Exploring the impact of Maker initiatives on cities and regions with a research through design approach

Abstract

During the last decades, economic, social and technological phenomena have influenced the role, importance and perception of cities and regions. Cities and rural areas are increasingly divided because of manufacturing and its globalization; digital technologies in manufacturing are introducing more automation in factories, reducing thus the workforce and aggravating these phenomena. But at the same time, the Maker Movement connects these two opposites by adopting such digital technologies with an open approach, enabling a distributed manufacturing ecosystem based on individuals and communities such as Fab Labs, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces that work locally but that are connected globally. How can we measure the impact of Maker initiatives over cities and regions? This article addresses this issue with a research through design strategy that connects both design research and practice focusing on a) a theoretical context that connects peer production, manufacturing and cities and regions, b) a model for measuring Maker initiatives and their impact on cities and regions and c) a tool for the visualization and exploration of such impact. In this way designers, makers and researchers can actively participate in intentionally building the future of the Maker Movement in cities and regions instead of only analysing its present and past.

Research through co-design

“…Often differences are related to the role assumed by the artefact or the design process. For instance, according to Menichinelli (2020), the difference between RTD and PBR is that the first has the goal of exploring a phenomenon with an artefact as a side effect, while the second has the artefact as the goal and insight as a spin-off.…”

Maker Networks Fighting Covid-19: Design Guidelines for Redistributed Manufacturing (RDM) Models

“…For instance, 'digital maker networks' has been used to describe "a series of 'pop up' manufacturing nodes or 'maker centres ' [that] were set up to explore the idea of local manufacturing bases connected to a wider network of supporting manufactures" (Smith, 2017. See also Menichinelli (2020), where the author explores several frameworks for the interplay of the actors involved in this process under the proposal of the "Maker City" (Menichinelli, 2020, p. 97).…”

Local and distributed manufacturing during the COVID-19 pandemic: Is crisis a window of opportunity for sustainable development in the Global South?

“…Within design research, it is nearly a decade since Manzini (2011) called for the cultivation of small, local, open and connected communities to promote sustainability. In recent years, distributed manufacturing has become more widely studied in the design field (Gasparotto, 2020;Menichinelli, 2020;Menichinelli et al, 2020). However, with few exceptions previous work on distributed manufacturing has taken place in the Global North (Rauch et al, 2016), and the impact of distributed manufacturing on sustainability has largely focused on environmental concerns (Kohtala, 2015).…”