[s2If is_user_logged_in()]Download PDF[/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)]
Manufacturing itself is changing as open-source sentiment grows with the “maker” movement, especially in FabLabs around the world. “Makers” are open-source hardware enthusiasts who want anyone to be able to make almost anything. This ethnographic research, conducted in 2013, centers on the “makers” in FabLabs in Japan. The research addresses cultural coherence among actors – human and machine – in these FabLabs, and changing notions of expertise enabled by open-source, DIY manufacturing practices. Are modern machines like 3D printers changing manufacturing? Will they change the world?
Free Article: Please sign in or create a free account to access the leading collection of peer-reviewed work on ethnographic practice.
To access video, Become an EPIC Member.
“Scarcely a new invention comes along that someone does not proclaim it the salvation of a free society.”
Langdon Winner 1980:121-122
INTRODUCTION
Social researchers have been intrigued by open-source projects that have led to changes in industrial practice through disruptive software projects like Linux and Firefox. Perhaps some companies have been spooked by such projects as a threat to the bottom line or to the expertise that justifies some of the value of their products. Now, open-source sentiment is growing in hardware design and production domains as well, reshaping the expertise and practice of manufacturing. The term “maker” has begun to be used as shorthand for a do-it-yourself (DIY), open-source, global movement to “make” things and “hack” things that previously were the express domain of corporate design, engineering, and production teams. What does this “maker” movement look like at close range? The ethnographic research reviewed in this paper addresses a subset of the “maker” movement, focusing on the people who operate and occupy FabLabs in Japan. I conducted the research during the summer of 2013 with support from Intel Labs, visiting each of Japan’s six operating FabLabs, interviewing proprietors and patrons, and observing the practice of “making”.
Most people (especially in technology circles) now recognize that extra-corporate collaborators – ad hoc groups that create competing products – can deter well-planned product lines. However, the total impact of this percolating open-source sentiment is much more variegated and nuanced. Today, in the space between garage tinkerers and corporate engineering teams, there is a range of actors “making” things. There seems to be more at stake than a few product lines. “Makers” speak of a world where anyone can make “almost anything” (Gershenfeld 2012, 2005) and where new tools like 3D printers presage a “new industrial revolution” (Anderson 2012). The ambitions of individual “makers”, the venues of production, and the tools of choice may differ but their central purpose remains the same: put the power of manufacturing in the hands of the people and change the future.
The “makers” whom I observed in FabLabs in Japan help to provide some measured ethnographic perspective on the enthusiasm with which popular literature has begun to herald the “maker” movement. In this paper, after situating the Japanese “makers” among whom I studied within the broader context of FabLabs, of benighted economic Japan, and of the global “maker” movement, I will describe a few of the FabLabs in enough detail to give the reader a sense of their operation and attitude. I will highlight the way in which FabLabs are used to “employ” (in Latour’s sense, 2005) ever-more accessible technical tools such as CAD software, 3D printers, microcontrollers, and laser-cutters – recruiting and assembling a host of agents. The proactive practice of the agents who employ these tools interacts with the existing cultures in which they operate. To tease out some understanding from the ethnographic data, I will address changing notions of manufacturing expertise and the Japanese sociocultural backdrop against which their work plays. Finally, I will comment on the way in which the lavish enthusiasm for the possibilities of “making”, while perhaps overwrought, nevertheless has a discernible effect on the cohering of the agents that comprise the movement.
SITUATING “MAKERS” IN JAPAN
Making is certainly not new. People have always made things, of course. Chris Anderson, Neil Gershenfeld, and Cory Doctorow, who have helped to popularize the term, along with O’Reilly Media’s “Make Magazine”, neither invented the term nor the movement. Furthermore, FabLabs are not the only place where it coheres and performs. In my experience among “makers” there is certainly no singular nor essential culture (of expertise or otherwise) coalesced as a primary structuring force in “makers’” lives. “Making” in its present, technology-centric denotation refers to the broad practice of creating objects for fun or perhaps income. The creation usually involves new technical tools and the designs are often shared. A quick, general summary of the field will help to situate the “makers” among whom I studied in Japan.
“Making” can be applied as a descriptor to a host of creative practices. At any given “Maker Faire”, of which there are now dozens around the world sanctioned formally by Maker Media, people of all ages will bring their resourceful creations to display and discuss. Some will be all plastic and duct tape. Some will be programmed by microcontrollers. Some will be just for fun and some will boggle the mind with their practical ingenuity. The allure of “making” is enhanced by the phenomenal range of creations that come from the minds of “makers”, enabled by the increased availability of knowledge and tools.
There are many places where “making” happens. The general term: “makerspaces”, often synonymous or at least co-located with “hackerspaces”, describes the thousands of little workshops around the world where people tinker with things – either to fix, hack, or create them. In the U.S., San Francisco is a hub for “makerspaces”, along with New York and Boston, following the vanguard of technology. Still, even my native Lexington, Kentucky, is presently building public “makerspaces” in a school and a library. On the national stage, President Obama has instituted special support for education-a-la-“making” through the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, funding new machine-centered curricula, such as that being programmed by Stanford’s FabLearn Fellows program. Then, of course, there is the young but storied Tech Shop franchise from which inventions such as the Square credit card reader have emerged. This business-grade “makerspace” costs $125 per month but gets you access to top-tier equipment and hands-on help from experts.
