We’re very excited to be working with STEAMhouse on a new series of events in Birmingham, that will run throughout 2019.
STEAMhouseis a new centre for creative innovation and cultural production that brings artists, inventors, engineers, entrepreneurs and makers together, developed by Eastside Projects and Birmingham City University.
Through these events we hope to support the growing community of makers at STEAMhouse, and provide an opportunity for a diverse group of designers, craftspeople, artists and technologists to learn, be inspired, and get to know each other.
Our first event is on Wednesday 13 March, featuring Triambak Saxena from Kniterate and Joseph Halligan from Turner Prizewinning architectural collective Assemble to Birmingham to talk through their work, and experiences, as makers making tools for makers.
Future events will be on the second Wednesday of each month.
Maker Assembly is supporting the Festival of Maintenance. In this guest blog, festival organiser Laura James reports on a day of talks on communities, systems, organisations and how much care is needed to maintain the things that matter
The Summit brought together a community of people interested in critical discussion about maker culture: its meaning, politics, history and future. We talked about how a lot of maker culture is about making new things, and in many Western contexts, that’s making gadgets and gizmos that are fun for a while but generally then gather dust until eventually thrown away. The Summit also discussed the sustainability of makerspaces, and how they are maintained past initial capital and enthusiasm; local manufacturing, and the unrealised potential for repair, reuse and recycling. These issues lead us to think about business and capital models, and their relationship to sustaining systems and maintenance, and about the culture of looking after things vs making new ones. You can read my reflections on the Summit here.
There are amazing individuals and projects striving to maintain, to repair, to reuse, to sustain, to steward, to remanufacture and to recycle things of value – hardware, software, data, infrastructure, communities. They work in the public sector, the private sector, at charities and non-profits, as volunteers, in co-ops and collectives. Too often, they are invisible to those who benefit from their work. From the Maker Assembly Summit conversations, some of us felt we should celebrate maintainers, learn from the different forms and practices of maintenance, and the ways organisations are finding to support these, and figure out how to build and manufacture more sustainable products and systems — because some of the most important activities in the coming decades will need to bring together the physical and digital and social.
Following these conversations, a group of us set out to organise a Festival of Maintenance, and on Saturday 22nd September, it happened!
The first session was a set of provocations around the nature of maintenance and where it fits in our world.
Simon Elmer from Architects for Social Housing shared a great data-driven investigation into the relative costs of rebuilding and refurbishing social housing in London — and the side effects of these choices.
Simon Elmer
Natalie Kane, curator of digital design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and one-half of research project Haunted Machines, on how we both maintain our bodies, and deliver the performance expected in some roles (in space, or in warehouse/factory work), using adult nappies.
Natalie Kane
Alanna Irving talked about different facets of leadership, and the need to balance visionary with operational leadership within a team. A subject close to my heart! Alanna touched on the hidden and challenging labour which makes big visionary ideas a reality, and the need for empathy in both directions — both from visionary to operational leaders and vice versa. You can watch Alanna’s talk here — she joined us live from New Zealand for Q&A.
Alanna Irving
The next session was about what has happened to maintenance, and its status.
David Edgerton, author of Shock of the Old (highly recommended!) gave a great talk about the ways we think about technology and maintainers. Maintenance work can be routine — or highly skilled. Maintaining things can be harder than making them; but then an old jet engine, seemingly more worn and in need of care, may take less time to maintain than a new one, as the maintainers have learned how to do it. Historically, engineers mostly worked on repairing things, keeping them safe, whereas today they want to present themselves as creatives, disruptors.
David had a political point about the criticality of maintenance in a society, and what that means for the way the society is managed; despotic governments which ensure maintenance is carried out might be justifiable if a society is at great risk otherwise. He touched on our cultural focus on innovation and entrepreneurship — which is often imitation, not real innovation. We often overlook material things; but perhaps Brexit is changing that, as we recognise the importance of supply chains for food and energy. The Chequers proposal separating regulation of goods and services illustrates the disconnect of the current government from reality — people who know about real business, and maintenance, recognise that goods and services are inseparable now.
