CERN is home to some of the largest and most complex scientific equipment on the planet. Yet back in March, scientists gathered there for a conference about DIY laboratory tools. Scientists in poorly funded labs, particularly in the global south, have used DIY tools for many years. But well-resourced institutes are increasingly interested in the collaborative possibilities of open labware. Citizen scientists are also using it to build instruments for tasks like environmental monitoring, which can then be used to support community demands for justice from polluters.

It is not only scientists – citizen or professional – who are going DIY. An open hardware movement of hobbyists, activists, geeks, designers, engineers, students and social entrepreneurs is creating ingenious versions of all sorts of technologies, and freely sharing the know-how through social media. Open hardware is also encroaching upon centres of manufacturing. In August, for instance, the global gathering of FabLabs met in Shenzhen (already host to Maker Faires) to review how their network can help to decentralise design and manufacture.

The free software movement is cited as both an inspiration and a model for open hardware. Free software practices have transformed our culture by making it easier for people to become involved in producing things from magazines to music, movies to games, communities to services. With advances in digital fabrication making it easier to manipulate materials, some now anticipate an analogous opening up of manufacturing to mass participation.

One online community has been developing DIY book scanners. These enable you to build a machine for automatically photographing book pages; and then download free software to process the images into a file. Having digitized your books, you might go further by sharing the files online (taking care to post anonymously to a site relaxed about copyright law).

The list of open hardware available to people continues to grow. The Open Source Ecology group is even developing a Global Village Construction Kit of tools for self-sufficiency, from machine tools to housing to tractors and beyond. A ‘global commons’ of accessible tools is emerging.

Open hardware can be serious business too. Take RepRap: a 3D printer community whose open source practices enabled its rapid growth. Its evolution took a controversial turn when members of the Resistor hackerspace in New York decided to commercialize their version of the RepRap, and protected aspects of its design through intellectual property. Their Makerbot business was subsequently bought for $400 million by 3D printer manufacturer Stratosys; a move which provoked fierce criticism from open hardware advocates.

Hobbyists have always tinkered with technologies for their own purposes (in early personal computing, for example). And social activists have long advocated the power of giving tools to people. The Whole Earth Catalogue was an early proponent of the liberating potential of digital technology. Then there were the dog-eared Appropriate Technology manuals that a generation of aid workers carried into the developing world in the 1970s and 1980s. Other antecedents include Victor Papanek’s Nomadic Furniture and Walter Segal’s self-build housing. We can compare these with their digital heirs at Open Desk and WikiHouse. Open, community-based technology workshops are not so new either.

So is this just old wine in new bottles? We think not. Open hardware lowers the barriers to participation in rapid prototyping in ways that earlier activists would find astonishing. And with community-workshops popping up in many towns, and online sharing platforms proliferating, the possibilities for doing technology differently are genuinely exciting.

Nevertheless, older experiences hold important lessons for the new. Our research into grassroots innovation movements, old and new, brings insights that activists today would be wise to consider.

The immediacy and connectedness of open hardware does not nullify the need for real skills in technology development. There remains a craft element to even the fleetest of digitally enabled tools. Experienced designers, engineers and machinists know the importance in understanding not just the tools themselves, but also the materials they work with. Practices that respect materials across their whole life cycle become imperative. Sustainable open hardware shifts the focus to making sufficiently, design for repair and repurposing, upcycling objects, and valuing the craft therein. Just because we can make almost anything, doesn’t mean we should.

And the materials involved are not simply physical. They are social too. If open hardware is to be genuinely inclusive, then its practices must actively empower people to become involved. Notionally accessible tools need to become actually available, and people need to feel confident using them. This requires social skills in community participation, as well as technology skills.

FabLabs are fantastic at combining face-to-face developments with online networks. These hybrid spaces contribute important infrastructure for open hardware. But maintaining infrastructure needs investment. Existing institutions, such as schools, museums, local governments, universities, and corporations are helping fund open workshops.

These institutional links bring the political dilemmas of open hardware to the surface. Is it really transforming technology development, or simply a refreshing input for business as usual? Education institutions see cool ways to induct people into conventional science, technology and manufacturing jobs. Local governments get excited about the entrepreneurial possibilities. Corporations see a reservoir of design prototypes offered up by the free labour of enthusiasts.

It is important to keep sharp open hardware’s more transformational edges, on agendas such as dismantling intellectual property and releasing investment for alternative business models. Only through a mix of craft, politics, and the support of social movements, will open hardware fully realise its potential to democratise technology.

