2.1 Thinking Through Making
2.1.4 Makers and the Maker Movement in the Social Sciences
While human geography seems largely devoid of work on the contemporary maker movement, academic disciplines outside of geography have also, until very recently, seen only a marginal interest in these spaces (Hielscher and Smith, 2014)16. In 2014, Sheridan et al. (2014: 529) noted a “dearth of empirical research
on makerspaces”, while two years later Kohtala (2016: 4) still maintained that “little empirical research on material peer production currently exists, and the
environmental impacts, and benefits, of digital fabrication are largely unknown”
(see also Kohtala and Hyysalo, 2015). This paucity is somewhat surprising, given the rise of such spaces as early as the 1990s (Hielscher and Smith, 2014), with Smith et al. (2013: 15) noting that “beyond practitioner aspirations, significant questions remain unanswered as to whether and how the ‘sociotechnical framings’ claimed for digital fabrication are manifesting in realities on the ground”.
Growth in this area is, however, becoming evident in fields such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Smith et al., 2013), design studies, and education studies (Halverson and Sheridan, 2014; Peppler et al., 2016; Sheridan et al., 2014) and can also be seen with the founding of a dedicated online journal on the topic, the Journal of Peer Production (peerproduction.net), as well as numerous special issues (Hunsinger and Schrock, 2016; Richterich and Wenz, 2017; Söderberg and Delfanti, 2015). Such growth, seen in the majority of citations in this section coming from 2014 onwards, comes on the back of “a surge in cultures of making,
from DIY, craft, and repair to hacking, 3D printing, digital fabrication, and
electronic tinkering” (Toombs et al., 2014: n.p.), a surge which Barba (2015: 639) calls “the making moment”.
16 I will here leave aside popular accounts, such as those of Anderson (2012), Dougherty (2012) and Gershenfeld (2007), which often tend towards the polemical (Davies, 2017b).
Kohtala (2015) notes that this is a field largely characterised by a technocratic focus, stemming from fields such as “operations and production management,
environmental management and/or design and engineering” (Ibid: 657; Ratto and Ree, 2012). This tends to “fetishize” tools, “seeing all problems as ones that technology can fix” (Smith and Light, 2017: 168). For example, Birtchnell and Urry
(2013: 391) examine “whether and to what degree…a new socio-technical system
might be emerging” around newly-accessible personal fabrication technologies such as 3D printing, a socio-technical system which “could mean that ships stacked
with thousands of TEU17 containers filled with consumer goods become a remnant
of the relatively recent past” (p. 402; see also Birtchnell and Hoyle, 2014). Dickel
et al. (2014: n.p.) note how “shared machine shops provide infrastructures for
novel forms of collaboration,” “a protective space for potentially path-breaking
innovations”, and that they “embody significant properties of a reflexive innovation society” (also Fleischmann et al., 2016).
There are number of issues with the broad statements issuing from this innovation- and technology-centred perspective. Firstly, it has ignored the preponderance and merging of both so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ tech approaches, including traditional ‘crafts’ within such spaces, tending to prioritise the former over the latter (Kadish and Dulic, 2015). Secondly, this work tends to elide, or sanitise, the complex and often contradictory social life of these spaces. As Smith and Light (2017: 171) note, “beyond some abstract general features, makerspaces
are not really a singular thing”, with “digital fabrication [articulating] very localized
activity that requires in-depth study on the ground” (2013: 3). Thirdly, political questions tend to be written out of such accounts, in favour of a form of technological determinism. Such determinism sits poorly with the complex outcomes of “a wide set of practices that ultimately aim to give control over
17 A twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU), which is a term used for what are commonly known as
sociotechnical systems to a broader group of people, effectively democratizing the
tools and knowledge of technical production” (Barba, 2015: 639).
