Which knowledge, skills and learning environments can boost Open Design & Manufacturing at meaningful scale? How can OD&M  become the ground of collective experimentation and co-creation between Universities, Makerspaces and Enterprises?

OD&M is a Knowledge Alliance dedicated to create and support communities of practices around the Open Design & Manufacturing paradigm, making the most of openness, sharing and collaboration to create new value chains of innovation in design and manufacturing oriented to the social good.

Through inspiring international mobilities, dedicated events, project-based trainings and innovative systems of learning outcomes certification, the OD&M community is committed to create a valuable environment of capacity-building for students, university staff, enterprises and highly creative and passionate people.

The P2P Foundation and its sister organization, the P2P Lab, are part of Open Design and Manufacturing platform, which has recently released an report. The report can be downloaded in it’s integral and reduced versions. Below you will find the report’s introduction, (written by Laura Martelloni, from LAMA agency) followed by its Executive Summary.

Introduction

Often, new professions and jobs emerge from transformations in the market.

They tend to remain in a grey zone where they mostly take shape through progressive adaptation and training on-the-job, until institutional education and training systems are able to recognize, codify, embed and scale them up into coherent learning journeys and learning outcomes, understandable by the labour market and the wider society.

Manufacturing in Europe is going through a major, almost unprecedented transformation. While it is suffering heavily from the effects of the global crisis and ongoing globalization, we are witnessing the emergence of a social technology-based movement, the Maker movement, spreading fast across the globe. Supported by ICT networks and by the establishment of physical spaces such as Fablabs, this movement is expanding its outreach across the globe, involving people with different backgrounds and mindsets that converge around common values such as ‘sharing’ and ‘openness’, generating a multi-faceted and complex knowledge.

The maker movement has opened the way for a new paradigm of production, called from time to time open manufacturing, p2p production, social manufacturing, maker manufacturing; although the plurality of definitions hints at the lack of maturity of the sector, its keywords – open hardware, open software, distributed networks, collaboration, transparency, among others – all point to the movement’s vocabulary and narrative.

These new forms of production are enabled by open source ICT and rooted in social innovation principles, they adopt open-ended business models and act at the level of ecosystem, they harness distributed networks and ubiquitous communities to unlock the inventive of peer to peer collaboration, and are able to imprint production processes, products and organizational forms with social purposes and outcomes. Considered in its potential to infuse production processes with social innovation principles and values, open manufacturing opens room to cultivate radical changes in the economy and society, able to preserve and grow the public good while steering disruptive paths of innovation (Johar et al., 2015). Open manufacturing has already reached a stage that offers the prospect of new jobs and businesses, but education and training systems across Europe are still stuck in the grey zone of unaware and fragmented intervention.

Within this framework, the OD&M project (A Knowledge Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, Makers and Manufacturers to boost Open Design & Manufacturing in Europe)[1] works to create a trust-based and collaborative Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, traditional manufacturers, and innovation communities of digital-savvy makers and open manufacturing businesses across Europe and beyond. The Alliance’s ultimate goal is to build a European enabling ecosystem that fully embeds the key approaches, values and principles underlying the open manufacturing paradigm, and turns them into drivers for a more competitive, sustainable and socially innovative manufacturing in Europe.

Focussing on the co-creation of new teaching and learning processes, as well as on new methods and models of knowledge exchange and capacity-building between the nodes of the Alliance, OD&M works to unleash a new generation of highly skilled and entrepreneurship-oriented designers and manufacturers, able to boost open design and manufacturing towards meaningful impacts.

The present report contains the results of an action-research carried out by OD&M between March and August 2017. The core objective of the research was to analyse how and to what extent the emerging open design and manufacturing paradigm (OD&M) is currently becoming the ground of progressive convergence and synergy between Universities, enterprises and maker communities, and how this ‘knowledge triangle’ is collaborating towards the creation of effective and meaningful value chains of innovation.

The research started by investigating the key competences and skills that presently identify and characterise the ‘maker profile’, in order to draw a general picture of how these are developed, in which contexts, and through which particular teaching and learning processes (formal, informal, non formal). Further, the research explored existing experiences of making-related activities and initiatives promoted or partnered by Universities, and discussed with Higher Education’s representatives the drivers, barriers and possible scenarios connected to the introduction of making education within formal learning. Then, the research involved professional makers and OD&M enterprises (that is, enterprises that show strong and direct connections with the open design and manufacturing paradigm) in order to get an in depht understanding of how making-related values, skills and competences are contributing to shape and inform their businesses. Lastly, the research explored the perceptions and opinions of ‘traditional’ companies regarding these topics, and discussed with them the potential risks and benefits that may emerge for them from the OD&M paradigm as a whole. The overall goal of the action-research was ultimately to identify gaps and opportunities for strengthening connections and collaborations within the OD&M Knowledge Triangle, enabling in particular Higher Education Institutions with new capacities and assets to play a valuable role in this field.

The action-research has been coordinated by LAMA Agency and has actively involved teams of researchers from: University of Florence – DIDA (Italy), University of the Arts London (UK), University of Deusto – Faculty of Engineering (Spain), University of Dabrowa-Gornicza (Poland), University of Tongji (China), P2P Foundation (Netherlands), Furniture and Furnishing Centre (Italy). The other partners of the project (i.e. Fablab London, Fablab Lodz and Tecnalia) have contributed as key informants and hubs of connection with relevant stakeholders in the targeted countries.

As the report will highlight, the action-research confirmed that the maker movement is a complex phenomenon that is nurtured by a continuous serendipitous melting-pot among cultures, skills, knowledge, learning styles, languages and attitudes. If this richness represents a fertile ground for innovations across manufacturing sectors – and probably beyond them -, it also represents a challenge for the codes through which Higher Education Institutions embed new topics and shape new mindsets on the one hand, and through which companies demand and search for new, innovation-oriented skills and competences on the other hand.