Adrian Smith is professor of technology and society at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) and a member of the ESRC STEPS Centre (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) at the University of Sussex. Dr Mariano Fressoli is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET, Argentina) and STEPS Latin America. Their new book, Grassroots Innovation Movements, includes chapters on social technology, fablabs, hackerspaces and makerspaces.

Originally published on theguardian.com

Photo by LarsZi

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São Paulo’s authorities join a range of civic bodies casting an eye over the – potentially – empowering possibilities of FabLabs. Yet these initiatives raise many issues: who, exactly, is being empowered by access to tools? What kind of technological citizenship and forms of urban governances do they support, and why? To start unpicking these questions, it is instructive to look to Barcelona where a program to open an Ateneu de Fabricació Digital in every city district has been running for two years.

A brief history of digital fabrication workshops

FabLabs are part of a larger global movement of community-based digital fabrication workshops. These spaces also include hackspaces and makespaces, and are typically equipped with both contemporary versatile technologies – CAD, 3D printers, laser cutters, routers – as well as traditional machines and tools including lathes, drills, sewing machines, and welding equipment. Emerging from the free culture and autonomist movements, community workshops have moved into hardware hacking, using tools that allow their members to modify, personalize, and manufacture anything from toys and vehicles to wind turbines and home energy systems (FabLab Barcelona even made a prefab eco-house). Members share ideas, design, code and instructions online – what gets designed in one workshop can theoretically be made in any other in the world.

The growth in FabLabs might seem like an organic outgrowth of this people-led movement. Its roots, however, come from an outreach initiative of MIT’s Centre for Bits and Atoms, who had intended to gradually roll out FabLabs in a few countries. Technology carries unexpected consequences, and the model soon took on a life of its own as other groups decided that yes, they would quite like to set up their own fabrication labs independently of MIT. Right now, there are around 440 FabLabs across 33 countries.

Barcelona and the Ateneus Project

And so to Barcelona, which opened its first FabLab at the Institute of Advanced Architecture Catalunya (IAAC) in 2006. Originally intended for relatively closed use – for students, prototyping, and architectural commissions – the lab garnered global attention for its pioneering vision of urban governance. More than simply making new widgits, IAAC founder, and now City Architect, Vicente Guallart envisioned maker-citizens using new tools such as 3D printers and open source designs as a means of taking an active, material role in city development.

This image of the technologically empowered civic citizen appealed, and FabLab Barcelona’s model went on to provide the template for the Ateneus program as part of the city leaders’ vision for transforming Barcelona into a smart, self-sufficient city. Supported by Barcelona’s civic leaders, each Ateneu receives public funds to run popular local events – family days and school visits; training courses and social innovation programs: everything necessary to equip citizens with the digital fabrication nous necessary to ‘materialise their ideas and create their worlds’ (according to the Ateneus slogan). By this vision, high-tech public infrastructure will make it easier for Barcelona’s citizens to lock into a global ‘maker’ network – uploading designs which folks, say, in Singapore, might use; or collaborating in prototyping with FabLabs in São Paulo, adapting ideas produced globally to fit their own local needs.

What does a citizen of this exciting new world look like? Technologically active, certainly, and willing to embrace digital fabrication tools, yes – but in a relatively trouble-free and depoliticised way? In adopting the term ‘Ateneu’ for their workshops, city authorities have evoked a Catalan tradition of social centres where people used to meet up, build bonds, and debate issues about the type of society they want – but which in this case civic leaders wish to associate with selectively.

Opening up Ateneus

The first Ateneu opened in July 2013, in an abandoned silk ribbon factory in the Les Corts district. A further 20 workshops are planned to some degree for later down the line. In speaking to me, the Ateneus network director stressed how embryonic and exploratory the programme is. A community workshop for digital fabrication is a strange concept for public administrators to get their heads around. Councils traditionally produce conventional public services for people to receive and consume; conversely, Ateneus offer a space where citizens do the producing. Simply convincing city bureaucracies to experiment with this concept is already an achievement.

Whilst setting-up is also relatively straightforward – installing machinery, running courses – the real challenge comes in weaving the workshops into the everyday fabric of the local community. It takes time to build familiarity, confidence and commitment amongst neighbours, and considerable resources and patience on the part of the city authorities before the possibilities loaded onto Ateneus can be realised.