On the question of sustainability, Fleischmann et al. (2016: 115) note that the sustainability of community-based workshops remains to be adequately assessed (see also Olson, 2013) and that, rather than being beacons of sustainability, they
may “lead to diminished (resource) scale efficiencies and intensify production and
consumption through the possibility of continual, customized manufacturing and
uncontrolled production.” Furthermore, the authors call for more research, noting
that work on this front has been neglectful of the breadth and depth of environmental social science (see also Smith et al., 2013), being largely undertaken through economistic, and often reductive, life-cycle assessments of technologies or manufactured items (Hielscher and Smith, 2014; see Gebler et al. [2014] and Kreiger and Pearce [2013] for examples).
Countering assertions that 3D printing could allow communities to reduce their reliance on global transport infrastructures, scholars note that the technologies held in maker spaces are no panacea, and often require the transportation of material feedstock18 and building materials themselves (Olson, 2013; Fleischmann
et al., 2016; Smith and Light, 2017). Olson (2013: 37) writes that while generalisations are impossible to make, given the varying uses and developing
technologies, “so far personal 3-D printing is leaning more toward overproduction
of throwaway goods than toward a new model of sustainable consumption”.
However, moving away from narrow questions of material use, Nascimento (2014: n.p.) holds that the actual sustainability value of such labs “may reside in a clear
re-thinking about the specific values, norms and relations…to be embedded in artifacts”.
18 Such as 3D printer filaments, acrylic plastics, MDF wood etc. It should be noted that such feedstock is mostly comprised of highly-refined materials, such as ABS and PLA plastics in the case of filaments, which are themselves energy-intensive to produce (albeit also widely recyclable).
Maxigas (2012), in a relatively early paper, attempted an historical genealogy of Hacklabs and Hackerspaces, arguing that they descend from two distinct lineages
– the former coming predominantly from the autonomist and anarchist movements, and the latter descending from the digital hacker community. In reality, obtaining clarity in such matters is difficult. The current use of ‘Hacklab’ or ‘Hackerspace’ has become more or less interchangeable with other terms, such as
‘makerspaces’ and sometimes even Fab Labs (though the latter are a particular form of entity franchised from MIT). Smith (2014), in turn, finds historical parallels with Technology Networks, supported by the Greater London Council in the 1980s to encourage community-driven innovation and empowerment.
The democratization and grassroots politicization often held to inhere in the spaces of the maker movement has been described as ‘critical making’ (Ratto and Boler, 2014a; Kadish and Dulic, 2015) and touted as an important response to the top-down priorities of technocratic high-tech societies. Within this work, makers have been broadly defined as “those who tinker, fix, recreate or assemble objects
and systems in creative and innovative directions, commonly adhering to the search for alternative and non-deterministic pathways to live in contemporary
material worlds” (Nascimento and Pólvora, 2016: 3). Evident in such work is an idealism in the framing of the spaces. For example, Nascimento (2014: n.p.)
elsewhere speaks of “far-reaching transformations in how we can conceptualize
and act through technology”, describing maker communities as ”vanguard agents
in creating, experimenting, producing and distributing new technological solutions, and as such, leaders in generating disruptive innovations that largely affect scientific, economical, educational or government organizations, and
ultimately, societal structures as a whole” (Nascimento and Pólvora, 2016: 2).
For Lindtner (2015: 871), such proclamations remain “a utopian vision rife with
technological determinism that portrays software-enhanced machines as the
harbingers of a third industrial revolution.” Troxler and Maxigas (2014: n.p.) similarly note that “shared machine shops figure as the occupied factories of peer
production theory – worker owned production units which often look like the perfect illustration of the revolutionary theory on first sight, yet on closer look
exhibit all its contradictions.” It has been said that no two spaces are the same
(Kostakis et al., 2015) and, while acknowledging the empowerment and community which are often evident in such spaces, Davies (2017a, 2017b) has picked up on several important contradictions, noting that there is a “multiplicity
of accounts of what hacking is and can do and a jangling disconnect between certain public accounts of it and what appear to be the priorities and interests of
“ordinary hackers”” (Davies, 2017a: 11).
