The contemporary landscape of information technology production is one that has been profoundly influenced by the emergence of so-called "maker culture" in the 1960s and 1970s. From Mac OS X to Android, from TiVo DVRs to Linksys network appliances, from Amazon.com to Google Chrome, the technology landscape is full of products that depend upon open source and similar alternative models of production. Society currently finds itself in the middle of a new maker movement that both harkens back to the earlier model and also departs from it in significant ways. It is rooted in a growing network of "makerspaces" that expands ideas and practices of the Web generation into hardware and manufacturing. Makerspaces are cooperative studios where people develop new approaches to technology design based on the open sharing of software code and hardware designs through the use of technology such as computer controlled laser cutters, 3-D printers, and microcontroller kits. Makerspaces are places where new models of innovation are explored, where values of openness and participation are re-assessed, and where new relationships between people and technology are forged.
To understand these phenomena, this project will conduct ethnographic research at four makerspaces, studying them from a socio-technical perspective. The goal of the project is to understand the relationship between cultural and material practices in the maker movement. Accordingly, the focus is on the daily practices in makerspaces, with particular attention to how they experiment with models of social organization, distributed collaboration, and peer production. Specific research sites have been chosen to highlight key questions. Two are located in the United States, in centers of information technology (IT) innovation and production (New York and San Francisco); two are located in China, at key sites for the development of new models of commercial development (in Shenzhen, a major Chinese production hub, and in Shanghai, a center for the Chinese creative and IT industry). Through ethnographic investigation, the project will examine the questions of how DIY (Do-It-Yourself) making as a practice, and makerspaces as physical sites, contribute to the development of new models of technical, economic, and social innovation.
Within a broad cultural and sociopolitical context, this research will study peer production, DIY and open source making, models of innovation in action, and the material production of IT work. This exploration will help us to understand non-professional expertise and alternative forms of technical knowledge, distributed collaboration, and inter-cultural exchange of ideas and artifacts. This study complements previously published investigations of peer production by focusing on the effect of physical sites on social organization and open source production. The project provides a concrete, ethnographic foundation for emerging questions of materiality in human-computer interaction.
Broader Impacts: As sites of DIY production, makerspaces provide an important interface between technological production and the everyday world. At the same time, they may also represent important sites for rethinking contemporary processes of technological and commercial innovation. This research will help to assess and understand these possibilities, support educational developments in this area (such as makerspace infrastructures within schools), explore alternative forms of small-scale commercial production, incentivize participation, and develop intellectual property. To the extent that makerspaces embody a set of broader cultural values about relationships between people, technologies, and the innovation cycle, this project will provide empirical and conceptual material to support social processes around these questions. As a large-scale public practice, DIY production provides an important forum for connecting academic-based and citizen-based models of knowledge production, and the opportunity for outreach into communities in which scientific and technical work is part of their identity.
