How Fab Labs Address Environmental Issues

* PhD Thesis: Making Sustainability. How Fab Labs Address Environmental Issues. Cindy Kohtala. 2016

URL = https://shop.aalto.fi/p/872-making-sustainability/

Description

"Citizens are increasingly involved in the design and production of their own products. Forerunner groups are exploring new ways of doing things with digital fabrication tools, a phenomenon known as the maker movement. Especially communities who work together in dedicated spaces, makerspaces, are rapidly proliferating. They are of research interest, as they are now experimenting with new practices and organizations that indicate the possible impacts of a digitalizing society. They carry potential to do away with the negative environmental impacts associated with mass production and consumption (and decouple them from socio-economic prosperity), but there may also be new, unforeseen environmental consequences of such prosumption.

This dissertation reviews the environmental issues in the maker movement, and it examines how environmental sustainability is taken up in Fab Labs (fabrication laboratories) or remains invisible and unaddressed, based on longitudinal analysis. The thesis sheds light on our possible futures, as these niche activities move towards the mainstream. It clearly demonstrates how communities attempt to enact ideology: how we shape technologies and technologies shape us."

Abstract

"Digital manufacturing technologies are proliferating and can enable socially significant, innovative new forms of production and consumption. This thesis examines the environmental sustainability issues in peer production and how they are addressed in Fab Labs (fabrication laboratories): shared spaces where users can design and make their own artefacts outside of conventional mass production channels, using, for example, laser cutters, 3D printers and electronics stations. Fab Labs are open to members of the general public, who learn to use the equipment themselves and are encouraged (or required) to document and openly share their projects. ‘Making’ in Fab Labs and the ‘maker movement’ are often endorsed by proponents as a better alternative to mass consumption and consumerism, whether through enhancing skills to build and repair, answering one’s own needs as opposed to ‘satisficing’ through passive consumption, or distributing production within local networks as opposed to long, transport-intensive and large-volume supply chains. However, Fab Labs and makerspaces are contexts rife with paradox and complexity concerning appropriate use of materials and energy. Little empirical research on material peer production currently exists, and the environmental impacts, and benefits, of digital fabrication are largely unknown.

Primarily through ethnographic research methods and Symbolic Interactionist analysis, the thesis examines daily practices and discourses in selected Fab Labs and how sustainability is represented in these communities. The findings articulate how the actors’ interactions, expressed intents and contextual conditions serve to shape the Fab Lab. The key finding is the conflict actors encounter between – on the one hand – setting ambitions, promoting particular ideologies and espousing sustainability-oriented values, and – on the other hand – realizing and enacting these values in the mundane and constraining routines of everyday practice. Even actors with a clear ecological mandate struggle to engage with emerging sustainability issues in a rapidly changing sociotechnical environment. Present topics of concern and everyday tasks overshadow future strategy and vision work as well as engagement with environmental issues and rapid technology developments. However, actors who consciously and visibly strive to enact the espoused Fab Lab ideology, i.e. offering access to empowering, distributed technologies that enable people to meet their own local needs by design, appear better able to identify and tackle the environmental sustainability issues as they arise. Environmental issues are also intertwined with and embedded in other ideological concerns, but they are rarely promoted in their own right.

The thesis also details the current landscape of research literature on distributed production, who is studying these environmental issues and how, and the potential opportunities and threats in this new mode of production.

?The thesis thereby contributes to research on peer production communities, social shaping of technology and sustainable design. Knowledge of current maker practices and their sustainability implications have value for the peer communities studied, but also potentially technology developers and policy makers. As Fab Labs are experimental spaces for new digital manufacturing capabilities and activities, the wider implications of the findings may indicate how increasing digitalization and citizen involvement in production will transform design and production – and the sustainability implications therein." (https://shop.aalto.fi/media/attachments/f8dd3/Kohtala.pdf)

Excerpts

From the introduction:

"Increasing numbers of citizens have access to digital fabrication equipment via devoted spaces known as Fab Labs, makerspaces and hackerspaces, which are mushrooming globally. Such access enables people to design and make their own products outside of conventional mass production and consumption channels, using technologies such as desktop additive manufacturing equipment (that is, ‘3D printers’), CNC (computer numeric control) milling machines, laser cutters, vinyl cutters and electronics stations for circuit prototyping. The technologies themselves, especially 3D printing, are widely espoused as disruptive technologies that will radically shift production and consumption patterns (Anderson, 2012; Marsh, 2012; Hamermesh, 2014).