The experiences around the Ateneu in Ciutat Meridiana highlight these tensions. Ciutat Meridiana is the poorest neighbourhood in Barcelona – unemployment exceeds 20 percent, and family incomes are one third of city averages. The neighbourhood association is constantly in battle with the council over changes to social services, and resisting evictions from mortgage lenders.

So what, exactly, does a high-tech, MIT-inspired workshop, with no immediate role in alleviating the daily crisis of people’s lives, have to offer the neighbourhood? Very little, it would seem – at least initially. The people of Ciutat Meridiana needed food, not 3D printers, and the project didn’t help itself by siting the workshop in a building that neighbours were already using as a food bank. (The Mayor’s support for Ateneus also counted for little in a neighbourhood that felt ambivalently towards him). Rather than embracing the project, locals were alienated and occupied the Ateneu in protest. Negotiations ensued, eventually leading to two conditions of agreement – the food bank was re-established, albeit elsewhere in the neighbourhood; and the Ateneu would emphasise training and work for young people.

Ciutat Meridiana shines a light on the tension between what citizens wanted from their city now, and what city-leaders envisage for future citizens. Even if local stakeholders are engaged beforehand, as happened with the first Ateneu in Les Corts, opening up a workshop is the easiest part of the project. Embedding the facility into community life is more challenging by far.

Making other forms of citizenship

Whilst the Ateneu program is being rolled out, other self-organised and spontaneous workshops are also flourishing across the city. Over in Ciutat Vella, the Maker Convent offers open and informal training programmes for their machinery. Vailets Hacklab run courses for kids in a variety of locations, and now including the Ateneus. Similarly, the Fab Café, run by the Makers of Barcelona and other groups, offer workshop space, education, and tools for anyone walking in off the streets. The ethos of these spaces borrows heavily from a Silicon Valley-esque, Kick-started, ‘can do’ form of urban entrepreneurship, in which people happily share enthusiasm for digital fabrication and explore new forms of collaboration together. Whether citizens suffering precarious employment and other economic hardships wish to embrace this form of citizenship is perhaps a moot point.

Despite the public imaginary of hackspaces as user-led spaces, neither the Ateneus nor these other makerspaces are particularly grassroots phenomena. One test for whether the Barcelona civic vision of digital fabrication workshops can co-exist with grassroots activities will come with Can Batlló, a massive disused textile mill proposed as a potential site for an Ateneus workshop. Can Batlló is in the Sants district of Barcelona, and working-class Sants has a long tradition of political and community organisation – including many squats and social centres – and a history of their own autonomist and co-operative activities.

In response to the economic crisis, Sants activists have already occupied and renovated Block 11 of Can Batlló. The building has been converted into an autonomous, self-organised community centre and co-operative working space, housing a library, carpentry workshop, bar, urban gardening space; and the Sants activists have aspirations to seed local, co-operative economic activity for the neighbourhood through the centre.

If activists are already involved in this type of community building, does a project like Ateneus offer anything more than a shiny technological patina to the process? Or could an Ateneu provide useful tools that unlock wider possibilities, and plug the district into a global community of design activists experimenting in digital fabrication for DIY urbanism and commons-based economic development? The association of Ateneus with Mayor Trias’s smart city vision has been considered by critics to be the latest in a series of city makeovers, prioritising international capital markets and speculative investments in the city over the real needs and aspirations of its residents. According to Ivan Miró, an activist from the Ciutat Invisible co-operative, the smart city is merely a different brand of the same neo-liberal model of urban regeneration, whose democratic and local economic credentials are deeply suspect. In Barcelona, the council’s (sometimes violent) evictions of long-established squatted social centres have deepened suspicions of the smart city plan, and heightened antagonism with the city’s grassroots activists.

Making is political

The Ateneus programme, with city-leaders’ notions of an orderly cultivation of technological citizenship, has unintentionally uncovered very different forms of citizenship in action, and the role that tools play in them. Ateneus are trying to establish themselves in a context where people feel the strain of economic crisis, and increasingly question whose interests are truly being served by future visions of their city.