More research is needed to further encompass and systematize the wide geography of knowledge, competences and skills underlying the maker movement, as well as to better understand how and to what extent they can be encoded in a framework that is portable across life’s domains, and recognizable by different actors. However, the OD&M research represents an important step in this direction, providing insights and identifying a possible scenario of education, training and business innovation built upon an unedited Alliance between Higher Education, manufacturing businesses and maker communities, able not only to prepare the next generation of designers and manufacturers, but to spur innovation – and, in particular, social innovation – across the whole open design and manufacturing value chain.

[1] The OD&M project is funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme, Knowledge Alliances strand. The project started in 2017 and will run over three years. It actively involves the following organizations: University of Florence – DIDA, University of Dabrowa-Gornicza, University of the Arts London, University of Deusto – Faculty of Engineering, University of Tongji, Furniture and Furnishing Centre, Tecnalia, Fablab Lodz, Fablab London, P2P Foundation, LAMA Agency. The project also involves a number of Universities, SMEs, Foundations, local innovation communities and networks across Europe as associate partners.

Executive Summary

The present Report contains the results of an action-research developed in the context of the OD&M Project (A Knowledge Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, Makers and Manufacturers to boost Open Design & Manufacturing in Europe), funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme, Knowledge Alliances strand.

The main objective of the research was to analyse how and to what extent the emerging open design and manufacturing paradigm (OD&M) is currently becoming the ground of progressive convergence and synergy between Universities, enterprises and maker communities, and how this ‘knowledge triangle’ is collaborating towards the creation of effective and meaningful value chains of innovation.

The research started by investigating the key competences and skills that presently identify and characterise the ‘maker profile’, in order to draw a general picture of how these are developed, in which contexts, and through which particular teaching and learning processes (formal, informal, non formal). Further, the research explored existing experiences of making-related activities and initiatives promoted or partnered by Universities, and discussed with Higher Education’s representatives the drivers, barriers and possible scenarios connected to the introduction of making education within formal learning. Then, the research involved professional makers and OD&M enterprises (that is, enterprises that show strong and direct connections with the open design and manufacturing paradigm) in order to get an in depht understanding of how making-related values, skills and competences are contributing to shape and inform their businesses. Lastly, the research explored the perceptions and opinions of ‘traditional’ companies regarding these topics, and discussed with them the potential risks and benefits that may emerge for them from the OD&M paradigm as a whole.

Indeed, the different levels of maturity of the maker movement – and, more generally, of the open design and manufacturing paradigm – in the different countries, poses clear challenges in the implementation of this type of research; on the other hand, it reflects the reality of an emerging phenomenon and points to both the challenges of a common path, and the opportunities of building common experimentations at European level.

Read the full version of the report here

Read the reduced version

The post Universities, Enterprises and Maker Communities in Open Design & Manufacturing across Europe: an exploratory study appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Abstract

“Peer production has emerged as a new and relevant way of organising the work of distributed and autonomous individuals in the production and distribution of digital content. Increasingly, the adoption of peer production is taking place not only in the development of digital and immaterial content, but also in the design, manufacturing and distribution of physical goods. Furthermore, Open Design and Open Hardware projects are developed, discussed, manufactured and distributed thanks to digital fabrication technologies, digital communication technologies, advanced funding initiatives (like crowdfunding platforms and hardware incubators) and globally integrated supply chains. This new systemic dimension of work is possible, among other factors, thanks to local facilities like Fab Labs, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces (that can be generally called Maker laboratories), where individuals can gather and form communities with other people, designing and manufacturing together. Generally, these people are referred to as Makers and, while their existence is still an emergent phenomenon, it is widely acknowledged that they could exemplify a new modality of work. We investigated the knowledge, values and working dimensions of Makers in Italy with the Makers’ Inquiry, a survey that focused on Makers, Indie Designers and managers of Maker laboratories. This research generated a first overview of the phenomenon in Italy, improving the knowledge of the profiles of Makers; an important step because Makers are usually defined in a very broad way. Furthermore, we investigated their profiles regarding their values and motivations, in order to understand how much Makers engage in peer production or in traditional businesses and whether their working condition is sustainable or not. Finally, we compared these profiles with data regarding traditional designers and businesses and the national context. Given the recent nature of the Maker movement, the focus of this article is on providing a first overview of the phenomenon in Italy with an exploratory analysis and with comparison with existing related literature or national data, rather than contextualising the Maker movement in sociological and political contributions. Far from happening in a void, Italian Makers have a strong relationship with their localities and established industry. Therefore, this is a recent evolution, where Makers work with a broader palette of projects and strategies: With both non-commercial and commercial activities, both peer production and traditional approaches. The activity of making is still a secondary working activity that partially covers the Makers’ income, who are mostly self-employed working at home, in a craft workshop or in a Fab Lab in self-funded or non-commercial initiatives, where technology is not the only critical issue. As a conclusion, we identified current patterns in the working condition of Italian Makers. The data gathered shows some interesting information that, however, could be applicable only to an Italian context. Nevertheless, the survey could be a starting point to compare the same phenomenon in different countries. Therefore, we released the survey files, software and data as open source in order to facilitate the adoption, modification, verification and replication of the survey.”