The technologies are not new, as they have been used in industry, particularly in rapid prototyping, for decades; what is new is that costs of the equipment are rapidly decreasing, the machines are increasingly smaller and ‘desktop’, and the user base as well as use applications are expanding. Expiry of patents has especially fostered experiments in equipment design in open source development processes (de Bruijn, 2010; Jones et al., 2011), and users freely share and adapt designs and instructions for digital fabrication online (Kuznetsov and Paulos, 2010). Fab Labs, makerspaces and hackerspaces provide teaching and workshops to learn digital fabrication, but they also largely expect their users to use the equipment independently; this encourages peer learning and knowledge sharing. For explicit reasons such as ‘empowerment’, education and learning, and ‘democratization’ of production and technologies, Fab Labs are also expected to allow the general public access to their Labs at least part of the time, a mandate differentiating them from other makerspaces (Gershenfeld, 2005; 2012; Walter-Herrmann and Büching, 2013a). For Fab Lab founder Neil Gershenfeld, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ‘makers’ are “high-tech do-ityourselfers who are democratizing access to the modern means to make things” (Gershenfeld, 2012, 48).

Disruptive technologies combined with new practices and values aligned with empowerment and peer learning means the Fab Lab model could well be a stepping stone to something new and different: more widespread implementations of distributed production, as an alternative to mass production. Many actors in the Fab Lab network and the ‘maker movement’ espouse personal fabrication as a clearly better alternative to mass consumption and consumerism. In Fab Labs the capacity to answer one’s own needs locally, individually and as communities, is emphasized as a benefit (Gershenfeld, 2005), as opposed to being reliant on large corporate technology providers or ‘satisficing’ through passive consumption.1 Other espoused benefits are the enhanced skills people acquire to build, disassemble and repair (Mellis and Buechley, 2014). These propositions have clear environmental implications, from lessened environmental impact resulting from production only according to need, to more eco-efficient use of materials and products combatting planned obsolescence, to reduced negative impacts from transport emissions. However, little empirical research exists to confirm whether these benefits are coming to fruition or even on what actually happens in these forerunner makerspaces. Rifkin (2014), perhaps more than most commentators on Fab Labs or the maker movement, explicitly connects ‘making’ with environmental sustainability benefits: “The [Maker] Movement has been driven by four principles: the open-source sharing of new inventions, the promotion of a collaborative learning culture, a belief in community self-sufficiency, and a commitment to sustainable production practices” (Rifkin, 2014, n.p.).

Rifkin’s (2014) vision is of a more sustainable future world, where research and development (R&D) is distributed and democratized in Fab Labs and manufacturing is dispersed locally – powered by renewable energy, reducing transport emissions and eliminating the embodied energy in unneeded mass production intermediaries. Although stated as ‘fact’, Rifkin’s four principles (which would help precipitate such a vision) remain propositions and assumptions. The maker movement itself as a community of communities is fragmented and does not necessarily sing with the same voice on matters of self-sufficiency and sustainable production. Moreover, reporting on the environmental sustainability of 3D printing, personal manufacturing or the maker movement in non-academic media has tended to be taken on by enthusiasts and parties with vested interests. As research on makers, makerspaces and making is only now emerging, our understanding of everyday practices in makerspaces is also fragmented and largely reliant on groups’ and individuals’ own narratives. Rhetoric such as Rifkin’s (and numerous other authors’) may guide action as ideology and manifesto, but only direct observation of these activities and groups can reveal if makers’ actions truly reflect these “beliefs” and “commitments” – or otherwise.

