Grassroots Digital Fabrication

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= research project


Description

Adrian Smith:

"Our investigation consists of two projects.

  • Grassroots innovation in low energy digital fabrication (GI-LEDF)
  • Transformative Social Innovation Theory project

In both projects we will be working with people involved in FabLabs and Hackerspaces. These are community workshops where people can access versatile, digitally-controlled manufacturing technologies, open source designs and training, and like minded people working on collaborative projects in a wider ‘maker’ social movement. Community workshops connect online through social media and physcially in meet-ups and conferences. Workshops and their networks enable people to work together in practical, hands-on projects. As such, they provide interesting and vibrant spaces for grassroots innovation.

At the same time as using spaces to make objects, some groups are critically de- signing initiatives that encourage people to explore whether and how grassroots digital fabrication can reconfigure, relocate, and recalibrate innovation capabilities in society. Some argue these grassroots innovation in new forms of production and consumption could permit re/upcycling of goods, and help cultivate post-consumer values through collaborative production and consumption. Others argue the digital fabrication technologies in these facilities permit a personalisation of production that could intensify consumption. Either way, there are uncertain implications for energy demand and sustainability.

But we are also interested in how these spaces provide sites for social innovation more generally. We want to understand how claims made for transformative potential of the socially innovative activity in community workshops compares and contrasts with practices in projects on the ground. These aspects of our work will be explored with workshops in Europe and South America.

We will be studying a variety of spaces and working with participants in those spaces in order to understand what people are doing with grassroots digital fabrication. We will also be studying the networks that both support and debate the spaces for grassroots innovation provided by these community workshops. We will also facilitate debate about the possibilities and limitations of grassroots digital fabrication through the organisation of practitioner workshops, and through an engaged research approach more generally." (http://grassrootsinnovations.org/2014/01/15/grassroots-digital-fabrication/)