Making stuff is all the rage these days. But how does sustainable development fit into this enthusiasm?

The White House is celebrating a Week of Making from June 16-23 2016 after hosting its first Maker Faire in 2014 to spark a “grassroots renaissance in American making and manufacturing”. The hope is that by exposing people to design and fabrication skills it will “unleash a new era of jobs and entrepreneurialism in manufacturing and transform industries”. This follows the first ever EU Institutional Maker Faire, European Maker week, which ran from 30 May 2016 to 5 June to celebrate “makers and innovators from all over Europe”. The 400 events across the continent ranged from workshops on 3D printing in Italy to learning how to use a machine to do controlled cutting of hard materials, like composite or wood, in Limerick, Ireland. In February this year, there were also government-supported events to celebrate making in India. The maker movement is both mainstreaming and globalising.

Credit: Nathan Oxley, STEPS Centre.

Read the rest of the blog.

Related

Moving beyond products to material culture

BLOG 2 Prototyping or debating sustainable developments in makerspaces? Adrian Smith, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex September 2015 In the previous blog I introduced some of the diverse ways that makerspaces are helping cultivate sustainable developments. Admittedly, these initiatives do not represent the totality of makerspaces, where many…

22 September 2015

In "All Posts"

Why should we seek sustainable developments in makerspaces?

BLOG 1 Why should we seek sustainable developments in makerspaces? Adrian Smith, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Community-based workshops like hackerspaces, fablabs and makerspaces, equipped with design, prototyping and fabrication tools have spread rapidly in recent years. Interest in the social, economic and environmental possibilities of these spaces…

22 September 2015

In "All Posts"

Building and nurturing a community: the importance of material and emotional dimensions in grassroots innovation

As part of our CIED activities and with support from Ellen van Oost (University of Twente), Johan Soderberg (IFRIS) and Sascha Dickel (Technical University Munich), we recently ran a session for practitioners and academics involved and interested in grassroots digital fabrication. It was held as part of a wider conference…

23 April 2014

In "All Posts"