GDI Shorts: Maker Spaces
GDI Shorts are an ongoing series where we explore interesting ideas affecting the data economy through three simple questions: What is the idea? Where is it located? And why should I care?
What are maker spaces?
“Maker spaces” (sometimes called “hackerspaces”) are collaborative working environments equipped with a variety of tools — ranging from the highly technical (e.g., editing software and 3D-printers) to basic instruments (e.g., hammers and table saws) — that enable their users to exchange ideas and use these shared tools to ‘make’ new creations.
These spaces are also sometimes referred to by specific names, depending on the specialty of each space: Physical spaces include “fab labs” (i.e., small-scale personal digital fabrication laboratories), “sewing cafés” (i.e., for micro-production working with textiles), “repair cafés” (i.e., for repairing existing commercial products), and “DIYBio labs” (i.e., for democratizing access to research in biotechnology). Digital spaces often include catalogues of creations that are part of the Open Design movement, such as the Open Source software blueprints for Covid-19 face shields that were shared during early 2020.
Maker spaces are generally defined by three core features: First, they are known for being highly collaborative environments where people from a wide variety of backgrounds can meet and work together based on a shared interest. Second, while they can be virtual, physical, or hybrid environments, “maker spaces” are, at their core, focused on enhancing knowledge creation and sharing ideas among other ‘makers’ who are part of that space or similar maker spaces around the world. Finally, maker spaces enable their users to produce new software and hardware creations through providing access to resources previously out of reach to general users, such as expensive physical equipment usually restricted to corporate research and development (R&D) teams.
Researchers including sociologist Dr. Howard Aldrich, who studies the intersections between maker spaces and entrepreneurship, have highlighted how these unique features of maker spaces “democratize invention and innovation,” transforming the processes of generating ideas and how projects can be executed.
Where can I find maker spaces?
Recent attempts to map the geographic spread of the “maker movement” have shown that maker spaces are distributed worldwide though are often highly concentrated in cities and urban areas. A 2018 study by Massimo Menichinelli and Alessandra Gerson Saltiel Schmidt identified over 3,500 maker spaces worldwide, primarily located in North America and Europe.
Why should I care about maker spaces?
Maker spaces’ roots in the Open Design movement — and consequently, emphasis on collaboration between ‘makers’ and Open Source design projects — has significant potential for encouraging the creation and rapid diffusion of new innovations, especially during times of crisis.
This was most recently apparent in countries including India and the United States during the early Covid-19 pandemic. In India, the M-19 movement successfully mobilized the creation of over one million ‘M-19’ face shields over 49 days during the country’s early 2020 lockdown. This ‘‘#theM19Collective’ initiative started with the goal of giving 1,000 Covid-19 personal protection face shields to frontline workers, yet quickly evolved into a collaborative effort across 42 cities, towns, and villages who were able to engage with and scale production of the ‘M-19’ face shields’ Open Source design.
These networks of maker spaces across India engaged with what Dr. Aldrich considers the “external enabling forces of digitization, economization, collaboration, and user-innovation” that are unique to maker spaces. These factors, in turn, are the framework supporting opportunities for new technologies, social forces, and knowledge resources to come together and help makers do what they do best — create.
The Future of Maker Spaces
Yet despite their potential, maker spaces’ future as a source of simultaneously local innovation paired with global dissemination is not entirely clear. As maker spaces’ responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have also revealed — especially in addressing shortages of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) — tensions exist around the ways in which intellectual property (IP) are treated by users of maker spaces.
The maker movement’s emphasis on the generation and open sharing of new ideas, closely tied to the Open Design and Open Source movements, mean that many maker space-generated designs often fall under a creative commons (CC) license structure. This is ideal for disseminating creations and related data quickly. Yet this same structure also creates tensions when traditional venture capital (VC) organizations are seeking out investment opportunities in promising new inventions and business concepts. For VCs, their goal is to find great, unique ideas that, with additional cash and management guidance, can be transformed into new enterprises where value is created, captured, and scaled for profit.
Unfortunately, this ethos is often considered counter to the original goals of the ‘maker’ movement, which primarily seeks to open access to ideas and encourage collaboration rather than restrict it. It remains to be seen if and how more bridges develop between maker spaces and the world of entrepreneurial investment, especially given the increasing number of maker spaces around the world. This same tension also poses interesting questions about the future of how data-informed innovations will develop and spread, given the increasing datafication of our world — and especially within developing areas where ideas abound, yet access to often expensive software and hardware tools is limited.
For more information on maker spaces and the maker movement, we recommend starting with the original MAKE Magazine website: https://makezine.com/
For more information about the Good Data Initiative, visit our website at: https://www.gooddatainitiative.com/
