Anticipated environmental sustainability of personal fabrication
Introduction
Certain groups of end-users, often called “makers”, are increasingly involved in the design and production of their own products (Raasch and von Hippel, 2012, Anderson, 2012). This transition is enabled by greater access to digital manufacturing technologies at home, through services or in dedicated spaces (i.e. “makerspaces”). Such access is regarded by many as a disruptive alternative to mass production and consumption through material “peer production” (Benkler, 2006, Bauwens et al., 2012) or “personal fabrication” (Gershenfeld, 2005). There are potential environmental benefits, and harms, to distributing production in this way, but these have been little studied to date (Kohtala, in press).
If these personal fabrication practices diffuse into wider society, it is important to clarify the direct environmental impacts of technologies and materials, but also their indirect effects on society and consumption patterns. For instance, the “maker movement” is often promoted as more environmentally benign than mass production, by enhancing skills to build and repair, answering one's own needs as opposed to “satisficing” through passive consumption, and distributing production within local networks as opposed to long, large-volume supply chains (Diegel et al., 2010, Niinimäki and Hassi, 2011, van Abel et al., 2011). How maker practitioners organise their activities may provide a leverage point for more sustainable practices, depending on the makers' own knowledge of environmental impacts and how they enact sustainability-oriented values.
These hypotheses about the current and future sustainability of making are, however, currently based on limited scientific evidence, and maker practitioners tackle these questions of environmental sustainability based on their professional skills. This raises the question of maker practitioners' knowledge: how wide and deep is their own awareness of the environmental implications of making, and do they operationalise it in their current practices as well as planning for future activities?
The authors have earlier investigated these topics through long-term ethnographic research, examining the daily practices of setting up new makerspaces and organising and conducting making activities. This appears helpful in discerning the gaps between actors' pro-environmental attitudes and their concrete practices (e.g. Kohtala and Bosqué, 2014). However, making is a rapidly changing phenomenon where environmental implications may change and evolve as new technologies and interests emerge. The research question in the present paper is therefore:
What issues do competent maker practitioners foresee in the environmental sustainability of near future makerspaces?
To assess this, a workshop was organised with leading-edge practitioners in Finland. It was designed carefully so the practitioners were working on a real project, but also to offer a clear view on if and how they would consider issues related to the environmental sustainability of makerspaces in 2020. The year 2020 was a target date close enough for the practitioners to voice reasoned propositions about, but also far enough in the future to push them to envision likely future developments in this rapidly changing field and indicate any related environmental effects. The reasoning behind the workshop structure and its context is explained in section 3, as well as the methods for analysing the results. The findings and their implications are summarised in sections 4 Findings: the distribution of identified trends and solutions, 5 Findings: property space analysis of trend and solution interrelations, 6 Discussion. Section 2 provides more background on the maker movement and personal fabrication, with special emphasis on shared makerspaces and the knowledge on sustainability issues to date.
Section snippets
Background
Although “making” builds on a tradition of handicraft and “DIY” (do-it-yourself), it today also includes (and more commonly refers to) use of digital tools in hands-on fabrication of material artefacts, including electronics and physical computing experiments, stickers and marketing items for small businesses, furniture and items for the home or body, and prototypes of all kinds. Shared makerspaces are workshops with low-cost digital fabrication equipment, typically milling machines for making
Data and methods
The data for this study were drawn from a collaborative design experiment where thirteen leading Finnish maker experts were recruited to elaborate the future of makerspaces for the year 2020. The stakes of the workshop were real: the host was Helsinki library services, who will build a public makerspace for its flagship city centre library that will open its doors in 2018, as well as a small-scale pilot space that opened a few months after the workshop. The local maker communities would be
Findings: the distribution of identified trends and solutions
The final data set yielded 177 trend statements and 262 solution statements. This section will briefly present the overview of workshop outcomes as necessary background information to discussing the results of the deeper analysis in section 5.
Findings: property space analysis of trend and solution interrelations
Sustainable Consumption and Production research has long shown a high discrepancy between pro-environmental attitudes and actual behaviours: the “behaviour-attitude gap” (e.g. Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002). The gap may stem from sustainability being a “good” that is evoked for reasons of self-identity, an inability to realise pro-environmental intentions within the structural constraints of current society, or sustainability forming an ideology that lacks concretisation in some areas (Shove
Discussion
The present study is part of the first line of research on how environmental sustainability is enacted in real-life personal fabrication settings. This line of research is important because the scientific evidence from which maker practitioners could draw remains scant, and much of the environmental impact of the potentially disruptive technologies rests on practitioners' shoulders.
To complement ethnographic research on present-day maker practices, the present study set-up was designed to
Conclusions
The participants in this study were well able to envision the future of making, but they appeared to differ in their capacity to anticipate environmental issues: those competent and interested in assessing environmental impacts were different people from those competent and interested in keeping track of rapidly evolving new technologies and materials for making. This gap in practitioner orientation and competence is therefore potentially problematic.
Three obvious lines of implications and
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