kind of places they work in, which design processes and approaches they follow and what their social and economic statuses are, together with their working conditions. There are several different interpretations of the term “Maker”, and it is still difficult to know precisely how many Makers are in Italy and where they are (and, therefore, it is also difficult to reach them). For this reason, we decided to develop an open online survey in order to explore the emerging community of Italian Makers, rather than trying to precisely identify and quantify who they are.


We provided three different meanings to the term Maker, from which participants could choose at the beginning of the survey:

  • Makers as commonly understood and described in Make Magazine and other related authors (Anderson, 2012; Dougherty, 2005; The Blueprint, 2014): Makers as technologically advanced people who tend to use digital technologies for communicating, manufacturing and sharing their projects;
  • Makers as Independent (Indie) Designers: Individual design actors that own or manage all the competencies related to design, production, and distribution processes, thus becoming self-producers (Bianchini and Maffei, 2012); and
  • Managers of Maker Laboratories (since they both are probably a good example of Makers, and they work with Makers on an everyday basis).


We chose to reach potential Makers through online communities (the Facebook group Fabber in Italia), Maker laboratories and specific communications organised by the Make in Italy CBD Foundation and the Make in Italy Association. The survey was officially launched in July 2014 and closed at the end of October 2014: 214 participants partially completed the survey (which was composed by of questions divided into 11 sections, except for Maker Laboratories managers who were presented a further section dedicated to their work), and we chose to focus only on the participants who completed more than 50% of the questions, i.e., 134 participants. The online platform for the Makers’ Inquiry was developed with open source software (LimeSurvey Project Team and Schmitz, 2015) and the scripts specifically developed in order to manage information and elaborate data and graphs are also accessible online as open source software.

In addition, the results of the survey have been released online as open data, accessible to the general public, the research community and the Maker community through a book (Bianchini et al., 2015), and at the 2015 Cumulus Conference (2015), in a paper investigating the Design education system evolution in the era of digital fabrication, which took into consideration the results of the Makers’ Inquiry (Menichinelli et al., 2015). The survey has focused only on the Italian context for the moment but there is the intention to spread the research to other countries worldwide thanks to the collaboration with other international institutions. In this way, the Makers’ Inquiry could allow the comparison of data from national Maker communities becoming a shared and collaborative tool for understanding the Maker movement. The online platform could also, at the same time, become a shared repository for research and data about Makers and Maker Laboratories.

This article proposes a discussion from just a selection of questions composing the whole inquiry, in order to highlight the most important aspects regarding the connections among Makers, Maker Laboratories, peer production and work. We analysed the social, educational and economic dimension of Italian Makers, as a background for their working conditions and participation in peer production practices." (http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-10-peer-production-and-work/peer-reviewed-papers/makers-as-a-new-work-condition-between-self-employment-and-community-peer-production-insights-from-a-survey-on-makers-in-italy/)


Survey of Makers in Italy

By Massimo Menichinelli, Massimo Bianchini, Alessandra Carosi, et al

"First of all, the age of Makers ranges from 21 and 60 years old but the majority of them is between 30 and 40 years old, with a peak at 36 years (Fig. 1). The age of Italian Makers falls mainly in the range of the working age, showing how the identity of Makers could be linked to work. The majority of the participants lives with her/his partner (30.5%) and children (21.6%); less than 15% live alone or with her/his parents. Furthermore then, the Italian Maker scene is mostly composed by adults who have a family. Regarding their gender, 72.4% of them self-identifies as male, 23.4% as female and 3.7% prefers not to reply to the question.

Italian Makers are mostly highly educated and able to relate with international subjects: 88.8% of the participants speak English, 44.7% has a Master degree, 13.4% affirms to have a Bachelor degree and just 17.1% obtained only a high school diploma. The fields of specialisation of Italian Makers are mainly related to industrial design, architecture and engineering (i.e., mechanics, informatics and electronics); confirming, therefore, the identity of Italian Makers as based on the integration of both creative and technical skills related to project development.

