When People Take Technology in Their Own Hands: Shared Machine Shops in Context

June 29, 2017
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Room S201, Tibi3)
Av Tibidabo, 47. Free Entry.

When people take technology in their own hands: Shared Machine Shops in Context

Shared Machine Shops – hacklabs, hackerspaces, makerspaces, Fab Labs, incubators and accelerators, medialabs and tech shops – have been widely studied as so many variations on the same theme: for instance as strange institutions performing the democratisation of innovation through the involvement of non-experts. Building on the results of multi-sited ethnographic research, in this workshop we take a more methodologically nuanced and empirically rigorous approach. It turns out that even if SMSs all provide access to machines for non-experts, their social functions can vary greatly according to how they integrate into the social fabric. In other words, the “lab format” is mobilised by a wide range of social groups (often simultaneously) for different ends and with varying results. Thus, the aim of the workshop is to explore the diversity of Shared Machine Shops and explain such diversity through situating the phenomena in its temporal, spatial, economic and ideological context.

Schedule:

16:00 – 16:20 Maxigas (OSI/CareNet). Lab Waves: The historical logic of Shared Machine Shop evolution.

16:20 – 16:40 Debora Lanzeni (Mediaccions). Performing futures for assembling smart city projects: From imaginaries to markets.

16:40 – 17:00 Rosen Bogdanov (OSI/Mediaccions). Do-it-together science and platforms for public participation: Can biohacking be legitimising synthetic biology in the EU?

17:00 – 18:00 Discussion

The seminar is organised in collaboration between the “Open Science and Innovation” research group and the “Mediaccions” research group, UOC.