Source: Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers
In my column, Open World, I’ve tried to write what few truths of the Maker Movement I feel confident in. The longer I’ve spent at this, the less certain I am of their certainty or usefulness. Taking a step back from right answers, I tried to at least identify some right questions: those that characterize mine, and other people’s interest in spaces related to Making.
It’s mostly just a note for myself, an attempt to keep tabs on important issues that ought to be addressed. Now though, I think these questions might be a more useful product of my year than the “answers” I’ve tried to put together.
I hope it might be valuable to other people trying to frame how they think about makerspaces or Making in general— but they have larger implications for how we approach all sorts of related work:
Questions on Spaces Helping People Make Things
Fundamental questions in understanding a space (where “it” refers to the space in question):
- Who is it by? Who is it for?
- What does it do? What do the people involved do? At what scale?
- Where is it? Does it have a where (meaning does it have a physical site)? Where are its people from? Where are its projects from? Where do they go?
- When did it start? Does it service the past, present, or a particular vision of the future?
- Why did it start? Why does it continue? In other words, what is its core mission // motivation?
- How does it fulfill its mission? (eg. funding, people, projects, collaborations, etc.)
These questions might have two sets of answers: answers describing a space’s reality, and answers describing its aspirations.
Ideally, those answers should converge.More complicated // open-ended questions (in no particular order)
- How does one balance an organization’s needs with the need for the organization? Eg. how do makerspaces whose purpose is to make Making more accessible to people without resources, reconcile that purpose with the necessity of themselves making money? Are compromises necessary? There may be pragmatic answers, but do they differ from philosophical answers?
- What does a good team//collaboration look like? What is the interplay between collaboration and competition? Star players and teamwork? Honesty and kindness? Etc.
- What does “Making” mean? Who thinks of it in the context of the “Maker Movement” and who doesn’t? If they do or don’t, does that change how they talk about Making? Do people know about the Maker Movement? Do they think of themselves as part of it?
- What’s the relationship between a space and the people who use it? Are a space’s users also the people in charge of it? Are they the people who own it? Are they the people who started it? What is their buy in? Eg. what is the cost associated with their using the space and what can they get from it? What do they actually take from it? What does this mean on a micro and macro level?
- Was it a space first or a community first? What does that mean? I wonder, is one approach always better? Or is one or the other better in specific circumstances? This dovetails with the above question: generally there is a connection between how the space was established and how people take responsibility for the space (or don’t).
- How else can you encourage people to participate // take ownership? // how do you foster community or individual buy-in?
- Are projects individually motivated? Or community motivated? Which does the space preference?
- How does the space create better a) things, b) people, c) community. Does it? Does it focus on other areas of improvement seen as outside these three? Does it only focus on a subset of these three?
- What are the inadvertent consequences of the space and how are they treated? Is everything intentional or are accidents encouraged? How does the space and its members reflect on their work generally? Is there a culture of intentionality, reflection, and modification? Or does it prefer incidence, spontaneity, chance, etc. Is it unintentional about how it approaches this issue?
- How does the space gate keep? Or eliminate gates? How does it negotiate questions about…
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