We then investigated the role of making in the economic and working conditions of participants: Making is mainly considered a secondary or complementary activity for the majority of the sample (54.4%). It is interesting to highlight that only 26.1% of the subjects consider it as a primary activity, while for 19.4% of the interviewed it is just a hobby. Therefore, making is not just an amateur activity for participants but it consists of a sort of serious profession in the principal working period of subjects’ life, even if only to a partial extent. In particular, as making is not considered the main activity of Italian makers, their principal occupation has been analysed. The majority of the sample (31.3%) declares to be mainly working as freelancers, while 10.3% are entrepreneurs and 19% are employed and just 6.7% are students. It can be stated that, in respect to the typology of work, the Italian Maker community is mainly composed by professionals who work in an independent and autonomous way, without being part of established companies (Fig. 2) Interestingly, 21.6% of them did not reply to the question (this is the most common value after being a freelancer), showing how working conditions might be unclear, a sensitive topic, or not fitting in conventional formats. It should be noted that within another survey about Maker Laboratories in Italy (Menichinelli and Ranellucci, 2015), a similar reaction was found around the topic of budget and business models for Maker Laboratories: here the reaction was even more extreme, with the majority of Maker Laboratories not answering about their budget and business models. The economic and work dimensions of Makers and Maker Laboratories in Italy is, therefore, either still emergent and underdeveloped, a critical and sensitive topic, or a dimension that Makers and Maker Laboratories are not aware of.

Referring more specifically to formal working conditions (eg, work contracts), a third of subjects (31.3%) works as freelancers (with or without VAT), while 17.1% have open-ended contracts and 5.2% fixed-term contracts, showing that making is mainly an independent and autonomous activity. Interestingly, 16.4% of the subjects mentioned other working conditions; however, when analysed in depth, they show that a further 7.4% of subjects have self-employed positions (9% are entrepreneurs then), bringing us to a 38.7% of subjects that are self-employed individuals. Therefore, even if making remains an emerging phenomenon, it can be considered as a new way of working professionally and not just a hobby. On one side, there are entrepreneurs and professionals of self-production and making, and, on the other, individuals who deal with making as a supplementary activity, maintaining another principal job. We also investigated the sustainability of the yearly income of Makers: the majority of participants (36.5%) earns between 10,000 and 25,000 €, while only 10.4% of the subjects have no income at all, and 23.1% earn between 0 and 10,000 €. On the higher end, 17.1% earn between 25,000 and 50,000 € (Fig. 3). The Italian average per capita income is 20,678 € (Cnel and Istat, 2014): The majority of Makers earns less or a bit more than the national average.

Furthermore, when it comes to defining the percentage of earnings directly deriving from making activities and self-production, a huge percentage of people did not answer (Fig. 4) showing how little impact making has on income or how Makers have a low awareness of such impact, or how sensitive this question could be. Among the ones who answered, making has been confirmed as a secondary activity: for 31.1% of the subjects, it contributes just in a minimum part of their salary (from 0% to 30% of the total income). A smaller group of people (9.5% of the sample) earns between 40% and 70% of their income from it, while just 11.4% of subjects obtain between 80% and 100% of their income from it.

The activity of Italian Makers is mainly focused on producing prototypes (56.7%) and then manufacturing products in small batch runs (47.7%), personalised products (44%) and unique pieces (40.2%). Referring to quantities, 34.3% of the sample concentrates their work on 10 units/year, while 29% works on mini batch runs (18.6% until 50 units, and 10.4% until 100 units). Just 12.6% of subjects declared they produce more than 100 units per year. In relation to the target audience, Makers seem to sell a small amount of products to a wide audience of clients: professionals, private clients, distributors, traditional enterprises, and so on.

Their principal market (26.8%) consists of freelancers, traditional companies (20.1%), artisans (13.4%) and other Makers (13.4%). This data could suggest the existence of particular professional B2C channels, in addition to the classical B2B one. Furthermore, Italian Makers sell their products and services via B2C channels through distributors/traders (19.4%) and private clients (11.19%). There is a notable number of subjects who support Makers’ markets and encourage their activities; 23.1% are composed of friends and relatives, while 6.7% are investors (crowdfunding or venture capitalists). In conclusion, the great majority of Italian Makers mainly rely on their own resources through self-financing (71.6%) and, in a lower amount, through the resources they gain thanks to the sale of their products and services (46.2%). Just a small number of subjects rely on loans and credit (9.7%) or social financing like crowdfunding (8.2%). It can be stated at this stage Italian Makers are characterised by a traditional small business approach, investing enthusiasm and energy within an activity they like, and relying mainly on their personal and private resources.

