Technology Networks for Socially Useful Production
* Article: Technology Networks for Socially Useful Production. By Adrian Smith. Journal of Peer Production, · Issue #5: Shared Machine Shop, 2014
Excerpts
From the introduction:
"With unemployment reaching one in eight workers, and manufacturing in steep decline in the city, Londoners voted an avowedly socialist Labour council into power in 1981. Left-wing leaders of the Greater London Council (GLC) were committed to a radically alternative economic strategy compared to the “free-market” right-wing agenda of the Thatcher government nationally. The GLC quickly instituted a Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB) committed to job creation, industrial democracy, and socially useful production.
Amongst GLEB’s first acts was the creation of Technology Networks. These community-based workshops shared machine tools, access to technical advice, and prototyping services, and were open for anyone to develop socially useful products. GLEB’s aim was to bring together the “untapped skill, creativity and sheer enthusiasm” in local communities with the “reservoir of scientific and innovation knowledge” in London’s polytechnics (Greater London Enterprise Board 1984a, 9-10). In keeping with the political ideals underpinning the initiative, representatives from trade unions, community groups, and higher education institutes oversaw workshop management.
Technology Network participants developed various prototypes and initiatives; including, electric bicycles, small-scale wind turbines, energy conservation services, disability devices, re-manufactured products, children’s play equipment, community computer networks, and a women’s IT co-operative. Prototype designs were registered in an open access product bank freely available to others in the community; and innovative products and services were linked to GLEB programmes for creating co-operative enterprises. Similar workshops were created in other Left-controlled cities in the UK.
Ideas and enthusiasm for these workshops drew upon a wider movement for socially useful production, which in turn drew together strands of thought and activism from broader social movements, old and new. These included, workplace democracy and alternative industrial plans, community development activism, left environmentalist networks, radical scientists and alternative technologists, and, to a lesser degree, feminism. Workshops were conceived in movement terms of providing human-centred, skill-enhancing machine tools; developing socially useful products; and democratising design and production. As such, workshop aspirations extended well beyond local prototyping and manufacturing: Technology Networks were an attempt to recast innovation and inscribe it with a radical vision for society.
A history of Technology Networks provides a longer view on two questions motivating this special issue of Journal of Peer Production:
- Are rapid prototyping practices changing the relationships to technology, research and development, and innovation?
- How do shared machine shops interface with the political economy of contemporary capitalism?
In an earlier article in the Journal, maxigas demonstrated how situating the distinct historical genealogies of hacklabs and hackerspaces in earlier autonomist movements improves appreciation of the strategic issues confronting spaces today (Maxigas 2012). Similarly, this paper provides historical perspective on issues relevant to community workshops now (Tosh 2008). Features in Technology Networks are not only relevant to FabLabs, Hackerspaces and other workshops, but also to current ideas and practices in participatory design and critical making (maxigas 2012; Smith, Hielscher, Dickel, Söderberg, & van Oost 2013; Tosh 2008; Sanders and Stappers 2008; Ratto 2011; Disalvo 2012).
The argument here is that Technology Networks, reflecting the wider movement for socially useful production, contained tensions in terms of social purpose, cultures of knowledge production, and political economy. The social tension was between spaces for product-oriented design activity, and spaces for network-oriented social mobilisation. The cultural tension was between professional and codified technical knowledge and the tacit knowledge and experiential expertise of community participants. And tensions in political economy – between socialism-in-one-space and the neo-liberal turn nationally and internationally – meant insufficient (public) investment was available to develop initiatives into significant economic activity, and especially without transforming the initiative into capitalist form. A key lesson from this history is that radical aspirations invested in workshops, such as democratising technology, will need to connect to wider social mobilisations capable of bringing about reinforcing political, economic and institutional change. Otherwise, as we see in the case of Technology Networks, diminished versions of these ideas and practices will become captured and co-opted by incumbents.
The movement for socially useful production generated its own literature, supportive and critical, and which this study has drawn upon. Archived material was also accessed in relation to the meetings and conferences, programmes and organisations, artefacts, lobbying, and other repertoires of action generated by the movement (e.g. film, reports, media articles). The author has posted two examples on the web: one is a promotional booklet for Technology Networks produced by GLEB in 1984, and that can be downloaded via this link; another is a 1978 film documenting the Lucas workers’ alternative industrial plan, available via this link. Interviews were also conducted with protagonists and observers from the time. Finally, a draft of the history was circulated for comment, correction and reflection amongst a wider group of people with first-hand experience of the movement (Smith, 2104).