Conclusions

“We investigated the knowledge, values and working dimensions of Makers in Italy with the Makers’ Inquiry, a survey that focused on Makers as represented by Make Magazine, Independent Designers and managers of Maker Laboratories. This research generated a first overview of the phenomenon in Italy, identifying the profiles of such Makers; this is an important step because Makers are usually defined in a very broad way. Furthermore, we investigated their profiles regarding their values and motivations, in order to understand how much Makers engage in peer production or in traditional businesses, whether they work with open source and collaborative processes or individually, whether their communities have a strong role in their work or they are just a dimension with limited relevance. We then investigated their emerging business and working conditions. Finally, we compared the gathered data with data regarding traditional designers, businesses and the national context. Given the recent nature of the Maker movement, the focus of this article is on providing a first overview of the phenomenon in Italy with an exploratory analysis and with comparison with existing related literature or national data, rather than contextualising the Maker movement in sociological and political terms. Such contextualisations could be a further step for future research.

Far from happening in a void and being a completely unexpected revolution, Italian Makers have a strong relationship with their localities and established industry. The majority of Italian Makers has been involved in making activities for the past five years; therefore, this is a recent evolution, where Makers work with a broader palette of projects and strategies: with both non-commercial and commercial activities, and both peer production and traditional approaches. The activity of making is still a secondary working activity that partially covers the Makers’ income, who are mostly self-employed working at home, in a craft workshop or in a Fab Lab in self-funded or non-commercial initiatives, where technology is not the only critical issue. After analysing the data from the Makers’ Inquiry, we can affirm that Italian Makers have an interest towards collaboration and peer production and, in particular, that the will to collaborate mostly derives from the necessity of technological skills and capabilities acquisition but it is also an issue that is informally considered important. A notable interest towards openness is also present but we could not find any useful information that could have helped us in differentiating the Maker approach to openness when it comes to digital (i.e., open software) and physical (i.e., open hardware) content. Italian Makers associate making with openness but not as its main trait, but their practice has a stronger relationship with openness than what Makers are aware of. Participation in communities is relevant, but there is more collaboration in Maker Laboratories than in online communities. Italian Makers do practice Open Design, but the gathered data suggests that peer production for physical goods in the context of Makers is still limited (in approach and scale of production), at an early stage, more linked to practice than ideology. As found in the existing literature about peer production with physical goods, there is a need for more practice and research in order to close the gap with peer production of digital content. The working conditions of Italian Makers is emergent and still not completely economically sustainable, but more similar to a job than to a hobby. Even if only a part of their income comes from making and making is mostly a secondary activity (and there is no official legal status for Makers in Italy), they are more interested in making as a job than as a hobby and their age falls in the working-age range.

The data gathered shows some interesting information that, however could be applicable only to an Italian context. Nevertheless, the survey could be a starting point to compare the same phenomenon in different countries. Therefore, on makersinquiry.org we released the survey files, software and data as open source in order to facilitate the adoption, modification, verification and replication of the survey. The replication of such a survey in more countries could both lead to an improvement to the survey, tools and approach and a further example of peer production, in the context of Design research. The connections among Makers, Maker Laboratories, peer production and work are growing, but further research is needed on the topics of peer production with physical goods and on the topic of policies that could improve the working condition of Makers in order to be more sustainable. Some contributions suggested that consumer innovation already plays a huge role in society, and we think that the Maker movement could be integrated with such phenomenon, as both are based on product hacking by everyday citizens. If this integration takes place and has a relevant dimension, it would therefore be important to understand how to make making activities more sustainable. We suggest that future research should gather more data and compare the available data with theoretical contributions about working conditions of especially self-employed workers and non-profit organisations, with the aim of elaborating policies that recognise and support the Maker movement and its impact on society and economy. Furthermore, we suggest to adopt alternative approaches for studying this topic, extending this research from a survey to other perspectives, since one approach alone cannot understand the complexity of the phenomena.”

Find the full article here.

Photo by kevin dooley

Photo by Josh Kopel

The post Essay of the Day: Makers as a New Work Condition between Self-employment and Community Peer Production appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Makerspaces, aka hackerspaces innovation labs or fablabs, are providing local opportunities to realize that vision. Makers share their designs with other makers around the world, prompting new innovation and local production. Popular Science estimates 1,400 active spaces globally. For a global list of hackerspaces, makers spaces, and innovation labs visit Hackerspace.org.

Some hackerspace projects have become traditional enterprises Most remain part of the alternative economy, offering open source designs as well as viable products for sale. Barcelona’s Fab Foundation aims to connect alternative production with the alternative economy through its new project, Fab Market.

Extracted from: http://market.fablabs.io/manifesto/

The Fab Market is a new online shop where you can find a variety of locally made products designed by people from all over the world. All products are open-source and sold ready for use, assembly or fabrication, giving people the possibility to participate in the making process. The more you participate, the less you pay for the product.

Making products that adapt to people’s needs, culture or taste —and giving the buyer direct contact with the supplier— increases transparency in the supply chain and gives the opportunity to know exactly who you are working with and how.

The Fab Market wants to give talented creators, designers or makers a place where they can fabricate their creations for a low price and sell globally at the same time.

We want to invite all FabLabs around the world to become a part of the Fab Market network in order to create a distributed economy. By working together, sharing knowledge, equipment and customers, creates the opportunity for scalability without a great amount of investment.

Extracted from: http://market.fablabs.io/#products

Fab Market wants to offer good designs made to last and therefore all products need to be approved and tested before going on sale. Products have to be fairly easy to fabricate and come with step by step assembly instructions.

Designers and makers can present their creations to the Fab Market, and once they are approved, they are invited to their local FabShop for prototyping and testing.

Extracted from: http://market.fablabs.io/#sell

Designers and makers can present their creations to the Fab Market, and once they are approved, they are invited to their local FabShop for prototyping and testing.

In exchange for excellence, FabLab Barcelona will offer the creators a special discount of fabrication every time their product is sold.

Extracted from: http://market.fablabs.io/#fabshop

We want to welcome all FabLabs around the world to become a part of the FabShop Network.

