Thesis ‘A survey into FabLabs, hackerspaces and makerspaces between 2012 and 2015’

Recently Camille Bosqué, known from several french books on FabLab, obtained her PhD with the  thesis
‘A survey into FabLabs, hackerspaces and makerspaces between 2012 and 2015′
(La fabrication numérique personnelle, discours et pratiques d’un design diffus; Enquête au cœur des FabLabs, hackerspaces et makerspaces de 2012 à 2015)

Here is its abstract in english. Part three sounds interesting.

(Abstract)
FabLabs, hackerspaces and makerspaces are shared workshops, equipped with digital tools and organised in a network. These places are connected to the maker movement and are heirs to hackers. They offer themselves as places where anybody can come and make anything. In spite of some strong media coverage, the reality of discourses and practices that occur in those places has not yet been much studied.

This dissertation in Aesthetics and design is based on a large ethnographic survey conducted between 2012 and 2015, in France and abroad. A series of interviews and drawn observations allows for a critical description of the ways of doing that can be witnessed on these fields.
Practices, discourses and ambitions of personal digital fabrication are built in the margins of the classical fields of industry and design, blurring their historical frames.

The first part of this dissertation retraces the origins of FabLabs as well as of the maker and hacker movements. First hand data and classical accounts reveal how American counter-culture and the technophile ambitions of MIT researchers result in diverging local appropriations.
The rehabilitation of pleasure at work and the heritage of the Arts and Crafts both point to these places as fields of social experimentation, beyond mere production.

In the second part, this dissertation focuses on the values of openness and sharing advocated by contemporary amateurs, tinkerers, makers or inventors. The hypothesis of a design that could be open, participative, out of the standards of industrial mass production is examined. « Open design » places the production of artefacts in the wake of open source. This type of production ends up shaping a new, though hazy, field for design.

The third part studies the promises and contradictions that surround the democratization of innovation and production. 3D printing is taken as an emblematic case study to consider the ambivalences behind the emancipation expected by representatives of the maker movement.
These indecisive practices feed the branches of what we might call ‘diffuse design’. It develops itself by trial and error in amateur communities and reaches creative activities of invention, conception and fabrication.

The rhizomatic * area of diffuse design comprises rather plain objects, situated in the margins of industry. According to this definition, they are produced in an open and documented way, in order to explore and contribute to the discovery of digital fabrication technologies. Diffuse design is not a closed paradigm, but turns away from instituted norms and offers an open and exploratory conception of fabrication.

(End of abstract)

 

*  Wikipedia: Rhizomatic learning is a term applied to a variety of pedagogical practices informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Explored initially as an application of post-structural thought to education, it has more recently been identified as methodology for net-enabled education. In contrast to goal-directed and hierarchical theories of learning, it posits that learning is most effective when it allows participants to react to evolving circumstances, preserving lines of flight that allow a fluid and continually evolving redefinition of the task at hand. In such a structure, “the community is the curriculum”, subverting traditional notions of instructional design where objectives pre-exist student involvement.