“Making”, then, is a global phenomenon that encompasses a wide range of people, places, and activities all animated by an interest in building and sharing things. Its future impact is an often-conjectured but open question.
Popular Literature on “Making”
While the precise etymology and static meaning of the term “maker”, as it is used in this research, may never be more than an approximation, a few authors have certainly had an impact on its present signification.
Chris Anderson’s 2012 book: Makers: The New Industrial Revolution has been a pivotal work of introduction to ideas about “making” for many people. Anderson suggests that “making” will redirect people to newly invented machines for local, collaborative, and DIY projects, fundamentally altering the preeminent mode of work in established manufacturing operations. The book gives many examples of impressively collaborative creations, such as his own DIY Drone project, and commercially successful projects like the Square credit card reader. Most notably, perhaps, is Anderson’s unequivocal argument throughout the book that “making” is the beginning of “a new industrial revolution”. At its core, Anderson’s book is a tale of micro-batch entrepreneurs who can go from tinkering to sales very quickly, the business-class of the “maker” group.
Neil Gershenfeld, at MIT, seeded the burgeoning FabLab corner of the “maker” movement with his book about a lab he arranged on the MIT campus inside the Center for Bits and Atoms. Fab, The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop – From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication (2005) is the introductory text for nearly all of the people I met as “makers” in Japan, who read its Japanese translation. Gershenfeld filled his lab in Boston with a set of machines by which students could make “almost anything” in one semester. The novel notion and belabored epiphany of the book is that with these new tools, “anyone can make almost anything” (17). With a creative idea, a lab with the right machines, and a mentor to help with software and hardware, Gershenfeld (and thousands more FabLab enthusiasts) hold forth that we will all be “making” things on our desktops and in garages, or in FabLabs soon. There are already more than 250 chartered FabLabs in the world. There is a ten-year-old International FabLab Conference and a FabLab Research Group. Gershenfeld’s mantra is that fabrication (or “making”, or design, or manufacturing) is on the cusp of being personal, social, and never again just commercial.
A final publication that has impacted the present meaning of “maker” is Make magazine, originally published by O’Reilly Media and then spun off as part of Maker Media. The magazine, however, is just an entrée to the website, the webshop, and the Maker Faire events that Maker Media operate – a center of activity and publicity that continues to garner attention for the “maker” concept.
This sampling of publications gives a further sense of what is meant by the term “maker”. Each publication has its own spin on the practice of “making” but I note that each is also, in its own way, imagining “maker” activity to be the precursor to a whole new human future. There remains, I think, ample space to examine as ethnographers the present shape of the movement, its rhetoric, and its future as it gains momentum around the world.
Critiquing the Rhetoric
Scholars in anthropology and especially in the interdisciplinary domain of science, technology, and society studies (STS) have not shied away from investigating the deep social implications of new social formations such as the “maker” community. M.J. Fischer has turned a great deal of research attention toward “emergent forms of life” (2009, 2003) enabled by technological change, of which “making” is certainly one.
Susan Currie Sivek (2011) has directly addressed Make magazine, suggesting based on her textual analysis of the magazine and observations of its Make Faires that it promotes a technological utopianism, offering “participation in technology as an opportunity for self-actualization” (189). Sivek questions the assumption therein that the power of technology is by definition positive and natural. She notes how the technical objects of “maker” affection reflect a narrow vision of what can be created. For example, “make” objects often require energy to function but “makers” seldom design down power requirements. Sivek calls for more critical research and writing to supplant the dominant utopian assumptions.
Brian Pfaffenberger, an anthropologist, has described the fallacy of “technological determinism” (1998), or the assumption that technology is a “powerful and autonomous agent that dictates the patterns of human social and cultural life” (Pfaffenberger 239). The claim that 3D printers will democratize manufacturing, for example, makes that assumption: that the object dictates the human patterns. In fact, maintains Pfaffenberger, “the outcome of a given innovation is still subject to substantial modification by social, political and cultural forces” (Pfaffenberger 240). The relevant point here is that with new machines like 3D printers or free CAD software like Autodesk, the rhetoric easily slips into this fallacy of determinism when in fact the human use of the machines remains subject to a great deal of pressure from existing social systems and redirection by external powers such as companies, research institutes and governments.
Dr. Gershenfeld, for example, is welcome to say that in FabLabs anyone can make “almost anything”, but there may be many people who cannot, in fact, make anything, such as those inhibited by gender, income, race, and other intransigent social patterns. Examples of creative power in the hands of laypeople are impressive – no doubt. Still, the utopian rhetoric rings with the sense that all is as it should be – positive, natural, and accessible. Should we not expect to find, upon closer investigation, also stories of negative experiences in FabLabs or communities of “makers”? At the least, are there not stories of failed projects, frustrated “makers”, or the transition from personal projects to private gain? Who is benefiting from the way in which we talk about “makers” today? And is this fate of “making” determined by the new technology or is there a social story – with opportunities for derailment or redirection – still being written?
I certainly am not inclined to discredit the “maker” endeavor out-of-hand, faulting only its vaunted rhetoric – more often the contrary. However, there are reasons to ask whether the practices of “making” are what they purport to be.