This data highlights a positive fact: Making activities are starting to provide some supplementary income for the people who undertake them. In some cases, such activities can become a professional opportunity for work: Making is evolving from a hobby activity to a professional job. One of the reasons for this condition could be addressed to the recent origin of this phenomenon in Italy, where making can be still considered a quite recent movement as a whole. Indeed, the majority of Italian Makers (60.4%) have only been involved in making activities for the past five years; 17.9% declares to have been involved making activities for less than a year, while 19.3% has practiced making for more than 5 years. The increasing interest towards making could be then linked to the global spread of the Maker Movement, but also with the Great Recession that took place in the years after 2007: Interest in making could be a consequence of the spreading of the “Maker meme”, but also as a consequence of the need to find new work opportunities in a period of crisis through self-employment. Furthermore, the phenomenon of the Maker in Italy has emerged more recently than in other countries, but it has found a prior “making knowledge” already embedded in historical Italian industrial districts. There is, in fact, an interesting overlap between the territorial concentrations of Italian Makers within historical industrial districts and urban contexts (Fig. 5): 27.5% of the participants lives in urban contexts (20,8% lives in Milan, Rome and Bologna as a whole) but 75 places have been mapped through the whole country. The higher concentration of Makers can be found in North and Central Italy, partially superimposed onto the pre-existing geography of industrial districts. Moreover, many Maker Laboratories and Italian manufacturers of digital fabrication technologies have a strong link with local productive systems. This means that there could be a partial continuity between traditional local production and the emergent working conditions of Makers.

We also investigated to what extent the working conditions of Makers in Italy can be related to peer production. We did not ask a specific question about peer production, but we asked several questions regarding many aspects of peer production: motivation for working, types of projects and approaches, values, participation in online and local communities in Maker Laboratories.

Regarding why people participate in making, the first motivation is the will to experiment (74.6%), followed by an interest in creating a product-service or launching an enterprise (64.9%), and then by an interest in learning (60.4%). However, social aspects like collaboration with other people is an important motivation only for 39.9% of subjects: a relevant percentage, but less than half of the participants are interested in collaboration. The idea of participation in making as an alternative for the capitalistic model of production and consumption of goods is accepted only by half of the participants (50.7%). In a similar way, a little bit less than half of the participants (44%) participate in making because of the possibility of generating a positive impact on their local community. In terms of keyword association, Italian Makers associate the term “making” with several different dimensions (Fig. 6). In first place, they relate it with self-production as an activity (75.3%), followed by Digital Fabrication as technology (52.9%), then with Maker Laboratories as places (61.1%) and DIY as an approach (51.4%). It is interesting to note also the association with the theme of Openness (Open Design, Open Hardware, Open Source Software) (39.5%) and with the Collaboration and Sharing condition (47.1%). Even if the majority of Makers do not associate making with openness, collaboration and sharing of knowledge and goods, a notable amount of participants do and their percentage is relevant. Therefore, it can be stated that collaboration and openness are still emerging ideas in making activities, not fully widespread, but already present and relevant.

At the same time, even if sharing and collaboration are not clearly associated with making, the majority of the participants stated that they are more important than general information, technical knowledge, the organisation of initiatives, places for work and files and resources. Sharing and collaboration, therefore, are not considered to be originating from making, but are the most important traits. More insights about the approach to sharing and collaboration can be gathered from the question where we asked the Makers to choose an approach for their design processes (Fig. 7). While the majority of Makers prefer to start their projects from scratch (79.1%), Tinkering and Open Design follow at almost the same percentage (41.8% and 40.3%, respectively). Co-Design with a community then follows (20.9%) and Generative Design tools and approaches are the last option (9.7%). While Makers may still prefer to work individually, especially while experimenting with the materials at the same time of designing, the Open Design approach is highly relevant here.

We then investigated to which extent Italian Makers participate in an online community or in local laboratories. The majority of them participates in an online community, specifying that they are members of the community (41.8 %) or that they participate while not being a real member (23.8%); 34.3% of them do not participate in an online community of Makers. The size of these online communities are mostly under 50 members (41.8%), but a relevant number of participants (26.8%) did not reply to the question, probably because they are not aware of the size of their community. The activities of these communities that the Makers participates in are also a good sign of the amount of collaboration and sharing (Fig. 8). Makers mostly follow activities passively (55.2%), but also download content (26.8%), and produce and share content (25.3%). While sharing and downloading content are activities with almost the same percentage (but with a higher proportion of unanswered questions compared to the other activities), active participation in working with other members takes place with a much less percentage: 11.2% for both the development of projects or events.

