Hannah Stewart is a Research Associate at the Royal College of Art on the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council-funded project Future Maker Spaces in Redistributed Manufacturing. Alongside Andrew Sleigh she was commissioned to produce the UK Makespaces Open Dataset for the National Endowment for Science Technology and Art. Her Doctoral research with the Creative Exchange focused on the values and practices of the maker space, indie web and open data communities.
Future Makespaces in Redistributed Manufacturing
Over two years, the project will run events, build a network, fund studies and undertake cross-cutting research to establish what role maker spaces and their communities could play in the future landscape of sustainable production. Through a multidisciplinary network it is defining the challenges involved in interfacing and integrating maker spaces with existing manufacturing businesses. As partners in the Fab City network, the project team is particularly interested in the distributions and concentration of agency, risk and reward associated with goods, services and design moving towards ‘shipping data not products.’ We focus on the question how platform co-ops could be part of enabling decentralized infrastructure that is optimized for both people and planet.