Many in the wider ‘maker’ movement can be reluctant to engage in politics overtly, as to do so would appear to constrain the notion of giving tools to people in a way which offers them unconstrained agency around their purposes, deployment and use. Yet, as I have explored in my work on community workshops in London in the 1980s, these types of ‘making’ spaces are always opened in very specific social, political and economic contexts. Such contexts already influence the relative ease and kinds of support available for putting tools to particular purposes. If communities are truly to be liberated to debate, use, and resist tools in a way that they see as appropriate (rather than those encapsulated in elite visions), one must engage with the politics of these contexts. This is something that earlier advocates of providing tools for the people have made very clear – think of William Morris and his argument for socialism, or Murray Bookchin on post-scarcity anarchism.

Deployed sensitively, the Ateneus programme could provide important spaces for exploring technology, citizenship, and urban governance in very practical ways, supporting diverse forms of neighbourhood-led development. The programme is still young, and patience is required. The longer-term promise of Ateneus rests with it becoming a community resource owned by the neighbourhoods in which it sits, rather than tied up with the patronage of local politicians. São Paulo, and wherever else public authorities become involved in community workshops, including here in the UK, should take note: bringing tools to people requires skilful community development as well as skills in digital fabrication. A controlled opening up of urban governance and experiments in cultivating particular forms of citizenship is not an easy task.

Originally published in the Guardian in 2015. Lead image by Adrian Smith.

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Experimentation with radically open and collaborative ways of producing knowledge and material artefacts can be found everywhere – from the free/libre and open-source software movement to citizen science initiatives, and from community-based fabrication labs and makerspaces to the production of open-source scientific hardware. Networked digital infrastructure – including ever-faster internet access in far flung places – makes these experiments more possible.

Though diverse, these initiatives have important things in common: they create or recreate knowledge commons, and attempt to get a broader array of actors involved as ‘agents’ in innovation.

In a new working paper, ‘Open and Collaborative Developments’, researchers in STEPS America Latina, the STEPS Centre and SPRU reflect on what these emerging practices might mean for helping to cultivate more equitable and sustainable patterns of global development. For many commentators and activists such initiatives promise to radically alter the ways in which we produce knowledge and material artefacts in ways that are far more efficient, creative, distributed, decentralized, and democratic. But can open and collaborative approaches fulfil this promise?

Challenges for open and collaborative practices

The key to answering this question is a set of challenges about the knowledge politics and political economy of the new practices. What depths and forms of participation are being enabled through these new practices, for instance? In what senses does openness translate to the ability to use knowledge? Will open and collaborative forms of production create new relations with, or even transform, markets, states, and civil society, or will they be captured by sectional interests?

Sharing and sticky knowledge

To take one example, a key assumption underpinning many open and collaborative initiatives is that knowledge and information can be shared, then used, modified or further developed, among actors who are far apart from each other (either geographically or institutionally). In effect, this is a promise to radically redistribute access, power and agency over the way that knowledge and materials are produced.

For those in the global South, this is an intriguing prospect. Many developing countries are characterized by acute knowledge dependencies, very narrow production structures, and constrained scope for innovation. In many cases, global firms have control over the frontier of knowledge and technology. So sharing knowledge openly and collaboratively across nations ought to give more options for innovation and participation for people in those countries.

The problem is, though, that knowledge is ‘sticky’: it is immobile, or at least costly or difficult to move from one setting to another. There are several aspects to this; each of which complicates further the challenge of ensuring widespread, equitable internet access and digital information flows.

One aspect to knowledge stickiness is that knowledge possesses important tacit dimensions, particularly in the form of skills and competences. These are most readily shared and learnt in apprentice relationships and through social practice, they often take years to develop, and they are extremely difficult to codify or render explicit, and so are not easily shared through digital networks. Tacit knowledge and the skills to put knowledge to material effect in development are, however, critical to producing and utilizing any and all forms of knowledge. Even successfully using databases of codified information requires skills to select, interpret, and practically use what is relevant.

Some areas of open and collaborative production cope more effectively with knowledge ‘stickiness’. For instance, absolutely central to the success of the open and highly collaborative international Green Revolution in plant breeding (albeit in pre-internet days) were long and intensive international exchanges and field training of thousands of young scientists.

More recently, community-based makerspaces have managed to combine digitally shared, non-proprietary knowledge platforms, with collaborative physical spaces that enable shared learning by doing and using locally. They may, as a consequence, manage to get around many of the problems posed by the immobility of tacit knowledge and the need to re-interpret appropriately and re-embed codified knowledge in local practices.

But other practices, such as citizen science initiatives or the sharing of scientific information via open access repositories may struggle to overcome these kinds of challenges without analogous developments locally. In such circumstances, meaningful access to knowledge and the ability to participate effectively in its (re)production and use are likely to remain very limited.

