Visions in assemblages: Future-making and governance in FabLabs

Abstract

The impacts of socio-technical future-making on the governance of innovation processes are increasingly important in sociological STS research and technology assessment (TA). Through the case of the emergence of FabLabs, a global network of several hundred of organizations that aim to make digital fabrication machines such as 3D printing accessible to diverse audiences, and their transformation from elite to collective Fab Labs this paper sheds light on the constitutive interplay between socio-technical futures in practices and changes of the governance of an innovation process. To grasp the processes of future-making and its governance we apply a practice-based perspective inspired by assemblage theory of Deleuze and Guattari and combine this theoretical model with the analytical concept of visions as socio-epistemic practices, a new approach in TA. With this approach we show how future-making is often unequally distributed and governed. We show that future-making and the governance of socio-technical innovation can be democratized if the means to make and explore futures are themselves democratized. Future-making depends upon assemblages in becoming and if we want to change future-making and innovation processes we need to focus on how we can create conditions that make desirable changes of assemblages more likely.