Sign up now if your lab is interested in accepting the invitation!

Photo by aurelie ghalim

The post Project Of The Day: Fab Market appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Introduction

“Many believe that modern technologies such as 3D printers, sensors, and networking capabilities provide an unprecedented opportunity to support a renewal of localized production – especially when combined with “Maker Movement” trends toward customization, user engagement, local and small-batch production, and reparability. Others are unconvinced, and instead forecast increased efficiency in high volume production and global supply chains. Let us state the core questions: will either the Maker Movement or these dramatic new technologies fundamentally influence the basic structures of market competition? Or, will this all be merely an interesting but marginal blip along the road as the technologies themselves are absorbed into automated high volume production? What are the clues? What do decision-makers across industry and policy need to know in order to properly evaluate this potential?

With this paper, we look beyond the revolutionary rhetoric of the Maker Movement in an attempt to consider its effects on a more practical level. We define the Maker Movement (also known as the Do-It-Yourself or Fab Movement) as a crusade for more accessible design and creation – incorporating a mix of new technologies, philosophies, and business models. This Movement is especially tied to the concepts of digital fabrication, public access to tools through community workshops (Fab Labs, hackerspaces, makerspaces, repair cafés, TechShops, etc.), the Internet of Everything/interconnected devices, and Jeremy Rifkin’s concept of the “zero marginal cost society.” We employ a vague definition here because the concept itself is nebulous and ill-defined; depending upon whom one asks, this Movement is a “bourgeois pass-time,” the “new industrial revolution, ”the future of interdisciplinary education, the impetus for a wealth of new hardware startups, and/or yet another overhyped and impossible vision of techno-utopia.

This essay will focus upon whether or not the Maker Movement might substantially disrupt traditional manufacturing, or alternatively at least create an enduring niche position in evolving manufacturing. Part I examines this from three perspectives: (1) Redistributed Production, (2) Personalized Fabrication, and (3) After-Market Repair and Customization.

The idealistic devotees of the Maker-Industrial Revolution argue that the particular confluence of Maker ideas and technology will lead to a hybrid form of production, combining the scale and efficiency of high-volume manufacture with the benefit to local economies provided by small, artisanal businesses. We divide these idealists into the Trekkies who imagine a thoroughly radical and (we will argue) science fictional manufacturing revolution, and the moderates who foresee significant changes but not a complete overhaul of the current manufacturing paradigm. We are focusing here on the “moderate Trekkies.”

By contrast, there are a group of skeptical realists who recognize possibilities, but consider that the impact of the tools and the Maker Movement will be more restrained. They tend to step past the Maker rhetoric around “democratization,” doubtful that this is an attainable or reasonable objective. Skeptical realists argue that, despite some impact on marketing strategies, products, and factory tools, the Maker Movement will not lead to radical changes in systems of production or current power structures; 3D printers, other digital fabrication tools, and open-source technologies have already been in use for decades without forcing any substantial shifts to production models. High-volume manufacturers already produce small batches of customized pens and T-shirts featuring company logos, so skeptics believe that the addition of more complex, customizable elements would likely follow the same traditional manufacturing model. Although many new micro-enterprises have arguably emerged as a direct result of the Maker Movement and related technologies, the skeptics don’t believe that the cumulative effect of these businesses will significantly affect the current high-volume manufacturing paradigm – which, by most calculations, is extraordinarily cost-effective for both consumers and corporations.

These skeptics may still be fervent believers in the overall potential of the Maker Movement – they simply don’t buy into the idea that this Movement and related technologies will itself drive substantial shifts in the current production landscape. Compelling evidence from the entrepreneurial community indicates that this Movement has had a significant impact upon both artisanal businesses and more ambitious hardware startups – and yet the skeptic would point out that, as Maker-entrepreneurs scale up their startups, they tend to follow traditional paths of either high-volume manufacturing or boutique artisanship. For example, the New York-based company MakerBot, once heralded as a pioneer in “democratizing manufacturing” through their affordable 3D printers, recently moved all their own production to China. (There are, however, regional desktop 3D printer competitors that kept their local production – such as Ultimaker in the Netherlands and Type A Machines in California.) Given the ease of high-volume manufacturing and economies of scale, the skeptic would argue that many Maker startups will either follow MakerBot’s less-than-revolutionary lead or else remain small and non-competitive.”

Read the full paper here.

Photo by wemake_cc

The post Exploring the maker-industrial revolution: Will the future of production be local? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Just as importantly, the article argues that this is not a technocratic change, but a holistic and integrative endeavour, with crucial psycho-spiritual aspects. They introduce Terror Management Theory, which stresses how the fear of death drives human behaviour and institutions, and how consumerism plays into it, while the ReMaker Society has the potential, through the new culture that it is developing in the physical places of collaborative ‘maker’ culture, to create a new way to deal with the fear of death, that is actually compatible with a sustainable society.

By Stephen Quilley, Jason Hawreliak, Kaitlin Kish:

“Technological innovations in telematics (communication, coordination and organization) and micro-fabrication are combining to make possible a shift in the opposite direction. Open production and the distributed economy make it at least conceivable that high tech production and innovation can be achieved i.) more sustainably, using eco-cyclical patterns of resource use in smaller-scale, bioregional contexts, and ii.) in more place-bound and communitarian settings that reduce the spatial scope of interdependency whilst increasing the intensity of interactions in place. However, whilst technical developments may make possible a more fractal and distributed model of production, technical solutions alone will not resolve the problem of over-consumption. The post-consumer society intimates problems of meaning [ontology], societal values and non-rational drivers of behaviour. Even more difficult is the extent to which open-architecture production models involve the informalization of economic activity. Because ‘re-embedding’ economic activity in this sense involves the contraction of that part of the formal economy that is ‘visible’ to the state, and therefore taxable, the open economy presents a terminal threat to the established models of public infrastructure, redistribution and welfare provision – all of which depend on fiscal transfers from a growing economy. In what follows, we explore the logic of the distributed, open architecture ‘ReMaker Society’, focusing in particular on the problems of meaning and alternative modes for the provision of public goods.

