Makerspaces and Institutions

* Special Issue: Makerspaces and Institutions. Ed by. Kat Braybrooke, Adrian Smith. Issue #12 of the Journal of Peer Production, 2018

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Description

" how are makerspaces encountering institutions in practice, and how are makerspaces institutionalising their practices? How are autonomous spaces maintained beyond the designs that different institutions may have? How are practices reinvigorated or altered in response to these encounters? Throughout the editorial process, we left what was meant by ‘institution’ deliberately open – though we did encourage contributors to be explicit in how they understood and approached institutions in makerspaces. The result, we’re pleased to say, is 13 papers that report rich, empirically-informed insights into makerspace institutionalisation and the possibilities for transformational change."

Contents

Kat Braybrooke, Adrian Smith:

"The 13 peer-reviewed research papers that make up this special issue deal with different aspects of these institutional conundrums. Some papers are about institutional entrepreneurship and the institutionalisation of new practices originating in makerspaces. Other papers examine what happens when existing institutions enter into makerspaces. And many papers look at both these directions of travel. In “Institutionalisation and informal innovation in South African Maker communities“, Chris Armstrong, Jeremy de Beer, Erika Kraemer-Mbula and Meika Ellis look into the co-existence of informal and institutional practices in makerspaces in South Africa. Institutionalisation, here, emerges through a variety of strategies, including the formalisation of maker community practices, partnerships with formal organisations, and embedding makerspaces in formal organisations. Whilst their evidence points to considerable institutionalisation, they find that even in these more formal situations a commitment to informality is valued, such as working imaginatively in open collaboration with innovative projects, where knowledge appropriation is handled informally. Makerspaces are thus seen as playing a helpful intermediary role in bridging the more formal development of innovation systems with the large informal sectors of South African society.

The ability of institutions to connect beneficially with large informal sectors is a theme in “Making in Brazil: Can we make it work for social inclusion?” by Rafael Días and Adrian Smith. They write about an initiative by the city authorities in São Paolo that opened public FabLabs in different districts, including the disadvantaged Cidade Tiradentes on the margins of the city (literally and figuratively). They discuss the initiative, and its aspirations to seed inclusive developments in the community. These hopes are situated in the Brazilian culture of improvisation and making-do known as gambiarra, and earlier programmes for social technology aimed at emancipating people from poverty through other participatory technology programmes. What is striking in this case, and familiar to public support for makerspaces in other cities, is how makerspaces are seen as an instrument that follows a ‘script’ for development as seen by those institutions, sometimes to the puzzlement of the intended beneficiaries. What will be important in the São Paolo initiative, and others, is the processes by which people can bring their own scripts into technology developments in makerspaces and narratives about the communities in which they are situated and what they’d like those communities to become.

The importance of permitting a diversity of scripts to enter into technology and making becomes especially apparent in the study of makerspaces in Nairobi undertaken by Alev Coban in “Making hardware in Nairobi: Between revolutionary practices and restricting imaginations“. Adopting a conceptual approach of performativity, her ethnography shows how institutional presumptions about ‘African’ development and poverty informed a particular, and questionable, view of social impact for makerspaces. She argues this reinforces (post-colonial) power relations with regards to what kinds of technology project were worthy of support and promotion, and which not. Perversely, good intentions – materializing in the funding of technology with social impact – end up further performing an exoticized take on poverty, rather than opening up to the wealth of ideas and diversity of talent that exists in Kenya.

Differences in institutional designs upon makerspaces is illustrated in a different way by the comparisons Pip Shea and Xin Gu make between FabLabs in two nations with “Makerspaces and urban ideology: The institutional shaping of Fab Labs in China and Northern Ireland“. The provision of open spaces and networks that support participants to do creative things with technology in collaborative projects is supported for differing instrumental purposes by public authorities. In China, they argue makerspaces are viewed as a practical way of promoting innovation culture, entrepreneurialism and a government-led economic agenda, whereas in Northern Ireland value is seen in the ability of making projects to build bridges between communities that carry a history of conflict. Rather than makerspaces rolling-out a universalist commons-based peer-production ‘paradigm’, spaces are found to be shaped more significantly by local and regional cultural values and expectations, reflected in the availability (or lack thereof) of institutional priorities and support.

