Collaborative futuring with and by makers

Abstract

Maker spaces and maker activities offering access to low-cost digital fabrication equipment are rapidly proliferating, evolving phenomena at the interface of lay and professional design. They also come in many varieties and change fast, presenting a difficult target for, for instance, public authorities, who would like to cater for them but operate in much slower planning cycles. As part of participatory planning of Helsinki Central Library, we experimented with a form of collaborative futuring with and by makers. By drawing elements from both lead-user workshops and participatory design, we conducted a futuring workshop, which allowed us to engage the local maker communities in identifying the issues relevant for a public maker space in 2020. It further engaged the participants in envisioning a smaller prototype maker space and invited them into realising its activities collaboratively. Our results indicate that particularly the information about future solutions was of high relevance, as was the opportunity to trial and elaborate activities on a rolling basis in the prototype space. Insights about more general trends in making were useful too, but to a lesser extent, and it is likely that these could have been gained just as easily with more traditional means for futuring.

Social Innovation, Democracy and Makerspaces

“…Public workshops are seen as contributing to a 21 st century infrastructure for citizens analogous to libraries in an earlier era (Smith, 2015). Indeed, makerspaces are opening in libraries too (Hyysalo et al, 2014). The intent is that these public facilities -with courses, events and workshops for families, start-ups, and social innovation -will equip citizens with the knowledge and skills to benefit from the 'fourth industrial revolution'.…”

Circular Makerspaces: the founder’s view

“…This method is useful as it engages participants with the space directly and was viewed as an insightful technique to uncover and share key CE themes about day-to-day practices, in dialogue with the makerspace founders/managers. Hyysalo et al (2014) employ a similar contextmapping approach through a tagging activity undertaken with makers who were instructed to add notes, with solutions statements to known issues, onto machines and surfaces as part of a participatory research. • Approach: Participatory context-mapping workshop integrating observation and shadowing…”

On the Emerging Area of Biocybersecurity and Relevant Considerations

“…Examples can be seen among a few groups in the Community Bio movement which arose out of the Maker Movement, in which groups of people have been inspired to pursue these research areas and more through a mix of traditional and nontraditional cooperation with mixed success [17][18][19]. Plenty of these successes resulted in the creation of start-ups that deal in a great amount of biometric data or material which is tracked, for improving health outcomes or expanding functions [14][15][16][17][18][19]. Much of what is thought of as cyberpunk in science fiction has reached reality, and this implies that the time to think ahead regarding the protection of biometric data is now.…”