While Waiting for the Third Industrial Revolution: Attempts at Commoning Production

Abstract

It is Thursday evening at STPLN, a makerspace located in an industrial building in Malmo. Davey is helping some newcomers with the milling machine. Chris and Frank are working on an old vending machine, trying to make it suitable for selling hardware boards. Someone else is mending a flat bike tire. In the textile corner, Luisa is teaching one of the hackers how to crochet. Quinn is in the kitchen, preparing food for tomorrow’s catering. Some of the regulars are sitting on the sofa testing a robot they recently built. Jonathan is playing a cello he built from scrap material. In another room, a new group is experimenting with screen-printing. The makerspace STPLN is a public workshop that provides access to machines and tools for production. Participants explore fabrication possibilities by sharing space, means, and sometimes knowledge and skills. The space is a platform for several activities, among them building robots, experimenting with new educational formats for sustainability, band rehearsals, and investigating how a cafe for families with small children could work. The facility is owned by the City of Malmo and is managed by an NGO. The activities are driven by citizens, small companies, groups of friends, and other NGOs. STPLN, together with similar venues around the globe, is part of a growing network of what could be described as spaces for opening production. Through shared facilities, means of production, and knowledge, these spaces are providing citizens with the possibility to engage in production processes and to re-appropriate knowledge and practices having to do with making things. These open workshops may have different names and come in different formats (such as fab labs, hackerspaces, and makerspaces). What they have in common is the hope that they would be the venues from which the democratization of manufacturing (Mota 2011) could boost grassroots innovation (Gershenfeld 2005; Troxler 2010) that would lead to a “third industrial revolution” (Anderson 2012; Rifkin 2011; Troxler 2013). If textile companies—with steam engines— were the scene of the first industrial revolution, and automotive industries—with mass production and assembly lines—became the symbol for the second one, these spaces, with shared equipment and collaborative production processes driven by individuals outside traditional companies, may become the venue for the third one. Specifically,