Regarding the participation in a local Maker Laboratory, 53.7% of the participants are active in one of them (even if with different levels of involvement), while 29.8% do not participate because they already own a private laboratory and 16.4% do not participate at all in a laboratory. These laboratories are mostly Fab Labs (35%), craftsmen’s workshops (18.6%) or Makerspaces (5.2%), among others. Here, again, we asked which kinds of activities the Makers were participating in, and generally the participation and collaboration was higher than in online communities (Fig. 9). Inside laboratories, Makers follow activities (22.4%), develop their projects (49.2%) or projects with others (29.8%) or initiatives and events (27.6%). (http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-10-peer-production-and-work/peer-reviewed-papers/makers-as-a-new-work-condition-between-self-employment-and-community-peer-production-insights-from-a-survey-on-makers-in-italy/)

Conclusions

"We investigated the knowledge, values and working dimensions of Makers in Italy with the Makers’ Inquiry, a survey that focused on Makers as represented by Make Magazine, Independent Designers and managers of Maker Laboratories. This research generated a first overview of the phenomenon in Italy, identifying the profiles of such Makers; this is an important step because Makers are usually defined in a very broad way. Furthermore, we investigated their profiles regarding their values and motivations, in order to understand how much Makers engage in peer production or in traditional businesses, whether they work with open source and collaborative processes or individually, whether their communities have a strong role in their work or they are just a dimension with limited relevance. We then investigated their emerging business and working conditions. Finally, we compared the gathered data with data regarding traditional designers, businesses and the national context. Given the recent nature of the Maker movement, the focus of this article is on providing a first overview of the phenomenon in Italy with an exploratory analysis and with comparison with existing related literature or national data, rather than contextualising the Maker movement in sociological and political terms. Such contextualisations could be a further step for future research.

Far from happening in a void and being a completely unexpected revolution, Italian Makers have a strong relationship with their localities and established industry. The majority of Italian Makers has been involved in making activities for the past five years; therefore, this is a recent evolution, where Makers work with a broader palette of projects and strategies: with both non-commercial and commercial activities, and both peer production and traditional approaches. The activity of making is still a secondary working activity that partially covers the Makers’ income, who are mostly self-employed working at home, in a craft workshop or in a Fab Lab in self-funded or non-commercial initiatives, where technology is not the only critical issue. After analysing the data from the Makers’ Inquiry, we can affirm that Italian Makers have an interest towards collaboration and peer production and, in particular, that the will to collaborate mostly derives from the necessity of technological skills and capabilities acquisition but it is also an issue that is informally considered important. A notable interest towards openness is also present but we could not find any useful information that could have helped us in differentiating the Maker approach to openness when it comes to digital (i.e., open software) and physical (i.e., open hardware) content. Italian Makers associate making with openness but not as its main trait, but their practice has a stronger relationship with openness than what Makers are aware of. Participation in communities is relevant, but there is more collaboration in Maker Laboratories than in online communities. Italian Makers do practice Open Design, but the gathered data suggests that peer production for physical goods in the context of Makers is still limited (in approach and scale of production), at an early stage, more linked to practice than ideology. As found in the existing literature about peer production with physical goods, there is a need for more practice and research in order to close the gap with peer production of digital content. The working conditions of Italian Makers is emergent and still not completely economically sustainable, but more similar to a job than to a hobby. Even if only a part of their income comes from making and making is mostly a secondary activity (and there is no official legal status for Makers in Italy), they are more interested in making as a job than as a hobby and their age falls in the working-age range.

The data gathered shows some interesting information that, however could be applicable only to an Italian context. Nevertheless, the survey could be a starting point to compare the same phenomenon in different countries. Therefore, on makersinquiry.org we released the survey files, software and data as open source in order to facilitate the adoption, modification, verification and replication of the survey. The replication of such a survey in more countries could both lead to an improvement to the survey, tools and approach and a further example of peer production, in the context of Design research. The connections among Makers, Maker Laboratories, peer production and work are growing, but further research is needed on the topics of peer production with physical goods and on the topic of policies that could improve the working condition of Makers in order to be more sustainable. Some contributions suggested that consumer innovation already plays a huge role in society, and we think that the Maker movement could be integrated with such phenomenon, as both are based on product hacking by everyday citizens. If this integration takes place and has a relevant dimension, it would therefore be important to understand how to make making activities more sustainable. We suggest that future research should gather more data and compare the available data with theoretical contributions about working conditions of especially self-employed workers and non-profit organisations, with the aim of elaborating policies that recognise and support the Maker movement and its impact on society and economy. Furthermore, we suggest to adopt alternative approaches for studying this topic, extending this research from a survey to other perspectives, since one approach alone cannot understand the complexity of the phenomena."