Nevertheless, many of the leading figures of makerspaces are motivated by commons-based, peer-production possibilities, even if the practicalities of running a site and working with supportive institutions to keep it open means falling short of this ideal. In “The sociomateriality of FabLabs: Configurations of a printing service or counter-context?“, Cindy Kohtala draws upon ethnographic fieldwork to examine conflicting sociomaterialities at FabLabs in Europe, in doing so analysing how a tenuous co-existence between alternative and mainstream values can be negotiated through specific social and material practices. Her paper discusses how the commodification and conformity of some FabLab practices is entangled with the negotiated reconstitutions and aspirations of a more counter-cultural current of activity. This is illustrated by looking at the dynamics evident in specific kinds of work, knowledge and imaginative objects.

Commitments to common-based peer-production can, of course, constitute an informal institution in itself, to the extent that a set of norms and routines are established through such commitment. Compared to the backing by states and corporations for other kinds of institutions, such as those reinforcing market-oriented innovation and entrepreneurship, the informal norms of commoning and working as peers can seem at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, aspects of practices informed by commons-based peer-production can attract institutional entrepreneurs, who see a chance to win support for their activities by aligning with higher-level policy agendas. In “The institutionalization of making: The entrepreneurship of sociomaterialities that matters“, Evelyne Lhoste and Marc Barbier look at these dynamics in their history of FabLab developments in France. They explore how notions of innovation and entrepreneurship enable a host of different agents, artefacts and organisations to assemble around and find value in makerspace practices, and the important intermediary role FabLab managers play in the institutionalisation of these practices from a uniquely French perspective, including those at La Casemate in Grenoble.

In “Can one size fit one? A prospect for humane custom production“, ginger coons provides some useful historical perspective on the excitement for personalised production that emanates from today’s makerspaces, and particularly the increasingly accessible digital fabrication technologies facilitated by these sites. A comparison is drawn with dress-making practices in the 18th and 19th century, and the increasing access to patterns, sewing machines, and possibilities for personalised clothing. In taking the longer view, mass-personalisation today, in which customers can tweak patterns, is seen as an attenuation of the possibilities for much freer user relations with making. Coons argues institutional orientations towards smaller-scale production (as compared to mass-personalisation) would, from a historical perspective, have a better chance of genuinely involving the user in a more humane form of manufacturing.

Coon’s argument is perhaps reinforced by “In situ, 3D printed heritage souvenirs: Challenging conventional spaces and culture“, Sam Vitesse and Constantia Anastasiadou’s report on the use of on-demand 3D printed souvenirs at a gift shop at Stirling Castle in Scotland. A ‘pop-up makerspace’ was set up near the castle’s gift shop, where customers could choose from a range of designs and materials, and thus create a somewhat personalised memento of their visit to the castle. Vitesse and Anastasiadou look at the implications of this arrangement for material culture, situating the gift shop as an institution oriented not just around sales, but also around materially enduring relationships between visitor and official heritage attraction. Emotionally enduring design is advocated by some as a way of promoting a more sustainable material culture, precisely by making ‘made’ objects more meaningful to owners and users (Chapman 2009). So whilst a 3D print in a gift shop might appear particularly niche and innocuous, it nevertheless points to the bigger themes of sustainability covered by Cindy Kohtala.

In exploring political economies of the heritage sector in Britain, Kat Braybrooke’s research in “Hacking the museum? Practices and power geometries at collections makerspaces in London” considers how ‘collections makerspaces’ have been used by cultural institutions to create new experiences and hence relationships between artifacts, culture and visitor experience. She has studied their use through an applied, multi-site ethnography of three museums in London – Tate, the British Museum and the Wellcome Collection – and focuses on the geometries of power that are revealed through user practices and interactions at these emergent spaces. Starting with a genealogy of makerspaces that is framed around four temporal waves of innovation, she argues that as recent initiates into an institutionally-oriented fourth wave of spatial interactivity, collections makerspaces may be activated by their users in ways that facilitate critical inquiry into museums themselves, and the conventions of culture and privilege they represent. Power geometries do not disappear, but they do morph and evolve, and can result in a redistribution of power balances through peer production practices, in doing so changing notions of what a museum should and can be.