The obstacles are not necessarily insurmountable, but they do require careful attention to how sharing and collaboration is practiced on the ground, and to the development and distribution more generally of capabilities in knowledge production and use.

Three challenges

Our paper as a whole highlights three sets of challenges in the emerging field of open and collaborative production.

One, as in the example above, concerns the ways in which important attributes of knowledge itself limits aspirations for a more democratic innovation culture.

A second concerns the operation of power internal to the process of producing open and collaborative knowledge. Can open and collaborative production transcend existing hierarchies, asymmetries in the distribution of resources and capabilities between collaborators, and wider patterns of social privilege and structure?

A third concerns the nature of political and economic power within the wider settings and structures in which initiatives in open and collaborative production are situated. Put somewhat crudely, will the new practices constitute ‘novel inputs for existing processes’ or ‘novel inputs for transformed processes’?

None of these three challenges is insurmountable, as we conclude in our paper. But they do imply that any promise in the open and collaborative practices will be realised through accompanying, wider developments. These must be attentive to issues of local capabilities (material and social) in diverse contexts, and include the capability to grapple with issues of relative power and autonomy.

The authors of this blog post are co-authors of the working paper ‘Open and Collaborative Developments’(STEPS Working Paper 98). You can read the abstract here and download the paper (PDF, 900KB).

Photo by Gexydaf

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It was in January 1976 that workers at Lucas Aerospace published an Alternative Plan for the future of their corporation. It was a novel response to management announcements that thousands of manufacturing jobs were to be cut in the face of industrial restructuring, international competition, and technological change. Instead of redundancy, workers argued their right to socially useful production.

Around half of Lucas’ output supplied military contracts. Since this depended upon public funds, as did many of the firm’s civilian products, workers argued state support be better put to developing more socially useful products.

Rejected by management and government, the Plan nevertheless catalysed ideas for the democratisation of technological development in society. In promoting their arguments, shop stewards at Lucas attracted workers from other sectors, community activists, radical scientists, environmentalists, and the Left. The Plan became symbolic for a movement of activists committed to innovation for purposes of social use over private profit.

Of course, the world is different now. The spaces and opportunities for democratising technology have altered, and so too have the forms it might take. Nevertheless, remembering older initiatives casts enduring issues about the direction of technological development in society in a different and informative light: an issue relevant today in debates as varied as industrial policy, green and solidarity economies, commons-based peer-production, and grassroots fabrication in Hackerspaces and FabLabs. The movement for socially useful production prompts questions about connecting tacit knowledge and participatory prototyping to the political economy of technology development.

In drawing up their Plan, shop stewards at Lucas turned initially to researchers at institutes throughout the UK. They received three replies. Undeterred, they consulted their own members. Over the course of a year they built up their Plan on the basis of the knowledge, skills, experience, and needs of workers and the communities in which they lived. The results included designs for over 150 alternative products. The Plan included market analyses and economic argument; proposed employee training that enhanced and broadened skills; and suggested re-organising work into less hierarchical teams that bridged divisions between tacit knowledge on the shop floor and theoretical engineering knowledge in design shops.

The Financial Times described the Lucas Plan as, ‘one of the most radical alternative plans ever drawn up by workers for their company’ (Financial Times, 23 January 1976). It was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. The New Statesman claimed (1st July 1977) ‘The philosophical and technical implications of the plan are now being discussed on average of twenty five times a week in international media’. Despite this attention, shop stewards suspected (correctly) that the Plan in isolation would convince neither management nor government. Even leaders in the trade union establishment were reluctant to back this grassroots initiative; wary its precedent would challenge privileged demarcations and hierarchies.

In the meantime, and as a lever to exert pressure, shop stewards embarked upon a broader political campaign for the right of all people to socially useful production. Mike Cooley, one of the leaders, said they wanted to, ‘inflame the imaginations of others’ and ‘demonstrate in a very practical and direct way the creative power of “ordinary people”’. Lucas workers organised road-shows, teach-ins, and created a Centre for Alternative Industrial and Technological Systems (CAITS) at North-East London Polytechnic. Design prototypes were displayed at public events around the country. TV programmes were made. CAITS helped workers in other sectors develop their own Plans. Activists connected with sympathetic movements in Scandinavia and Germany.

