Alternative Histories in DIY Cultures and Maker Utopias

Please join us for a special event on alternative maker histories, Thursday 29 April 2021, 18.00-19.45 CET, online.

Register here to get the zoom link: http://tiny.cc/by9wtz
The event will be recorded.

The programme (subject to changes):

18.00 INTRODUCTION (18.00 Amsterdam, Cape Town; 13.00 Rio de Janeiro; 12.00 New York; 0.00 Hong Kong)
Cindy Kohtala, Yana Boeva, Peter Troxler


RADICAL TECHNOLOGY – THEN AND NOW
Chair of theme: Cindy Kohtala
Simon Sadler, Peter Harper in conversation with Cindy Kohtala and Yana Boeva on Alternative Technology and the Exhibition of People’s Technology, Stockholm, 1972
Kostas Latoufis on Alternative Technology in the UK.
Q&A


THE POLITICS OF DIY COMMUNITIES
Chair of theme: Peter Troxler
Ellen Foster on the history of Maker manifestos.
Regina Sipos on the history of Germany’s Open Workshops.
Suné Stassen and Felix Holm on Making and makerspaces in southern Afrika.
In absentia: David Cuartielles, Cesar Garcia on the history of Spain’s maker communities.
Q&A


19.00 BREAK (19.00 Amsterdam, Cape Town; 14.00 Rio de Janeiro; 13.00 New York; 01.00 Hong Kong)

THE POLITICS OF CARE, CRAFT AND REPAIR
Chair of theme: Yana Boeva
Emilio Velis on the Meaning of craft during the San Salvadoran civil war.
Svetlana Usenyuk-Kravchuk on Arctic inventiveness and “cosmic conversion”.
In absentia: Petr Gibas, Blanka Nyklova on Czech DIY.
Anupama Gowda on Making with and for marginalized children in India.

ALTERNATIVE INDUSTRIAL HISTORIES
Chair of theme: Yana Boeva
Sam Shorey on Corporate DIY, ‘then and now’.
Kat Jungnickel on discovering women’s Inventions in patent registries.
Jesse Adams Stein, by video, on the Meaning of manufacturing expertise.

Q&A


OPEN DISCUSSION AND CLOSING OF EVENT


INFORMAL HANG-OUT


This event is to mark the launch of a Special Issue of Digital Culture & Society, guest editors Cindy Kohtala, Yana Boeva and Peter Troxler.

If you have any questions about the event, please email me directly or our editors’ email <dcs.si.althistdiy (at) gmail.com>. We are also collecting questions for the presenters in advance!

The study was supported in part by the Nessling Foundation.

Systems of Resilience: A Dialogue on Makers

Here is a free pdf of my chapter in the Agents of Alternatives book, called ‘Systems of Resilience: A Dialogue on Digital Makers, Making and Their Principles of Conduct’ (2015).
It’s an easy read, inspired by the dialogue format Jane Jacobs used in Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. I present various types of DIY makers, typical motivations for why they do what they do, and the typical types of commons they foreground.

It was reprinted in the research publication Fabricating Society produced for the FAB13 international Fab Lab meeting in 2017, edited by Andrés Briceño and Tomás Vivanco, available as a free pdf here.

Trashlab (repair café)

Hooray! Trashlab is back! This time in Vallila.

What is Trashlab? Trashlab is…

DSCF5366_sm DSCF5381_sm

… helping others to fix their broken things …

DSCF5375_sm

…getting your hands dirty…

DSCF5379_sm

…breaking broken things to fix them…

DSCF5397_sm

…needing tape, needing glue…

DSCF5389_sm

…needing more light…

DSCF5394_sm

…needing fuel…

DSCF5376_sm

…giving up with some things…

DSCF5393_sm

…succeeding with others.

Trashlab began in 2012 as an initiative by people from Pixelache and several departments in Aalto University in Helsinki: an art-design-recycling-trash collaborative, peer-learning experiment, combined with a more philosophical, critical, towards-the-academic look at waste and material culture (i.e. the Talking Trashlab lecture series hosted in Media Factory).
In 2013 Trashlab became a regular monthly repair event in different locations around the city, and in 2014, it found a home every month in Helsinki city centre’s municipal library makerspace Kaupunkiverstas (then in Lasipalatsi). In 2015 the group began to alternate the repair events with the original artistic and critical explorations – again in different locations but often in Sankariliiga makerspace in Hermanni. I especially enjoyed the casting workshop using reclaimed aluminium.

Today was the first event in 2016, and the first repair event for a few months. Two bikes, a child’s toy, a golf putt device-thing, a chair seat needing new fabric, a computer adaptor, a jacket zip, a dish, clothes with holes. I didn’t bring anything to fix, but I like to go just to socialize.

And I like taking pictures of people’s hands making and doing. They’re so beautiful.

Facets of the Maker Movement: repair, fix and hack

When I tell people I’m researching environmental issues in Fab Labs, there is often a mysterious response: “are you being ironic?” Um, no… why?

I’m not sure I understand this reaction. Is it because people see Fab Labs as just obsessed with gadgets, technology driven, focused only on pumping out plastic Yodas and weird electronic contrivances? Well, that is certainly a visible part of makerspaces, and we’d be right to start examining what we are doing in Fab Labs and why. I know I’m not the only one who’d like to see a way to pop that plastic blob that didn’t work back into an extruder, make a new filament out of it, and feed it back into the printer. If I were a coder I’d come up with a solution that could scan a piece of ply or acrylic that has bits laser cut out of it – already while it is sitting in the laser cutter – and then help me plan a new cut so any small pieces I need can come from the parts that will otherwise go to waste. Maybe this already exists somewhere.