Identifying when and how makers enact ideology, and when not, can help articulate opportunities for more responsible practices in makerspaces. As Fab Labs are experimental spaces for new digital manufacturing capabilities and activities, and makers the actors practicing a possible future already now, there is much that can be learned about the potential coming impacts of ever-increasing digitalization in society and more citizen involvement in production. Fab Labs and makerspaces are especially spaces where new practices around open design and open innovation meet new uses of materials (and new materials) and energy-intensive production methods: where the espoused equipotentiality (Bauwens, 2005) of citizens globally for creative making and invention may or may not meet equitable global access to and use of energy and natural resources. There is clear potential for participants in the maker movement, such as Fab Lab users and organizers, to bypass the negative ecological impacts of mass production and consumption in their collaborative endeavours, but it is not self-evident that the actors even acknowledge or actively pursue this potential in their quest to change the present: change production, education and even the economy (Walter-Herrmann and Büching, 2013b). It can therefore be put forward that the sustainability analysis of these practices is best done sooner than later.

?Among the citizen communities experimenting with digital fabrication, Fab Labs are a distinct entity and provide a distinguishable identity with which actors readily and eagerly associate. As will be explained further in the next chapter, the Fab Lab network is the most organized of maker communities: having clear communication facilities and channels networking the Labs; an abstract but widely promoted protocol for action; platforms for individual mobility, training and support across Labs; and regularly scheduled meetings for face-to-face interaction. Fab Labs therefore provide an excellent opportunity for examining peers making things together: organic enough that Labs differ widely from each other, while structured enough to enable observations of what commitments appear to maintain over time and across distance. Most importantly, such observations lend themselves to a better understanding of these novel spaces than mere identification of environmental issues in digital fabrication alone.

The opportunities and hindrances to adoption of sustainability-oriented values and actions by these communities can be identified and understood as rooted in the community’s local and geographic conditions, chronology and history, and interaction among actors: a more profound understanding involving time and change than can be delivered by quantitative evaluations (such as Life Cycle Assessments). This methodological advantage has also recently been acknowledged by other researchers, such as Hielscher and Smith (2014).

Given this background and the challenges outlined above, and highlighting the potential of Fab Labs to contribute to new production and consumption patterns in future, the key question is how (or if ) these actors can co-create a more sustainable (i.e. environmentally, socially and economically sustainable) paradigm through collaborative, explorative activities based in Fab Labs today. In this doctoral research, this question is mainly examined through the lens of what actors actually do to both establish and use the Lab to fulfil their objectives: to articulate what current activities in Fab Labs tell us about the barriers and drivers to recognizing and prioritizing sustainability issues. The research questions for the dissertation are as follows.

How do actors in the social world of a Fab Lab address environmental sustainability, in their future-oriented vision and strategy work and in their everyday operations? What are the environmental (often socio-environmental) issues in the maker movement and distributed production, and how are they discussed and tackled in Fab Labs?

The research methodology draws from approaches in Science and Technology Studies (STS), particularly Symbolic Interactionism and the social shaping of technology perspectives, and is informed by Design Research and the field of Design-for-Sustainability. Ontologically the research therefore takes a constructivist, interpretivist position. The methodology, methods and the researcher’s standpoint are discussed in chapter 3.

In geographic scope, the research has focused mainly on the global North, particularly northern European Fab Labs. In scale, the dissertation particularly examines the ‘middle range’ of material peer production that is currently little studied: the actions and interactions of active practitioners and Lab organizers and the relationship between what they espouse and what they do. At this scale, as individuals form communities and social worlds, structural concerns such as existing institutional conditions meet actor- and material-related aspects, such as developing and learning new practices with technologies. As a unit (or units) of observation, this research target falls between the micro-level focus of individual Lab users’ making actions (what they make, what motivates them, the role of ‘creativity’ and so on), a focus that receives more research attention, and higher-level observations of larger ecosystems (Fab Labs as innovation platforms, as alternative educational and socio-cultural spaces for neighbourhoods and municipalities, and so on). This larger body of research will be discussed further in chapter 2, and the scope of the research topic is discussed in more detail in section 2.2 and illustrated in Figure 4.

The audience that may benefit from the dissertation findings thus comprises researchers and practitioners from the fields of design and sustainable design, peer production, digital fabrication, user innovation, Sustainable Production and Consumption (SCP), futures studies and Science and Technology Studies. Also importantly, the findings and implications should help guide actors in Fab Labs to reflect on their future options and directions.

The next chapter will discuss the context and background of the dissertation topic and chapter 3 the theoretical positioning and methodology. Chapter 4 presents the summary of the research papers. Chapter 5 will synthesize and articulate the key findings and chapter 6 present their implications and final conclusions, followed by the original papers. "?