Academic makerspaces as a “design journey”: developing a learning model for how women students tap into their “toolbox of design”

Abstract

An academic makerspace, home to tools and people dedicated to facilitating and inspiring a making culture, is characterized by openness, creativity, learning, design, and community. This nontraditional learning environment has found an immense increase in popularity and investment in the last decade. Further, makerspaces have been shown to be highly gendered, privileging men's and masculine understandings of making. The spike in popularity warrants deeper analysis, examining the value of these spaces for women and if learning is occurring in these spaces, specifically at higher education institutions. We implemented a phenomenologically based interviewing process to capture the making experiences of 20 women students, recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. By eliciting the narratives of women students, we captured how making, designing, and creating evolved through gendered experiences in the university makerspace. Each interview was transcribed and resulted in around 868 pages of single-spaced text transcriptions. The data were analyzed through multiple cycles of open and axial coding for common themes and patterns, where makerspaces create a culture of learning, facilitate students’ design journey, and form a laboratory for creativity. These themes forwarded the creation of a learning model that showcases how design and learning interact in the makerspace. This work demonstrates that women students are engaging learning and inspiration; developing confidence and resilience; and learning how to work with others and collaborate.

Collaborative Teamwork Prototyping and Creativity in Digital Fabrication Design Education

“…Often interpersonal skills are targeted to a similar degree to the professional or technical skills that are the primary target of such education (Veldhuis et al, 2021). Furthermore, cultural knowledge and skills were seen as a way to navigate and understand the digital fabrication (FabLab, makerspace) community (Tomko et al, 2020). Additionally, learning through others, namely, observing the actions of others or interacting with them as a means of learning, has been pointed out as a type of learning in digital fabrication spaces (Tomko et al, 2020).…”

“…That is to say, the digital fabrication activity, with all its characteristics in terms of environment, technology, and specifics, increased the overall acceptance on the level of the team of the learning by building tangible artefacts practices compared to the state before the course. Building tangible artefacts and constructionist learning are recognised as outlining features of digital fabrication education (Milara et al, 2019;Morado et al, 2021;Tomko et al, 2020). Self-recognition of own work and learning by building artefacts as a team was beneficial and can be seen as critical for digital fabrication.…”

A Systematic Review on FabLab Environments and Creativity: Implications for Design

“…This theme focuses on students and stakeholders in FabLab and makerspace education. Some studies identified FabLabs and digital fabrication technology as a field dominated by male students [55,82]. However, other works found that the use of digital fabrication technology by both men and women was equally helpful in enhancing their creativity and critical thinking skills [54].…”

“…However, other works found that the use of digital fabrication technology by both men and women was equally helpful in enhancing their creativity and critical thinking skills [54]. Women makers can enhance their confidence and resilience by developing a culture of learning, facilitating their own design journeys, and creating a "laboratory for creativity" [82]. In the context of psychological counselling, makerspaces can adjust personal definitions of creativity, integrate creativity into professional identity, and foster an environment for creative expression and problem solving [21].…”

A Methodological Roadmap for Phenomenologically Based Interviewing in Engineering Education: Identifying Types of Learning in Makerspaces

“…We chose PBI because we believed that the rapport-building aspects of in-depth, three-part interviews would be necessary for answering our research questions. Our rich, contextualized data gave insights into significantly more than expected: the gendered expectations serving as barriers occurring through women's life narratives related to making (Tomko et al, 2021), the importance of engaging and immersive catalysts for creating making opportunities, especially for women (Tomko et al, 2021;Tomko et al, 2020), the role of verbal and nonverbal affirmations in fostering a supportive making community (Tomko et al, 2020), the importance of structured and unstructured opportunities to explore creative pursuits pre-college, and the role of community, both during college and before (Tomko, 2019;Tomko et al, 2021;Tomko et al, 2020). It is through this lens of unexpected discovery that we share PBI and illustrate its use in engineering education herein.…”