But back to my question: what are you comparing, exactly, if it becomes “ironic” to talk about environmentally-conscious making, especially considering the extreme low volumes of material flow in and out of makerspaces? So desktop 3D printers tend to produce a lot of plastic waste, but does focusing on that allow us to ignore the amount of crap that gathers dust on shelves in discount stores, “dollar stores”, or “pound-saver” or “euro-saver” shops? Or consumer products that end up in landfill – whether it is post-consumer waste or pre-consumer waste that never even gets to the shops? What if the comparison is rather the choice between experimenting with fabrication in a makerspace and spending all day in a shopping mall / shopping centre (to which you drove in your private car, of course)? Or doing a workshop in a Fab Lab where you learn to make your own mobile phone, maybe instead of buying a new one? These comparisons are not entirely fair either, but sometimes I get the impression that some believe makerspaces will take people away from making things with their hands. 3D printing is wasteful because people will just go crazy and print out all kinds of plastic rubbish in some experimental frenzy, just because they can – instead of what – their usual routine of sitting by the fire and carving their own cutlery? Yeah, right. I do still contend that the enemy of DIY and handcraft is not digital fabrication but rather the anonymity and cheap prices of mass produced products – and that has been the case for more than one hundred years. Know thine enemy.

So isn’t the route to happiness for all our camps to support handcraft and DIY via makerspaces as an alternative to consumerism and shopping? And to promote craft and artisan skills in the makerspace alongside the digital fabrication skills? This is already happening, partly via the repair movement, which I will get to in a minute. But before I do, let’s get back to this question of irony, attitudes to environmental sustainability, and makers’ and designers’ motivations.

A rather similar topic is “Sustainable Fashion”, which a lot of my colleagues are active in. They also have to always justify this expression and nod their heads: “Oh, yes, yes, what an oxymoron, ‘sustainable’ and ‘fashion’ just don’t go together, yes, yes.” Meanwhile, they have a more accurate and profound understanding of the term ‘fashion’ and its role as a cultural and social phenomenon – which differs from our understanding of ‘fad’. And they know their enemy is “fast fashion” in particular and not the entirety of the thousands of years of human history related to how we chose to clothe ourselves, represent our identities, our cultures, our social class in apparel.

Let’s continue and imagine that our knee-jerk reaction is still to assume that ‘fashion’ just means trendy, faddish, short-term clothes buying and disposal. Clearly unsustainable, right? Well – doesn’t that make it even more important that we figure out how to make it more sustainable? If it is an oxymoron, or an ironic statement, why does it mean something not worth doing?

If Fab Labs are just techy playgrounds and a breeding ground for 3D printers and their reckless offspring, and considering how fast makerspaces are spreading, the DIY and maker movement getting more media attention, and how quickly digital fabrication technologies are developing, shouldn’t we study the environmental issues in making sooner rather than later?

I follow quite a few of the usual maker suspects on Twitter, and particularly the commercial entities’ tweets tend to confirm that tech driven image of the maker movement. The incessant focus on 3D printing in the mass media doesn’t help. What is easily forgotten, though, is why people get into making in the first place: it is often because they are seeking an alternative to mass production and consumerism – and often this is intertwined with environmental consciousness. Click on this link and see how the P2P Foundation defines the Maker Movement. See? Did that surprise you? Did you know that it is “about reusing and repairing objects, rather than discarding them to buy more”? And now do you understand why I find it puzzling that “environment” and “Fab Lab” should be seen as an oxymoron? A Fab Lab might not precisely be “a philosophical idea about what ownership really is”, but it is definitely about giving people the means of developing – and understanding – their own tech rather than just giving them tech. (See Gershenfeld’s book Fab.)

This ethos of the maker movement seems easily lost in the hullabaloo around additive manufacturing, so some writers do feel the need to remind us:

We Need a Fixer (Not Just a Maker) Movement, in Wired

Design for repair: empowering consumers to fix the future, in The Guardian

When recycling is the second-best option, on BBC.

Repair events are spreading from space to space and city to city, and they are notable because they attract a much wider audience than just the hardcore makers and hackers. Protospace in Calgary offered repair events after the city’s big floods last year so people could salvage their electronics. (I’m looking forward to visiting Protospace next month.)

Helsinki’s Trashlab offers a repair event every month in collaboration with the city library, and this is also attracting larger and larger crowds and a lot of media attention. Today, in fact it will be on a consumer programme on TV (they were filming last week) – later available on Areena (in Finnish, viewable only in Finland). So far I have only had clothes to fix, something I could also do at home, but I bring them to Trashlab because it’s much more fun to darn socks when you can chat to friends. Such activity does not always need digital fabrication equipment but sometimes it might come in handy if one needs to make a spare part or component that is trickier to do by hand or has tolerances best met with digital help.

In Fixing therefore I argue we see all kinds of benefits and issues in the maker movement come together: the problems with consumer products and their planned obsolescence, the value of a shared makerspace where people can come together to socialize while learning something, and the advantages of combining digital fabrication capability with electronics knowledge with hand skills. Most importantly, this is how these heroes choose to spend their time. So what if it is quicker to just buy another replacement product? It is so much more rewarding for the fixer to help someone with their broken product, and test their own skills, and for the fixee to learn how something can be repaired and be able to keep what may be a treasured object. And I believe this time is the most valuable currency. It may even turn out to be insurance against the rebound effect in our quest to dematerialize our economies.