The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 describes the wider movement for socially useful production from which Technology Networks emerged. Section 3 describes the creation and operation of Technology Networks, as well as discussing some of the tensions that existed. Section 4 considers whether and how lessons then might be relevant for community workshops today. Section 5 concludes by reiterating how any radical aspirations for workshop practices needs to connect cultural developments with wider social movements and influence reinforcing political and economic change. Something easier said than done." (http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewed-articles/technology-networks-for-socially-useful-production/)
From the discussion:
"Conceived through radical social movement aims, Technology Networks clearly had ambitions to change relationships between design, innovation and society. Activists had taken seriously the idea of pursuing a different kind of design, and to use concrete experience to explore, rethink and reconfigure the political, economic and knowledge institutions underpinning innovation. They wanted a restructured set of relations. However, the relationships sought did not come about readily. Participants found it required considerable work and thoughtful organisation to overcome prior divisions of class, ethnicity, education, and gender, and to forge equitable working relationships that recognised the pluralities of expertise, skill, knowledge and creativity of participants. Moreover, attempts to connect workshop practices and the alternative innovation cultures being sought with wider processes of political and economic change identified as necessary proved very challenging.
Technological agit prop activities were conceived on these more radical terms. Prototypes provided a practical means to engage people in political debates about the relationships of technology in society. Workshop activities permitted a richly textured expression of critical and tacit knowledge towards the meanings and purposes of production, compared to, say, more rarefied analysis and argument in manifestos, reports, and policy documents. Material projects involved hands and minds in combination. They opened inclusion by bringing in more varied, less verbal, yet no less skilled and intelligent participants. And they addressed audiences differently, compared to, say, speeches and texts evoking an abstract revolutionary agent, socially entrepreneurial state, or notional governance framework.
Workshops also enabled mobilisation as well as expression. Projects allowed the gathering and accommodation of new and unusual allies, including engineers and community activists. Activists consequently saw workshops in relationship with wider campaigns for alternative economic strategies. Unsurprisingly, political economy favourable towards socially useful production, and in which Technology Networks could help catalyse democratic technology, was beyond the agency of the movement alone. The triple challenges of reforming and opening the institutions of innovation to community participation, re-directing substantial investment into the manufacture of socially useful products, and articulating economic demand to social use value, ultimately eluded those campaigns.
But workshops practices also accommodated less radical purposes. Prototyping products permitted the commercialisation of technological artefacts, the institutionalisation of participatory design methodologies, new service models for energy, and novel organisational forms like product banks. Technology Networks contributed towards a more pragmatic (and business-oriented) approach to prototyping products. Initiatives able to connect to state programmes for small enterprises and training outlasted the collapse of left alternative economic strategies.
So in a very practical, grounded and uneasy way, Technology Networks explored the possibilities and limitations for communities to exercise direct agency in technology development. Technology Networks enabled citizens to engage in extra-discursive ways, and offered spaces where material projects were connected to reflections on wider social, economic and political relations. Workshop aspirations for socially useful production may have proven to be more elusive than the capabilities actually cultivated, but they were nevertheless aspirations that nurtured workshop spaces in an otherwise hostile political economy, and provided an early site for debating relations between technology and society, as well as more grounded design and innovation practices.
Many of these features anticipate debates relevant to community workshops today regarding participatory design, critical making and design activism (Disalvo 2012; Ratto and Boler 2014; Thorpe 2012). One claim made for participant making in workshops today is that the co-creation one finds in these spaces presents an antithetical challenge to consumerism. There is a hope that participants find greater fulfilment through making and reduce their involvement in consumerism (Thorpe 2012; Sanders and Stappers 2008). Workshops might become seeds for more environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive material cultures (Schor 2010). Mike Cooley and others in the movement for socially useful production put a broadly similar aspiration (but clearly not identical) in the more Marxist light of alienation under capitalism. However it is cast, the experience in Technology Networks is that the development of alternative material cultures requires considerable work. Technology Networks emphasised tacit knowledge, skill, and learning by doing through face-to-face collaboration in material projects. Technology Networks had to work sympathetically to acknowledge, develop and draw out community involvement.
Moreover, local knowledge in communities caught the attention of earlier activists as a way of resisting industrial restructuring under capitalism and scientific management. Shared projects were about crafting solidarities of resistance, confronting power relations, and insisting upon a right to be involved in decisions about design and production. That is, participation aimed beyond the development of technical proficiency towards developing critical awareness and mobilisations. In this endeavour, Technology Network experience underscores the off-line, face-to-face cultivation of community building in democratising prototyping possibilities. It is important to be reminded of this, since it raises questions about the depth of possibilities opened up by codification and widespread transmission of know how through digital social media. Skilful design in social media can assist but not completely substitute face-to-face, hand-by-hand activity (Wood et al. 2009). Issues of crafting solidarities are just as important for digital fabrication technologies and on-line community mobilisations today (Söderberg 2013).
The wider social purposes invested in prototyping are being explored anew today through critical making. Ann Light’s work with the Geezers in East London, and the attempts by this group of retired working-class men to develop tidal power technologies, brought to light various assumptions and critical issues about how technologies are developed, and who is expected to participate. “But it did not seek to equip older people with technical skills. Instead, it treated participants as experts on life experience, social relations, and the ethics of technology. By doing making … our purpose was to stimulate an awareness of (and interest in) the designed nature of technology, and a willingness to engage in design decisions for its future, rather than create new designers or new design tools” (Light 2014, 260). In this the Geezers were successful. But it is telling that whilst Ann and colleagues helped the Geezers access grants for participation in the arts, eligibility for technology development grants eludes them, even though the project demonstrated a promising approach. Technology institutions remain relatively closed to many.
