Makerspaces and Peer Production

Abstract

Makerspaces are open community workshops for peer production which provide people with technical tools and training to experiment with making, learning, and hands‐on participation around material cultures. These workshops come in a variety of forms, and they are called by many names, including shared machine shops, hackerspaces, fab labs, digital studios and many other labels – including maker- space, which we will use as an umbrella term to keep things simple. What they have in common, how- ever, is a commitment to providing people with the skills and means needed to access versatile design and fabrication technologies, and to fostering communities that share an open and collaborative ethos regarding the possibilities that democratized design and fabrication technologies might offer person- ally, socially, economically, and culturally. In this chapter, we discuss the diverse dynamics of maker- spaces, and how encounters between makerspaces and institutional interests in particular are shaping what is possible. We also ask what is gained from the radical redistribution of prototyping capabilities in societies that makerspaces represent, and what is diminished.