Cindy Kohtala

Collaborative futuring with and by makers

Maker spaces and maker activities offering access to low-cost digital fabrication equipment are rapidly proliferating, evolving phenomena at the interface of lay and professional design. They also come in many varieties and change fast, presenting a difficult target for, for instance, public authorities, who would like to cater for them but operate in much slower planning cycles. As part of participatory planning of Helsinki Central Library, we experimented with a form of collaborative futuring with and by makers. By drawing elements from both lead-user workshops and participatory design, we conducted a futuring workshop, which allowed us to engage the local maker communities in identifying the issues relevant for a public maker space in 2020. It further engaged the participants in envisioning a smaller prototype maker space and invited them into realising its activities collaboratively. Our results indicate that particularly the information about future solutions was of high relevance, as was the opportunity to trial and elaborate activities on a rolling basis in the prototype space. Insights about more general trends in making were useful too, but to a lesser extent, and it is likely that these could have been gained just as easily with more traditional means for futuring.

Making “Making” Critical: How Sustainability is Constituted in Fab Lab Ideology

Abstract Fab Labs, fabrication laboratories, are shared workshops where citizens can access digital fabrication equipment to design and make their own objects. They are proliferating rapidly and represent an alternative to mass production and consumption, an ideology whose environmental and social benefits their “makers” like to espouse. A longitudinal ethnographic study in a Fab Lab in a European design school examined the Lab’s ideology building, how ideals were enacted and where compromises were visible. Environmental issues were intertwined with other ideological concerns, but they were rarely promoted in their own right. Engagement with sustainability-oriented makers and stakeholders is recommended.

Outside the “Comfort Zone”. Designing the Unknown in a Multidisciplinary Setting

Abstract: This paper presents a case study where the early stage of multidisciplinary collaboration is investigated. In the studied case designers work together with material scientists, market experts and the manufacturing industry to develop new textile fibres from waste using novel innovations in chemical recycling. The studied project is defined to be design-driven, and it aims at material innovation through multidisciplinary collaboration. This paper focuses on the first round, the initiative stage where different disciplines learn to collaborate and where the “unknown” is designed: the attributes for the future material. The data covers the first 12-month period in the project and meetings, workshops and communications in the project during this time. The participant observation approach is used. The results show that multidisciplinary collaboration needs participants’ readiness to step outside the practices of their discipline and learn collaboration. Further knowledge intermediators are needed for bridging knowledge gaps between different disciplines.