…

The vision, only occasionally explicit in this burgeoning maker scene, is of a post-consumer society in which fabrication of everyday material artefacts is routinely practiced in domestic and community contexts. This is supported through collaborative design across information networks, less grid-dependent energy and resource networks, and citizen participation in material production. While remaining critical of the techno-utopian rhetoric which often surrounds the maker movement, we propose that the open source ‘distributed’ economic model now coming into view has the potential to become truly disruptive, as demonstrated by the growing system of makers, informal economic activity, interest in repair and modularity, maker faires, and online shops and exchanges. Participatory fabrication has the potential to challenge the logic of passive consumption through communities based on sharing and creativity. These communities engender a new kind of community-based economy emphasising tacit and community knowledge, co-operative ownership, and implicitly removing one’s self from mainstream economic activity. Such changes have potentially drastic implications for a distributive political economy and a new reMaker society.

…

The model of the reMaker society is potentially significant for two reasons. Firstly, decentralised, participatory ‘low overhead’ production models make it conceivable that at least some of the material culture that defines modern societies might be sustained and reproduced outside of the integrated formal economy that currently straddles the globe. By substituting for this globally integrated market, a series of networked and more embedded (in Polanyi’s sense) bioregional economies, the reMaker model would not obviate the cycling of growth, collapse and reorganization phases. But it would eliminate the possibility of large scale systemic collapse, whilst i.) reducing the local and regional ecological impacts of growth and ii.) the social consequences of periodic retrenchment. Secondly, the reMaker model would allow alternative structures of political economy to emerge in tandem with more communitarian models of care, welfare and the provision of local public goods. Re-embedding economic activity and livelihood could conceivably see the re-emergence of the gift economy and reciprocity as important ‘planes of integration’ (Polanyi, 1968) and a reduced emphasis on mechanisms of both market and state. Examples might include public involvement in hospital care, familial and community home-schooling or community involvement in the repair and maintenance of public infrastructure. Because strategies for social emancipation have historically been so entwined with the expansion of both market and state in highly complex societies, such re-embedding scenarios raise difficult questions. Nevertheless, the reMaker society intimates a hitherto unacknowledged ‘adjacent possible’ i.e. a combination of state, (formal) market and (informal) communitarian reciprocity that could conceivably deliver modern technology and levels of innovation at a much lower ecological cost, and in the context of a much less individualistic post-consumer society.”

Critique: Dependence on Capitalist System and Problems of Access

“We have sought to distinguish the potential of a reMaker political economy from the sociology of contemporary maker culture, eulogised by the Make Magazine and the Maker Faires (‘the greatest show and tell on Earth’). There are obvious critiques of maker culture relating to income and educational barriers. Joining a maker space requires upfront cost, free time, some basic skill level, and knowledge of the group (generally disseminated in Universities). Certainly the number of maker spaces have greatly increased over the last 10 years (there are over 410 maker/hacker spaces listed on databases online, (“Directory”), almost none of which existed 10 years ago). But the maker culture also depends on the larger economic system for a flow of components, skills and expertize. With regard to patterns of maker motivation, there is also a structural link between capitalism and social systems of individualisation and freedom of choice/mobility (see Quilley, 2013). First, this dependence is logistical. Maker spaces are not typically able to supply, by making for themselves, the tools necessary for production. While most spaces are equipped with 3D printers, these printers are typically unable to print a metal blade for a rotary saw, for instance. Even more difficult, is obtaining the metal to make the saw, or the rare Earth metals to create the computers for operating CAD and the software to use the 3D printer. Without specific levels of technology, it is impossible to say what kind of scale of economy could independently exist in a reMaker society. There is no clear idea about the minimum scale of technology required for a single functioning maker space, let alone a community based on these ideas. This extends to the problem that “not all societies are at the same level of informational development, that the revolution is well entrenched in the richest countries and is only beginning in the poorest” (Mosco, 2004, p. 18). This may make it difficult for developing countries to adopt the maker culture as it exists in the West, without first going through an industrial revolution of their own – demonstrating the difficulty in suggesting a political economy that is dependent on the foundation that it seeks to challenge. However, there is another possibility that we address below.

The second argument for dependence on the capitalist system comes from complexity theory – that there is no ‘trivial consumption’.

Economic responses to biophysical limits to growth need to consider broad, long-term social development consequences. Degrowth literature (Kallis, Kerschner, and Martinez-Alier, 2012; Sekulova et al., 2013; D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis, 2014) commonly assumes that the political structure of degrowth will allow for the values of social inclusion, justice, peace and development to be reconciled with limits to growth. However, Ophuls (2011) demonstrates that this would come with significant complexity constraints and trade-offs between societal consumption and characteristics of cultural progress. The values, practices and institutions of social emancipation [at least as they have been understood over the last century] are tied intrinsically to overall levels of socio-economic and technical complexity, i.e. the extent of the division of labour and the degree to which the economy generates fiscal transfers to fund state infrastructures and institutions (e.g. state childcare programmes, the expansion of higher education, disability benefits). To the extent that contemporary maker culture i.) is part of the leisure economy, ii.) represents the self-actualising expression of highly individualised consumers with economic resources, and iii.) is parasitic on forms of social and cultural capital (e.g. individuals with high levels of tertiary education)—it is very much a function of the consumer society. Any significant process of degrowth or contraction would have unknowable consequences for the social, political, and cultural structures upon which contemporary maker culture depends. More generally, the decline in the scale of the economy would likely be accompanied by, what Elias refers to as, a process of ‘decivilisation’ i.e. a loosening of internalized processes of psychological restraint along with a decline in the regulatory capacity of the state (Linklater and Mennell, 2010). Quilley expands on this argument extensively in his paper “Degrowth is Not a Liberal Agenda” (2013).