David Edgerton
Hazel Forsyth from the Museum of London took us back to 1500–1750, for a look at repair and reuse across buildings, documents, garments and precious metals.
Hazel Forsyth
Alex Mecklenburg drew beautiful parallels between maintenance in stories — and in the work of creative agencies in marketing and advertising. Once you’ve slain the dragon, who is going to look after that huge castle? Alex talked about her enjoyment of stories which describe everyday living as well as adventures, and the frustrations of work in agencies where short lived heroics get the attention, when steady ongoing customer relationship maintenance is essential.
Creativity and maintenance go hand in hand. And in a mature ecosystem as much energy goes to maintenance as goes to creativity.—Gary Snyder
Alex Mecklenburg
Mike Green, Chairman of the Central London Maintenance Association, explained the incredible scale of facilities management and the amount of maintenance that goes into it — maybe 5% of GDP. The CLMA was created when new technology started to change the sector in the 1960s; and now it’s reinventing itself to do the same as the internet transforms the work again. It seeks to support practitioners to understand and work with new tech, when the professional bodies can’t keep pace. Maintenance is much less “shit and grit” and more about monitoring, preventative activities, managing energy — maintainers with laptops tracking all kinds of information.
Mike Green
After lunch, I was delighted that the Guerrilla Groundsman, a real local hero, could join us incognito to share reflections on random acts of tidying and maintenance in public spaces in Cambridge.
Read about his work fixing benches, cleaning signs, painting bollards, and even checking the typefaces and moulding on street name signs to retain original designs when repairing them.
Guerrilla Groundsman,
We moved on to a session about communities involved in maintenance, and the maintenance of such communities themselves.
The afternoon sessions brought in more ideas and speakers related to the maker movement and makerspaces, which had played a big role in inspiring the Festival in the first place.
Adrian McEwen from DoES Liverpool talked about how to organise the work of fixing and improving things in a volunteer community. If you mention something that’s broken, it’s easy for folks to respond “well volunteered!” — discouraging people from highlighting problems. DoES have developed a “Somebody should” list, which tracks things that need to get done and when they are fixed. This also recognises the labour of maintenance, as you can see who did something, and also builds knowledge of how things were fixed.
Adrian McEwen
Adrian reminded me of a photo I took in a community space in Istanbul. It’s a P J O’Rourke quote, and both fits with this local community context, and broader spheres of tech entrepreneurship and change-making.
Oliver Holtaway helped to make Bath City FC a community-owned football club, and talked about what’s happened since that initial project, now the community have to maintain the club. There’s been a lot of innovation, especially around the model and creating democratic procedures, which create maintenance obligations around governance. Oliver also talked about the challenge of understanding the motivations of different kinds of volunteers — creative folks doing specific tasks are easier to understand and motivate, maybe, than those doing more maintenance-type work.
Oliver Holtaway
Lauren Hutchinson talked about the dangers of burnout and bullying, and the often-thankless emotional labour in volunteer communities. Maintaining shared goods and communities is exhausting, and when stuff goes wrong problems often snowball, and the pressure can fall disproportionately on a small group or individual. If the community isn’t just where you volunteer, but is your friends, your social support network, your workplace, stepping away is a big sacrifice. It was an important talk about mental health and looking after yourself as well as maintaining the collective goods and community.
Lauren Hutchinson
The next session looked at maintenance in digital technology — looking after shared public knowledge, and enabling the infrastructure of the internet to be maintained by tending the documents that explain it for software developers.
Daria Cybulska from Wikimedia UK talked about how Wikipedia in English is growing, but the community of editors and contributors is not. Making it possible for more people to contribute is a challenge in both culture and process.
Daria Cybulska
Chris Mills talked about the work of the MDN writers’ team at Mozilla, maintaining open standards, and the open web. Openness makes it easier to do things, and to maintain things. There’s a lot to maintain at Mozilla and in the open source documentation space though!
Chris Mills
Our next highlight was a remote talk by Lee Vinsel, creator of The Maintainers in America. The papers from this conference and the articles linked to it helped us explore questions of maintenance through 2018 and we’ve been highlighting this and similar work through the #maintenanceinspiration hashtag on twitter.