Redistribution is also the focus of the paper “Redistributed manufacturing and makerspaces: Critical perspectives on the co-institutionalisation of practice” by Liz Corbin and Hannah Stewart – but here, the important relationships occur on a macro-level. They consider how makerspaces are cast in the broader technical possibilities for manipulating the global circulation of design and machining instructions to local fabrication and production. The concept of redistributed manufacturing (RDM) has become alluring for a number of institutional agendas, all of which look to makerspaces as pioneers, prototyping systems and practices that enable revolutionary ways-of-doing. By looking into the tensions and contradictions of RDM discourse, and its dismissal of certain techniques, tools and materials while others are championed, Corbin and Stewart explore the increased importance of external agendas to the governance, purpose and focus of peer production communities. In doing so, they are able to peer beneath the peer production ‘technomyth’ (Braybrooke and Jordan 2017) itself.

Intriguingly, instrumental uses of local production capacity connected to cosmopolitan and mobile design possibilities is the point of departure for a quite different study in “Achieving grassroots innovation through multi-lateral collaborations: Evidence from the field” by Silvia Buitrago Guzmán and Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar. Here the site of inquiry shifts to Colombia, and the use of citizen innovation events and temporary makerspaces as an instrument for development and peace-building. After a helpful review of issues in development collaboration in technology, the authors provide analysis and reflection of two international design summits convened in Colombia in which they participated. The summits were intended to catalyze and support local innovation capabilities and peer production. Whilst they succeeding in making visible a rich variety of creative possibilities, the events also made apparent the lack of institutions available to help foster the further development of promising activities after the events. The challenge, here, is creating local institutions that bring universities, international organisations, civil society organisations, and business investment to the service of grassroots initiatives. Sustaining the success of these events requires an appropriate institutional environment.

In “Configuring the independent developer“, Tobias Drewlani and David Seibt examine a quite different instrumental use of the possibilities of making-as-peer production when it is harnessed by an influential multinational corporation. They examine the roles played by the ‘independent developer’ in a work programme organized by Google for the development of a modular smartphone. To build the phone, Google tried to maximize on the potentials of voluntary labour by bringing together a community of (unpaid) technology enthusiasts in the process of creative development – something which open hardware networks are doing in all sorts of domains. Grassroots enthusiasm and the apparent openness of Google were only able to mask the underlying tensions for so long before the project collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Drewlani and Seibt argue the experience is typical of current attempts by large firms to engage grassroots production communities in digital fabrication.

Our final research paper, “ReMantle and Make: A cross geographical study exploring the role of makerspaces and the circular economy in Scottish textiles“, is written by Paul Smith, Michael Johnson and Lynn-Sayers McHattie. They report on a design study centred on a workshop where makerspace practices are used to explore circular economies for the textile industry at two geographically different sites in Scotland. Issues in making textile production and the circular economy were situated around activities that were embodied in the hands-on making of textile products themselves using off-cuts and scraps. In a similar vein to other studies of this issue that looked at the use of the makerspace as an instrument of collaborative exploration, Smith, Johnson and McHattie find a disconnect between the successful raising of issues and the cooperation of institutions capable of carrying proposals to action, revealing a foreshortening of the makerspace-as-transformational possibility. Nevertheless, they conclude there is a usefulness in the kind of democratic knowledge production that is enabled by these interactions.

In additionally inviting more experimental pieces from practitioners as part of this special issue, we hoped to broaden the diversity of perspectives by sharing not only academic research but also on-site reflections about the effects of institutional engagements in these spaces. We were happily impressed by the diversity of knowledge and inquiry shared by those who participated.