In an editorial note for the fifth issue of this publication, the editors ask, “We now have the means of production, but where is my revolution?” (Maxigas and Troxler, 2014). As many of the articles in the fifth issue note, the revolutionary promises of maker culture, FLOSS, etc. have largely failed to materialize. One article which is particularly relevant to our discussion of OSE and the emancipatory rhetoric surrounding maker culture is Wolf et al’s (2014) examination of “Fab Labs” or fabrication laboratories. Like OSE, Fab Labs “have the ambition to share digital fabrication blueprints as well as operating instructions for using the machines in the worldwide community” (Wolf et al, 2014: para. 2). As the researchers found, however, there are significant “motivational, social, technological and legal barriers” (para. 3) which make it difficult to achieve this ambition. Indeed, they note that “within the Fab Lab community global open knowledge sharing is far from the norm, despite the high claims of the Fab Charter” (sec. 4.1, para. 3). Like OSE, members of these fab-labs are well-intentioned and many are altruistic in their aims. Yet, significant challenges remain, such as the issue of accessibility, and a critical assessment of the associated techno-utopian claims can help us address them. So maker culture is not a social movement in the sense of presenting a coherent and self-conscious challenge to the structures of contemporary capitalist society (Roots, 1997; Melucci, 1989; Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). It is self-evidently tied to the existing structures of global consumer capitalism (Bean and Rosner, 2014). Using the heuristics of complex systems analysis, maker culture is deeply entrenched in the existing ‘basin of attraction.’ In any objective sense, experiments like Open Source Ecology remain utterly marginal and insignificant. There is no conceivable way in which, other things being equal, participatory fabrication can challenge incrementally the logic of accumulation driving the current system. In all sorts of ways, makers like everyone else are tied to a capitalist growth economy – not least because all public sector infrastructure, health systems, welfare, roads, universities, education systems etc. depend absolutely upon fiscal transfers from a growing economy. But in an era of limits, it is possible that the rules could change rather quickly. If we have learned anything since 2008 and from the on-going crisis in Europe, it is that continued growth is not guaranteed. And any serious failure of the growth machine would quickly lead to what Habermas (1975) referred to as legitimation crises. In an era of systemic limits, environmental politics is likely also to prove non-linear: opportunities are likely to emerge rapidly and in the context of crisis. In this context any relationship between current maker culture and a conceivable future/emerging reMaker society should be seen as ‘pre-figurative’: a shallow basin of attraction explored by pioneers and counter-cultural radicals that may have the potential to explode given a sufficiently destabilising exogenous shock to the current system. To use Gramsci’s metaphor (1971) the leading edge of maker culture can be seen as a resource for and an arena for a ‘war of position’ – the struggle to reveal cultural and political-economic ‘adjacent possibilities’ that have the potential to proliferate under the right conditions (Quilley, 2016). Open Source Ecology is in this sense a kind of pre-figurative politics (Graeber, 2002; Young & Schwartz, 2012).

This notion of pre-figurative politics also has implications for radical community development in the global south. The notion that all countries are destined to follow an immutable sequence of developmental stages has often been a feature of both Marxist and mainstream political economy (Rostow’s modernization theory). However not only has this idea been challenged in theory (Skocpol, 1977; Kay, 2010; Escobar, 2011), it is also being turned upside down by novel applications of technology in the field. Stewart Brand (2010) uses the example of mobile telephony in Africa to demonstrate how technology is transforming the relationship between infrastructure and development facilitating entirely new and less grid dependent trajectories for industrialization. In this context, it seems at least plausible that global economic shocks might be most likely to trigger a deepening and widening of the reMaker basin of attraction in the proliferating urban conurbations of the global south. In such contexts the potential for polyvalent, multi-skilled artisans working with open-sourced, multi-functional, small scale machines to re-imagine the relationship between production and consumption seems to be much greater – not least because of the lower regulatory burden. These ‘low-overhead’ contexts are the likely to be most conducive for a transition from maker culture to a reMaker society.”

Conclusion

“The reMaker society offers a number of possibilities for community structures centred on open source technics of relocalization. While still dependent on global production chains, the ongoing aspiration for relocalization is for the first time supported by technological innovations and micro-fabrication that give hope for a shift away from a corporately dominated political economy. Such a political economy, bolstered by growing support for open-source/commons ownerships and approaches would be more likely to achieve a ‘sustainable degrowth’ (Martínez-Alier, 2010) by a) making visible impacts on local bioregions and ecological systems and b) restructuring satisfaction toward a more limited set of needs. It would also redefine ownership, both of goods within a community and toward a single produced good. Citizens would be engaged, embedded in community and place, gaining satisfaction through family, community, and creative activities. All of this sounds like the idyllic visions of a post-growth society. However, open production and the distributed economy make conceivable such social structures in conjunction with high-tech production and technological innovation. With satisfaction coming from community and kin ties, a potential post-consumer, yet high-tech, society becomes possible. At the same time, we must keep a watchful eye on the utopian rhetorics surrounding progress and potentially emancipatory technology, while also remembering that this is not a condemnation of it. Indeed, as ambitious and utopian as it may be, the OSE project, for instance, is noble in its pursuits. However, by better understanding the limits of open source networks—technical, rhetorical, economic, and socio-political—groups such as OSE and Fab Labs will be better positioned to make good on their goals. In looking at OSE, the risk is not so much that its adherents will exploit those they purport to help, but rather, that in getting too caught up in what can be accomplished technically, they unwittingly ignore the complex network of human factors upon which their success depends. Additionally, the amount to which an open-source distributed political economy relies on the corporate capitalist system remains an open question. This suggests two significant areas for future work and investigation. First, to select a set of various social outcomes of the corporate capitalist system and examine the consequences when each of those outcomes is threatened by a reduction in governmental and centralized support (e.g. health care). Second, to further explore the likelihood of having information technology without reliance on larger global systems of trade and distribution.”