The movement that emerged challenged establishment claims that technology progressed autonomously of society, and that people inevitably had to adapt to the tools offered up by science. Activists argued knowledge and technology was shaped by social choices over its development, and those choices needed to become more democratic. Activism cultivated spaces for participatory design; promoted human-centred technology; argued for arms conversion to environmental and social technologies; and sought more control for workers, communities and users in production processes.

Material possibilities were helped when Londoners voted the Left into power at the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981. They introduced an Industrial Strategy committed to socially useful production. Mike Cooley, sacked from Lucas for his activism, was appointed Technology Director of the GLC’s new Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB). A series of Technology Networks were created. Anticipating FabLabs today, these community-based workshops shared machine tools, access to technical advice, and prototyping services, and were open for anyone to develop socially useful prototypes. Other Left councils opened similar spaces in the UK.

Technology Networks aimed to combine the ‘untapped skill, creativity and sheer enthusiasm’ in local communities with the ‘reservoir of scientific and innovation knowledge’ in London’s polytechnics. Hundreds of designs and prototypes were developed, including electric bicycles, small-scale wind turbines, energy conservation services, disability devices, re-manufactured products, children’s play equipment, community computer networks, and a women’s IT co-operative. Designs were registered in an open access product bank. GLEB helped co-operatives and social enterprises develop these prototypes into businesses.

Recalling the movement now, what is striking is the importance activists attached to practical engagements in technology development as part of their politics. The movement emphasised tacit knowledge, craft skill, and learning by doing through face-to-face collaboration in material projects. Practical activity was cast as ‘technological agit prop’ for mobilising alliances and debate. Some participants found such politicisation unwelcome. But in opening prototyping in this way, activists tried to bring more varied participation into debates, and enable wider, more practical forms of expression meaningful to different audiences, compared to speeches and texts evoking, say, a revolutionary agent, socially entrepreneurial state, or deliberative governance framework.

Similarly today, Hackerspaces and FabLabs, involve people working materially on shared technology projects. Social media opens these engagements in distributed and interconnected forms. Web platforms and versatile digital fabrication technologies allow people to share open-hardware designs and contribute to an emerging knowledge commons. The sheer fun participants find in making things is imbued by others with excited claims for the democratisation of manufacturingand commons-based peer production. Grassroots digital fabrication (pdf) rekindles ideas about direct participation in technology development and use.

Wherever and whenever people are given the encouragement and opportunity to develop their ideas into material activity, then creativity can and does flourish. However, remembering the Lucas Plan should make us pause and consider two issues. First, the importance placed on tacit knowledge and skills. Skilful design in social media can assist but not completely substitute face-to-face, hand-by-hand activity. Second, for the earlier generation of activists, collaborative workshops and projects were also about crafting solidarities. Project-centred discussion and activity was linked to debate and mobilisation around wider issues.

Workers at Lucas Industries, Shaftmoor Lane branch, Birmingham, 1970. Photograph: /Lucas Memories website, lucasmemories.co.uk.

With hindsight, the movement was swimming against the political and economic tide, but at the time things looked less clear-cut. The Thatcher government eventually abolished the GLC in 1986. Unionised industries declined, and union power was curtailed through legislation. In overseeing this, Thatcherism knowingly cut material and political resources for alternatives. In doing so, the diversity so important to innovation diminished. The alliances struck, the spaces created and the initiatives generated were swept aside as concern for social purpose became overwhelmed by neoliberal ideology. The social shaping of technology was left to market decision.

However, even though activism dissipated, its ideas did not disappear. Some practices had wider influence, such as in participatory design, albeit it in forms appropriated to the needs of capital rather than the intended interests of labour. Historical reflection thus prompts a third issue, which is how power relations matter and need to be addressed in democratic technology development. When making prototypes becomes accessible and fun then people can exercise a power to do innovation. But this can still struggle to exercise power over the agendas of elite technology institutions, such as which innovations attract investment for production and marketing, and under what social criteria. Alternative, more democratic spaces nevertheless for technology development and debate.

Like others before and since, the Lucas workers insisted upon a democratic development of technology. Their practical, material initiatives momentarily widened the range of ideas, debates and possibilities – some of which persist. Perhaps their argument was the most socially useful product left to us?

Adrian Smith researches the politics of technology, society and sustainability at SPRU and the STEPS Centre at the University of Sussex. He is on Twitter @smithadrianpaul. A longer paper on the Lucas Plan is available at the STEPS site.

Originally published in The Guardian.

Photo by Daniel Kulinski

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