Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 99, 15 July 2015, Pages 333-344
Journal of Cleaner Production

Anticipated environmental sustainability of personal fabrication

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.02.093Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We assessed how “makers” foresee the sustainability of future personal fabrication.

  • Eco-oriented practitioners articulated environmental impacts well, others less so.

  • Eco-oriented practitioners did not engage with emerging technologies or materials.

  • There are gaps between maker subcultures in their orientations and competences.

  • Targeted research, dialogue among maker groups, guides, checklists could remedy it.

Abstract

Distributed manufacturing is rapidly proliferating to citizen level via the use of digital fabrication equipment, especially in dedicated “makerspaces”. The sustainability benefits of citizens' personal fabrication are commonly endorsed. However, to assess how these maker practitioners actually deal with environmental issues, these practitioners and their practices need to be studied. Moreover research on the environmental issues in personal fabrication is nascent despite the common perception that the digital technologies can become disruptive. The present paper is the first to report on how practitioners assess the environmental sustainability of future practices in this rapidly changing field. It does so through an envisioning workshop with leading-edge makers. The findings show that these makers are well able to envision the future of their field. Roughly 25% of the issues covered had clear environmental implications. Within these, issues of energy use, recycling, reusing and reducing materials were covered widely by environmentally-oriented participants. In contrast, issues related to emerging technologies, materials and practices were covered by other participants, but their environmental implications remained unaddressed. The authors concluded there is a gap between different maker subcultures in their sustainability orientations and competences. Further research on the environmental aspects of real-life maker practices and personal fabrication technologies now could help avert negative impacts later, as the maker phenomenon spreads. This knowledge should also be directed to developing targeted environmental guidelines and solutions for personal fabrication users, which are currently lacking. Potential also lies in seeking to enhance dialogue between pro-environmental and new-technology-oriented practitioners through shared spaces, workshops and conferences.

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

References (53)

  • M. Baumers et al.

    Transparency built-in

    J. Ind. Ecol.

    (2013)
  • M. Bauwens et al.

    A Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy

    (2012)
  • H.S. Becker

    Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research while You're Doing it

    (1998)
  • Y. Benkler

    The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

    (2006)
  • K. Bødker et al.

    Participatory IT Design - Designing for Business and Workplace Realities

    (2004)
  • J. Churchill et al.

    Lead User Project Handbook–a Practical Guide for Lead User Project Teams

    (2009)
  • K. De Decker

    How sustainable is digital fabrication?

    Low-Tech Mag.

    (2014)
  • A. Delfanti

    Biohackers: the Politics of Open Science

    (2013)
  • O. Diegel et al.

    Tools for sustainable product design: additive manufacturing

    J. Sustain. Dev.

    (2010)
  • A. Drizo et al.

    Environmental impacts of rapid prototyping: an overview of research to date

    Rapid Prototyp. J.

    (2006)
  • P. Ehn et al.

    Cardboard computers: mocking-it-up or hands-on the future

  • F. Eychenne

    Fab Labs Overview. The Fing (Fondation internet nouvelle génération)

    (2012)
  • Fab Foundation

    Fab Lab Inventory: Fab Lab Inventory

    (2015)
  • FabLabs

    Labs | FabLabs

    (2015)
  • J. Faludi et al.

    Comparing environmental impacts of additive manufacturing vs traditional machining via life-cycle assessment

    Rapid Prototyp. J.

    (2015)
  • N. Gershenfeld

    FAB: the Coming Revolution on Your Desktop – from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication

    (2005)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text