* Article: Finding an Alternate Route: Towards Open, Eco-cyclical, and Distributed Production. By Stephen Quilley, Jason Hawreliak, Kaitlin Kish. Journal of Peer Production, Issue #9: Alternative Internets, 2016 (available here).

The post The ReMaker Society appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Corporations wanted to patent genes. Government security entities wanted to restrict access. But the information is public and available on the internet.  The Human Genome Project led to advancements in sequencing other genomes.  The era of biohacking had begun.

What is the state of the global biohacker community?

Extracted from: http://biohackingsafari.com/our-vision/

Vision

At Biohacking Safari, our vision is to witness and inspire innovation across the lines of DIY life science through a movement of collaborative storytelling and media-making.

We produce

Our mission is to foster global dialogue, share inspiration, and give a voice to open, collaborative, citizen-based places, communities, and practices of research, innovation, and education in biology and life sciences.

Extracted from: http://makezine.com/2016/08/04/get-to-know-biohacking-safari/

What is a Biohacker ?

A biohacker is someone that has pretty much the same mindset of a hacker but who is working with different tools, such as pipettes, incubators, tubes or petrie dishes. Part of the equipment is collected in all sorts of medical or research centers and wealthy biotech companies.

They also build their own scientific tools and equipment such as DIY Microscope or PCR machine (critical tool to tinker with DNA). All this is possible thanks to the extraodinary transdisciplinarity of knowledge and skills that you find in biohackerspaces (among other equipments that are most of the time collected in all sorts of medical centers and wealthy biotech companies).

Biohackers want to understand and analyze the food they eat, the water they drink, the air they breathe. Biohackers already made cheese without animals and dream?—?working hard?—?to produce their own insulin through genetic modifications. They want to see what their genome can teach them, even their gut bacteria is something of an interest.

Biohackers as hackers tend to share their researches with other communities. Of course the web is connecting as much as possible but they also organize events and workshops to open their knowledge and experiences. As a matter of fact next September, a conference made by Californian biohackers will happen in the mighty Counter Culture Labs building at the Omni Commons in Oakland, CA.

Extracted from: http://makezine.com/2016/08/04/get-to-know-biohacking-safari/

“As global connectors we at Biohacking Safari connect people, ideas and communities via workshops, discussions, and written articles digging in different ecosystems such as biohackerspaces, hackerspaces, maker faires, non profit organization, museums, academics like MIT Medialab (US), Tsinghua university (China), Oxford (U.K) and Fab foundation. We collaborate on designing new decentralized systems that allows us to navigate knowledge with better compass.

Our adventures lead us to new discoveries and new continents but we are attached to the fact that we are witnessing a growing movement and our humble role might be to introduce those new communities and bioconcepts to a broader audience. Telling their stories is for now in our reach, trying to go beyond the hype that sometimes surrounds biohacking.

New paradigms are often scary but the worst thing would be to let the politics and biotech companies decide alone for us. Biohacking is a way to engage now in drawing the society we want for the future.

The idea of this series of DIYBIO stories is to introduce what some of the amazing communities of the biohacking society are doing and share the questions they raised with their potential innovations or designed fiction prototypes.”

“For the last 2 years @QuitterieL, aka Quitterie Largeteau, and @Dailylaurel, aka Aurelien Dailly, have both been exploring open science communities worldwide, from Europe to United states as well as some ecosystems of China, Korea, Colombia and Mexico. Thus they co-founded biohackingsafari.com. This non profit organization was created back in 2014 at La Paillasse, a community lab which was at that time a squat of biohackers.

Quitterie has a Phd in immunology and teaches the art of science at ‘’Palais de la Découverte’’ in Paris. She lectures about “open science” and organizes conferences & workshops worldwide. She interviews biohackers on her Soundcloud.

Laurel is an activist and photojournalist. He is a trans-disciplinarian, traveling the world to gain inspiration and to collaborate on workshops and residencies. He documents everything he sees on www.serendibscoop.com and on his flickr about biohacking.

Photo by rvcroffi

The post Project Of The Day: Biohacking Safari appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Governments are so accustomed to dictating their will, through coercion if necessary, that they find it unimaginable that people might willingly – and with creativity and enthusiasm – self-organize themselves to take care of urgent needs.  So pause a moment to behold the remarkable Zaatari Refugee camp in Jordan.  This settlement of 85,000 displaced Syrians is showing how even desperate, resource-poor people can show enormous creativity and self-organization, and turn their “camp” into a “city.”

In many respects, Zaatari bears an uncanny resemblance to the DIY dynamics of the Burning Man encampment in the Nevada desert – an annual gathering that attracts more than 65,000 people for a week.  Both eschew “government” in favor of self-organized governance.  Both confer opportunities and responsibilities and individuals, and facilitate bottom-up initiatives through lightweight infrastructures.