Difficulty prizing open technology institutions means ostensibly socially progressive practices can become co-opted by more narrowly sectional interests. This was the experience in Technology Networks, and has subsequently been noted for participatory design more generally. Reflecting on his own involvement, Rasmussen recalled how developments over time, “focused on the micro-level only. The societal perspective of the Lucas Workers’ Plan or the attempts made by Greater London Council in the 1970s and 1980s get lost.” (Rasmussen 2007, 491). Asaro’s (2000) history of participatory design makes a similar observation (cf. Sanders and Stapper 2008, 7). As originally conceived, the development of work groups, use of mock-ups, and other design practices aimed for the democratisation of the workplace, and wanted to furnish working-class communities with the capabilities to influence technology development (Ehn 1988; Brödner 2007).
Projects like that of the Geezers illustrate just how rich a set of methodologies have developed for revealing everyday democracy in technology, but they often remain situated in constraining institutional settings.
Considered in an historical light, then the kinds of democratising cultural changes sought by some in workshops today, are seen as having to connect also to institutional transformation and, ultimately, political economy. The eventual transformative effect of workshop practices rests in the degree to which they can disperse their practices into society through social movements, and push them out in to state administration and (socialized) markets. Grassroots fabrication needs to link to social movement, just as the Lucas shop stewards and Collective Resource Approach attempted when linking to workers movements. And any cultural shift needs to translate into political and economic reinforcement.
Of course, neither every workshop nor workshop participant will wish to consider these political matters, since workshops are about fun and creativity for many. It has been harder to access everyday Technology Network participants in this historical research. It has been easier to interview and read the views of higher profile activists and workshop managers. Studying how participants felt about the aspirations invested in them by workshop activists and managers has been more difficult. Clearly, the product bank and activities documented indicate high participation in Technology Networks. But just how entrepreneurial or politically active participants felt, compared to pursuing personal projects, remains unclear. It is a very live issue for workshops today. Observers, activists and managers make varied claims about the meaning and significance of participation; but the views of those doing projects is less readily available.
However, even the most personal projects, in aggregate, have social consequences and cultural affects. The more rapid, extensive, and versatile networking possibilities opened up by digital fabrication and social media today, recasts innovative possibilities into interesting new forms. The social meaning of this activity is something participants should be encouraged to think about reflexively. Moreover, new powers to do innovation in a self-organised way can still struggle when they fail to exercise power over the agendas and frameworks of prevailing innovation institutions: such as which innovations attract investment for production and marketing, and under what market and social criteria. The bigger issues debated in Technology Networks remain pertinent today.
FROM THE CONCLUSION:
Celebrated internationally at the time, Technology Networks are largely forgotten now. With hindsight, the Networks were part of a movement that was swimming against the deeper and broader political economic currents of an emerging neo-liberal hegemony. The Thatcher government abolished the GLC in 1986. Without funds and political support, the Technology Networks declined, and activism dispersed into other forms and projects. At the time, however, things were less clear-cut, and the workshops and movement instigated early debate in the social shaping of technology and participatory design.
It is important to remember just how radical a position it was to call for citizens to be involved in prototyping in the past. Technology was the exclusive domain of expert designers, engineers and production managers. Whilst such elite views are still held by some today, it is not so surprising to see citizens involved in co-design and participatory prototyping initiatives, nor so radical to call for it. State support for FabLabs and other workshops is testament to some opening and is a legacy of past activism. However, what remains, and still challenges, is when those co-designs and alternative innovation cultures imply unwelcome and disruptive political and economic changes. The historical experience with Technology Networks suggests the prospects for workshops to transform the cultures of innovation will need simultaneously to address relationships with political economies. Activity in workshops has to be connected to wider mobilisations that challenge the prevailing political economy and offer alternatives supportive towards new innovation cultures. Recalling the conflicted experiences of Technology Networks in that endeavour brings to the fore issues still relevant today: tensions between prototyping activities for business development as distinct from more critical technological agit prop for political mobilisation; working at equitable relations between codified, formal expertise versus tacit, experiential skills; and the influences and opportunities presented by broader political and economic changes and wider movements for alternatives.
Of course, drawing specific strategies from these historical lessons is difficult. Any attempt would require very careful and contextualized translation across quite different situations. Otherwise lessons risk being anachronistic.
This paper has analysed the situation for Technology Networks, which arose from a movement whose conception of workshops embodied a social vision for technology particular to its time, and which had to contend the restructuring political economies in which they were situated. The ideas in play today, including social visions for workshops, not to mention the institutions and technologies to hand, are different. But some of the fundamentals remain the same and demand attention; a point historical reflection brings to the fore."