In her 2017 book Hackerspaces: Making the Maker Movement, Davies notes the problematic gender relations endemic to many hacker and makerspaces, resulting in some women establishing women-only spaces (Nascimento, 2014; Toupin, 2014; Fleischmann et al., 2016). Rosner and Fox (2016) recount how the current preponderance of male-dominated spaces is shadowed and reinforced by histories of hacker and maker culture which tend to rely on mythologies of
“middle-class, college-educated, and often male technologists” (p. 558) to the
exclusion, for example, of feminist histories of women’s craftwork, and the crucial
role played by women in early computing. In their report on a workshop on makerspaces and sustainable development, however, Smith and Light (2017: 167- 168) note an awareness of this in the European makerspace community at least:
Ensuring inclusivity, diversity and building an open community was seen as central. Makerspace strengths rest in the encounters they create and the ensuing cross-
fertilisation of ideas, knowledge and practices…There is
scope for running makerspaces in ways that are more welcoming to groups that are poorly represented at present.
The spaces also have a contradictory relation to capitalism and the wider economy, often touted as both the next evolutionary phase of capitalism and the means of transcending capitalism, simultaneously. Davies (2017b) notes that while these are often touted as radical spaces of self-reliance, her interviewees “got
their supplies from big-box stores, paid rent to expensive inner-city landlords, and
ordered cheap laser cutters from China” (p. 11). Irani (2015), furthermore, has
studied ‘hackathons’ in India, noting that through their questionable techno- politics they contribute to the formation of a certain “entrepreneurial citizenship”. Söderbergh and Delfanti (2015: 794) highlight that “hacker practices and
innovations are adopted, adapted, and repurposed by corporate and state
institutions on a regular basis” and “made to serve other ends than the (emancipatory) ones claimed at the outset.”
To dwell solely on such critiques, however, could be to miss the point. As Davies (2017a: 12) recounts:
The hackers and makers we spoke to were almost uniformly passionate enthusiasts of the maker movement. They cared deeply about the success of their spaces and spoke about the ways that involvement in these spaces had changed their lives. They did not view hacking as a practice that was failing to live up to particular ideals; by and large, they had little interest in having abstract discussions with us about what hacking should be and what it was.
Davies goes on to describe the vast majority of what takes place in the maker
spaces she studied as ‘serious leisure’, requiring “effort and perseverance” (p. 14)
but resulting in significant fulfilment, drawing on seminal work by Stebbins (1982; Jackson, 2010). On this more day-to-day level, the ethnographic study of one particular space allowed Toombs et al. (2014) to identify the importance of social relations and identity in maker spaces. Elsewhere the same authors (Toombs et al., 2015) have identified the mundane community maintenance and ethics of
mutual care which underlie much of the hyperbole around ‘maker spaces’.
To conclude, while human geography has seen a dearth of work on the topic, the growing social science literature on maker spaces to date has itself had a very particular and partial style and focus. When not focusing on technological, engineering or design issues, there is a tendency to emphasise something like a
general ‘hacker spirit’ (Davies, 2017b), ‘maker ethos’ (Nascimento and Pólvora, 2016) or ‘maker identity’ (Toombs et al., 2014), prioritizing the discursive over the
experiential, and therefore giving only marginal consideration to the day-to-day operations, affects and (un)sustainable practices of particular spaces or lacking fine-grained accounts of particular tools and techniques. This opens a significant gap in the literature which I hope to address.
2.1.5
Concluding Remarks
Serious thinking about our own personal place in the environment will inevitably involve thinking through craft.
Adamson (2007: 167)
In the late 1990s, Greenhalgh (1997: 47) asked “what concept of craft can be
developed to allow it to generate a philosophy and aesthetics for the next
century?” This section has presented craft as a growing focus in the social sciences of the 21st century. Hard to define, yet risk-laden and emergent, craft entails a tacit resonance between maker and materials, human and object, an encounter between this hybrid being called a human, and non-human/material agencies.
Historically, Western scholarship has attempted to draw lines in the sand between practice and theory, art and technology, maker and user (Sennett, 2008). As Ingold (2012) and others have exhaustively shown, however, making is a process of constituting things from the threads of life, not simply a technique of imposing form on matter. It is the complexity of this encounter which makes craft such a fruitful and ever-changing topic of research.