As the New York Times reported on July 4, the Zaatari camp has “neighborhoods, gentrification, a growing economy and, under the circumstances, something approaching normalcy, though every refugee longs to return home. There is even a travel agency that will provide a pickup service at the airport, and pizza delivery, with an address system for the refugees that camp officials are scrambling to copy.”  Times’ urbanist/architecture critic Michel Kimmelman declares that “Zaatari’s evolution points more broadly to a whole new way of thinking about one of the most pressing crises on the planet.”

Historically, most refugee camps are seen as impermanent camps whose desperate, wretched populations need “service delivery” of all sorts.  The “professionals” must orchestrate and administer everything.  The role assigned to the sad, needy hordes of refugees is to queue up in lines for food and to idle away their hours and days.

In Azraq, a refugee camp of 11,000 Syrians in the middle of nowhere, the “city” is “strictly policed, with fixed, corrugated metal shelters in military order, dirt floors and shameful public toilets, and it has no electricity.”  Refugees there are “terrified at night without electricity to light the shelters, unprotected against the scorpions, mice and snakes, say they escaped one nightmare to arrive at another.”

But what if you conceive a refugee camp not as an impermanent waystation (which often endures for years) to be “administered” from the top down, but as a project in self-organized, participatory, bottom-up city-building?

Kimmelman notes that the oldest parts of Zaatari “have streets, one or two paved, some lined with electric poles, the most elaborate houses cobbled together from shelters, tents, cinder blocks and shipping containers, with interior courtyards, private toilets and jerry-built sewers.  Clusters of satellite dishes and water tanks on the skyline can bring to mind favelas in Rio de Janeiro or slums in Cairo.  Like favelas, the camp has grown according to its own ad hoc, populist urban logic, which includes a degree of social mobility.”

The Zaatari experience illustrates “a basic push toward urbanization that happens even in desperate places – people leaving their stamp wherever they live, making the spaces they occupy their own.”

A German relief agency official describes Zaatari as “a complex ecosystem that you could call a city or a slum.  Either way, it’s a dynamic place, unforeseen by the humanitarian actors running it, which is giving refugees a sense of ownership and dignity.”

Kilian Kleinschmidt, the United Nations official in charge of Zaatari, describes the city as having “14,000 households, 10,000 sewage pots and private toilets, 3,000 washing machines, 150 private gardens, 3,500 new businesses and shops.”  It has barbershop, a pet store, a flower shop and a homemade ice cream business. Its main drag is called the Champs-Élysées. The owner of a bridal shop on the Champs-Élysées bought his property in the black market for 7,000 Jordanian dinars, or about US$10,000, which he may re-sell at a profit in the future.

To be sure, there have been some important top-down administration and leadership decisions making all of this bottom-up self-organization possible.  As the camp’s administrator, Kleinschmidt had to engage with and neutralize the organized crime bodies that were more or less running the camp, and he had to support and encourage grassroots projects.  But his critical realization was seeing his challenge not as UN management of a refugee camp, but as enabling refugees to build their own city:  a critical shift of perspective.

To be sure, Zaatari is a squalid place with lots of problems.  But it is surely a big advance when the management strategy recognizes the agency, imagination and dignity of refugees themselves, and tries to leverage those energies to improve everyone’s circumstances.  This strikes me as the essence of commoning.

Kleinschmidt is now exploring ways to get wifi for the camp and obtain 10,000 bicycles from an urban planning office in Amsterdam.  This, reports Kimmelman, “prompted a few canny Syrian refugees to open bike repair shops even before the bikes arrived.”

Perhaps DIY refugee camps like Zaatari will eventually teach municipal governments around the world a few things about unleashing the cooperative capacities of people and making their cities more robust, productive and liveable.  Zaatari should perhaps be considered a charter member of the Maker City movement.

This post originally appeared at bollier.org

The post Lessons of DIY Urbanism in a Syrian Refugee Camp appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The first generation exposed en masse to zero tolerance policies, millennials have been expelled, arrested, and tasered for an absurd litany of inoffensive acts. That’s on top of schools’ perennial failure to actually provide kids with a decent education. This generation is growing up and going to college in record numbers, only to find institutions drained of their counterculture gusto for intellectual confrontation and replaced by free speech zones that quarantine unpalatable ideas.

Image by Duncan Rawlinson

Perched in a watchtower above a live-sized game of Mouse Trap, MythBusters host Adam Savage announced, “When you make something … you’re telling a story about your desires. … You’re using your tools to improve yourself and the world around you.” He was directing the point to the younger attendees in his crowd of hundreds at Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, this past weekend. Their stories and desires are varied, but there was a consistent theme among many makers: They want to make life and learning more liberated, more fun, and a bit more rugged.

Implicit in their optimism and aim toward improvement is the awareness that current circumstances kind of suck. Young people cranked through America’s school system know that too well. The first generation exposed en masse to zero tolerance policies, millennials have been expelled, arrested, and tasered for an absurd litany of inoffensive acts. That’s on top of schools’ perennial failure to actually provide kids with a decent education. This generation is growing up and going to college in record numbers, only to find institutions drained of their counterculture gusto for intellectual confrontation and replaced by free speech zones that quarantine unpalatable ideas.

Growing up alongside millennials is the maker movement, and it is flourishing. Many young adults would do well to look upon this year’s Maker Faire’s standout structure: an imposing, steampunk octopus perched on a Mad Max-esque car. The razor-jawed, trash can-paneled beast is awesome in its ability to push people out of any sense of normalcy. It belches flames out of its tentacles as though it were a gritty reboot of the Statue of Liberty illuminating the eclectic, rough-around-the-edges movement of makers, whose do-it-yourself constituency overlaps everyone from hackers to knitters to off-the-gridders. They, like Savage, embrace hands-on education that “recognizes that discouragement and failure is part of the project.”

Read the rest of the article here

The post Is maker culture better than school? appeared first on P2P Foundation.