Robert Richter and Daniel Wessolek share their reflections on the different traditions of fabrication and making that define the Futurium and the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, two institutions that target a similar audience. Artist and Tate Digital Studio Producer Luca M Damiani experiments with new communication formats to illustrate the tensions and opportunities offered by the convergence of art and technology across formal and informal maker settings. Molly Rubenstein, Benjamin Linder and Kofi Taha from the MIT-D-Lab provide valuable lessons from their engagement with the Artisan’s Asylum in the United States, noting the distorting effects of financial support on grassroots initiatives, comparing its model to that of the much better-resourced International Development Innovation Network (IDIN). Kazutoshi Tsuda, Mitsuhito Ando, Kazuhiro Jo and Takayuki Ito from the Yamaguchi Centre for Arts and Media (YCAM) in Japan discuss the gradual expansion of its lab and fabrication spaces over the past 30 years of the centre’s development, noting the beneficial possibilities offered by a public institution which allows itself to evolve with the times. The Centre for Sustainable Design’s Director Martin Charter, meanwhile, reflects on the emerging consciousness of a ‘fixer movement’ in the United Kingdom, from repair cafes to other local community efforts aimed at reframing consumer culture. Em O’Sullivan shares photos from her research into issues of accessibility and diversity in the maker movement, highlighting the efforts of a series of inclusivity-focused makerspaces in the United States and the United Kingdom that aim to address these challenges.

We also engaged in a bit of institutional collaboration ourselves for this special issue. Invited to share our findings with a new kind of audience at Tate Modern, we collaborated with Tate Digital Learning to curate a mini-exhibit as part of Art:Work, which we describe in “Space Gather Make: Shared Machine Shop Sound“. By asking what worker-owned labour looked and sounded like at the makerspaces featured in this special issue, the sites of this issue’s practitioners were envisioned as a series of distinct visual environments, each imbued with its own kind of life. We collaborated with sound artist Vasilis Moschas, who created a conceptual audio installation that explored the sound environments of each site, illustrating typical on-site experiences of flow, discontinuity, repair and breakdown." (http://peerproduction.net/editsuite/issues/issue-12-makerspaces-and-institutions/editors-introduction/)

Discussion

By Kat Braybrooke and Adrian Smith:

"Our initial response was to suggest makerspaces are sites of ongoing sociotechnical experimentation. The contributions confirm and elaborate on this point. Critics of makerspaces, meanwhile, seem to flip back and forth between sociologically and technologically deterministic views. Technologically deterministic in the sense that the digital fabrication equipment in these sites is considered to be inherently oppressive towards people, and therefore has to be challenged. But at the same time technologies are seen as the tools of capital, whose interests develop and underpin their oppression. Under this sociologically deterministic view, challenging oppressive instruments constitutes an attack on repressive social arrangements.

What unites the case studies, analyses and arguments of this special issue is their call for more flexibility. Alternative sociotechnical arrangements illustrate how some technologies can be subverted, and hegemonic forces countered. Promising sociotechnical openings are found, for example, in the way making can cultivate and express talents and knowledges previously overlooked by institutions and enable their recognition; or in the way making can prompt reflections about our material culture and generate practices for more sustainable cultures; or in the way making can remind us of life beyond that of ‘rational’ economic man (and it is all too often a man) and the diversity of motivations, conditions and moments of activation under which radical creativity and collaboration emerges. There is plenty of scope in all this activity for informing and influencing progressive institutional reforms.

However, all of the contributions to this special issue also have a critical edge. The institutional agents who direct what gets selected, institutionalized and turned into development pathways beyond the walls of makerspaces do not constitute a wide-open frontier where everyone is welcome. Some paths are easier than others and made more available to some groups than others. Recalling Issue 5 of Journal of Peer Production, whilst peer prototyping is still evident, actual peer production remains challenging. We note how even peer prototyping in makerspaces is structured by institutional biases and has to be proactively countered – see, for example, Issue 8 of Journal of Peer Production on feminism and (un)hacking. The point, however, is that it can be countered. We find this in the contributions to this special issue also, where progressive possibilities are being opened up, and renewed demands articulated to more radical institutional changes; in response to a moment when spaces for radical experimentation in peer production are being closed down, whether due to their capture by institutions, or because experience with the existing institutional landscape teaches us that alternatives are harder to progress than initially anticipated and need a redoubling of effort.

