MAKE-IT proposal for a presentation ("success story") in the workshop “Collaborative Making, Art and Creativity” at DSI Fair 2017

Name of the project, Name of the contact person, URL of the project

Name of the project: MAKE-IT – Understanding Collective Awareness Platforms with the Maker Movement

Name of the contact person and contact details (email): Janosch Sbeih, Sbeih@sfs-dortmund.de

URL of the project: www.make-it.io

Indicate the workshop you are addressing

Open Democracy & Policy Making

Collaborative Consumption and the Sharing Economy

Collective Sensing and Action

Collaborative Making, Art and Creativity

Innovation and Internet Science: redesigning Research & Innovation

Public Services based on Collaborative Innovation

What is the concrete sustainability challenges(s) you are addressing? (e.g. as for the environment, economy, democracy, etc.)

The field research of MAKE-IT shows that the maker movement addresses various sustainability challenges with its activities.

For the environment, makers prototype technologies for a circular economy, research more environmentally friendly materials, design for reuse, repair and recycling and are dedicated to localise production which could reduce transport emissions.

In terms of sustainable economics, maker spaces are hubs for open innovation of social entrepreneurs and empower disadvantaged groups through products and education offers.

Which is the real community you are engaging? (area of activities, number of citizens involved, etc.)

The Maker movement is connecting citizens and professionals with digital manufacturing and communication technologies like 3D printers, laser cutters and online community platforms, such as fablab.io or thingiverse. As a result, virtual bits can be shared globally and turned into physical objects or atoms locally. The physical technology and digital infrastructure provide an unprecedented environment for digital social innovation (DSI) in the sphere of open source manufacturing and rapid prototyping.

The Maker Faire Rome 2016 exhibited more than 700 inventions presented by makers from more than 65 different countries and attracted over 110,000 visitors in three days.

Early results (if available) measuring the effectiveness of your approach compared to traditional "top-down" solutions

The maker movement consists largely of grassroots initiatives that have the tools and skills to address the above-mentioned sustainability issues. Their motivation comes from within the community, they respond to market failures and missed opportunities by firms and governments, and they aim for environmental or social benefit. The MAKE-IT approach is to work with that motivation and to enable the actors to follow their social ambitions more effectively through the use of CAPS.

Through the lens of MAKE-IT’s three analytical pillars “organisation and governance”, “peer and collaborative behaviour” and “value creation and impact”, we analyse trajectories of maker initiatives between sharing and commercialisation and we assess tensions that arise out of the open source ethos on the one hand and the need for financial sustainability on the other.

MAKE-IT proposal for a presentation ("success story") in the workshop “Collaborative Making, Art and Creativity” at DSI Fair 2017

What kind of innovative usage of networking technologies are you envisaging? (e.g. social networks, IoT, open source, open data, open hardware, open and participatory innovation)

The maker movement strongly relies on the innovative usage of networking technologies for open and participatory innovation. Makerspaces are places of open hardware where people have access to high-tech machinery with which they can develop prototypes that are then shared as open source blueprints through social networks. Some maker projects, such as the Smart Citizen project from FabLab Barcelona, make use of environmental sensing technologies which are linked through collective awareness platforms.

Present your “success story”, its approach, results and impact to the related communities (including lessons learnt about how to engaging citizens, moving from awareness to action, achieving sustainability, measuring impact, protecting privacy and ethics, defining better research and innovation priorities)

The EU Horizon2020 research project MAKE-IT investigates the diversity of the maker movement, its current practices and potential pathways for the maker movement to contribute to a more sustainable and inclusive society, as the following three examples show. MAKE-IT’s ten European case studies display the movement’s broad variety of makerspaces with diverse visions and approaches. Figure 1 maps the ten case studies along the axes of how strongly an initiative is market-oriented and how strongly it is embedded in a wider community.

To give but three examples how maker spaces function as innovation-incubators propelling especially DSIs:

HappyLab Vienna is a commercially run makerspace where DSIs like the water purification tool Wadi by Helioz have been first prototyped. Wadi purifies water with the help of solar energy and shows when a bottle of water is safe to drink, thus contributing to solving one of the biggest challenges in developing countries (see Figure 2).

FabLab Zagreb has a strong educational mission, working with children, students, long-term unemployed and physically challenged people. Following an open source ethos, FabLab Zagreb develops prosthesis and customised ergonomic devices for people with special needs by bringing together patients, makers and professionals working in this area.

Figure 1: A mapping of MAKE-IT's ten case studies

MAKE-IT proposal for a presentation ("success story") in the workshop “Collaborative Making, Art and Creativity” at DSI Fair 2017

Dezentrale Dortmund was founded by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft with the aim to open up innovation and research processes to the wider public. Its distinctive feature is the makers’ strong involvement with mushroom growing for edible purposes as well as material science. Makers experiment with integrating fungi in clothing, building and packaging materials that are more environmentally friendly than conventional materials (see Figure 3).

The diversity of the maker initiatives is reflected in the diversity of goals individual makers pursue. First, technophile makers look for new technological solutions to prevailing problems and focus on developing innovative technical infrastructures. Second, makers with grand societal goals regard their maker activities as a contribution to ideas of a sustainable society, such as to enhance ecological sustainability, education, empowerment and inclusion of marginalised groups. Finally, makers pursuing commercial goals display a strong entrepreneurial spirit, strive for self-realisation and attempt to translate their maker activities into a business providing them with a sound financial basis.

In this workshop, we invite stakeholders from civil society, science, policy and business to discuss the latest findings of the MAKE-IT project with a focus on economic sustainability scenarios for the maker movement. We would like to discuss how makerspaces are incubators for sustainable DSIs and, together with the workshop participants, explore what other DSI projects can learn from the maker movement and vice versa. The concrete output of this workshop will be a first starting-point for the development of sustainability scenarios that will serve as input for the project’s final recommendations for practitioners and policy makers. Your contribution to this session will thus have an impact on how the maker movement will be supported to shape our future society.

The duration of this workshop can be adapted to the overall structure of the DSI Fair 2017. 10 minutes presentation of the MAKE-IT findings and 20 minutes for the dialogical exploration would be a bare minimum. A 20 minutes presentation, a 40 minutes dialogic exploration, followed by a 45 minutes whiteboard sustainable scenario co-creation session, wrapped up in the final 15 minutes would be a good two hour session.

Figure 2: Water purification tool Wadi by Helioz Figure 3: Fungi-based material science at

Dezentrale Dortmund