The uneasy co-existence between makerspaces and institutions feeds into the cycle of sociotechnical experimentation reflected here. Actors – and not always the same actors – will continually seek alternatives, such as commons-based peer production. Institutions will continue to be drawn to elements of what emerges through this experimentation, and support the practice and development of those elements. What gets overlooked and left behind by these developments will disappoint those of us with alternative visions. We see this in the plurality of viewpoints around many of the practices outlined by this issue. What an institution thought would be an ambitious experimental encounter is consequently seen as missing the original point, or not going far enough. This mix of successes and disappointments galvanises renewed attempts in more ambitious experimentation, hopefully having learnt from prior experiences.

However, if this dynamic is the basic lesson we take from the special issue, then it is one that has to be treated with caution. Whilst many makerspace managers and users might be motivated by commons-based peer-production, the diversity of settings studied in the contributing papers demonstrate it need not be shared on the ground, nor is it necessarily shared by other cultures. Other purposes come into play, and these play out through specific conjunctions of institutions and grassroots actors in their localities. Advancing commons-based peer-production means ultimately viewing and adapting its ideals through a local lens. For all the prospects of nearly instantaneous design and fabrication, file sharing and online collaboration, making must matter locally. While this issue does display broad patterns, its cases more importantly illustrate a diverse kaleidoscope of local histories and geographies that set the important details.

Such details are important, since they can be the source of contingencies in technology development and use, the cultivation of which opens up alternatives that can be emulated and mobilised elsewhere. These contingent spaces are where categorical statements about technology can be countered – and also where the isomorphism of institutions can be undermined and unsettled. Referring to the movement for socially useful production in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which in London opened a series of community prototyping workshops that anticipated today’s makerspaces (Smith 2014), sociologist Donald Mackenzie noted, “Whatever the eventual success or failure of these efforts to alter the nature of technology, our understanding of how technology changes can only profit from them. For, by making contingency and choice actual rather than merely hypothetical, they throw into ever-sharper light the ways in which social relations shape technical development” (Mackenzie 1984, p. 502).

Makerspaces, we have argued, are an obvious site where such choices and contingencies can be cultivated through local differences. Mackenzie is careful to write that experimental alternatives cast the social relations of technologies in ever-sharper light. He does not assume that improved insight into those relations automatically leads to greater agency over their transformation. But choices and contingencies arise on the institutional side of encounters with makerspaces also: the museum hacking the material cultures they curate; the education programme reforming its pedagogy; the development agency nurturing grassroots innovation; the businesses seeking new sources of profitable creativity; civil society networks building material expressions of their social values. Makerspaces help provide these institutions with new possibilities. Such contingencies and choices open up space for new institutional arrangements. Makerspaces do not only open up the technological black box, as Mackenzie would see it, but they also can help open up institutions to social scrutiny and to a better understanding of how institutional changes reshape the prospects of different sociotechnical configurations.

Of course, many of the contributions in this special issue note the relatively limited ways in which institutional change happens. Education might become more stimulating, problem-based, and hands-on, but its openness can still be limited by deeper institutional requirements to build entrepreneurial subjects fit for labour markets. Museum collections might now be reconceived as an active dialogue, but their contents are still set by institutions that determine what is worth curating. And, for all the buzz around open manufacturing, the labour process still privileges capitalist institutions. Institutions are, after all, conservative. By definition, their norms and routines modulate and dampen developments.

These features, however, are brought into a critical light when we scrutinize what it is that limits makerspace practices from reaching more radical peer production possibilities. It becomes evident what deeper institutional changes are needed before social values committed to sustainable development, dignified work, and social justice can really become normal, routine ways to go about making things. Digital fabrication through mass manufacture of flat-pack furniture is still more prevalent than the commons-based, community fabrication of street furniture noted earlier. Makerspaces can help open up institutions, whether they are found in public spaces or homes, and they can inform the design of radical new institutions, but the power to implement those radical new norms and routines requires agency. The social value in makerspaces lies in their articulation of institutional tensions through practical activity, and in some cases, critical reflexivity – but they alone cannot shift such a powerful tide. Transformational projects arise out of the actions of many actors over time. We should not devalue makerspaces simply because they lack the agency to overturn institutional logics all by themselves." (http://peerproduction.net/editsuite/issues/issue-12-makerspaces-and-institutions/editors-introduction/)