Lee talked about how unhelpful ways of thinking and talking about innovation lead us to neglect maintenance and maintainers. Innovation isn’t always a good thing — and tech is not the same as innovation, either. We overlook the criticality of infrastructure, and the nature of the labour, status, identity and inequalities relating to maintainers.
Lee’s tagline is — How maintainers, bureaucrats, standards engineers and introverts created technologies that kind of work most of the time. 🙂
Lee VinselLee’s slide about engineering
Our final session looked at new paradigms around maintenance, and novel ways people are supporting and enabling maintenance.
Chris Hellawell, founder of Edinburgh Tool Library, talked about affordable access to tools, but also the ways that tools can bring people together, through learning about tools and how to use them, working with others to fix things together. (An echo of the common makerspace idea that folks “come for the tools, stay for the community.”)
Chris Hellawell
Jake Harries from Access Space in Sheffield talked about their work to support local people with technology, and how this has changed as technologies evolve. Fixing up old computers with Linux was well received, until smartphones took over. Now they are looking at digital fabrication.
Jake Harries
Janet Gunter, co-founder of The Restart Project which promotes community repair of electronics, discussed what needs to change for us to dismantle the 50m ton e-waste mountain. Restart have a campaign running and are part of International Repair Day which is on the 20th October this year. It’s important to both work on everyday repairs, and to engage in this wider policy and political debate, because forces are assembling to prevent repair, by demanding only authorised folks can do repair, by deeming spare parts ‘counterfeits’ and so on. Not everyone wants repair and reuse to be possible.
Janet Gunter
A huge thank you to all our speakers!
The event was run by volunteers and on a non-profit basis. Through a mix of good planning and good luck, we almost perfectly broke even financially. We had 40 paying attendees plus 15 speakers plus 5 organisers on the day (plus 2 remote speakers).
Here are some of the things people said about the Festival:
The Festival of Maintenance made me happy to realise there were so many different types of maintainers out there.
A wonderful little festival, full of fascinating speakers and ideas
A mind opening festival, where people discuss the aspects of work and life that are too often overlooked. I feel inspired to maintain things!
The ubiquity of the innovation vs maintenance question meant an incredibly diverse range of speakers and attendees, it was really well done.
Maintaining the maintainers provides a really special moment of reflection on modern era’s fascination with the new at the expense of the existing. Relevant for anyone who is tired of hearing about innovation and wants to support the existing to make it better.
The conference was a stimulating experience, demonstrating how the concept of maintenance faces major issues across a whole range of sectors.
Loved meeting people that were so far removed from my day to day commercial activity will be back next year.
Great group of people with varied interests, and a really provocative, expansive definition of “maintenance”
The 2018 Festival of Maintenance was an eye-opening event, bringing together people with incredibly diverse interpretations and experiences of what maintenance is all about who nonetheless touched on a bedrock of shared passions and commitments.
It was very helpful, and very timely, to get chance to hear experiences, expertise and ideas that framed maintenance as a counterbalance to the rhetoric of innovation, creativity and transformation.
Like discovering an entire other hemisphere of the world.
Many thanks to Maker Assembly and Maintain Our Heritage for their support. Thanks to all the volunteer team — especially Naomi Turner for wrangling speakers, schedule and venue, Jackie Pease for fighting camera gear so we weren’t so London-centric and Liverpool could take part too, Calen Cole and Marc Barto for keeping the event schedule on track and looking after attendees; plus Hwa Young Jung for our lovely logo design, Tati for the website, Michael Ball for domain support, Michael Dales for photography, and all the others who have helped with advice and guidance and ideas along the way (especially Andrew Back).
We’ve got a lot of speakers on our wishlist who couldn’t join this year, or who were suggested after our programme was finalised, so we could definitely do another day in 2019 and cover a similarly diverse range of topics.
In 2018, Maker Assembly is supporting a series of network activities by Maker Groups across the country. The first of these is New, New England House in Brighton.
New England House is a council-owned, multi-storey factory in the middle of Brighton. New, New England House is a project led by local regeneration agency, Spacemakers, to “reorganise the building, from the bottom up, from the inside out”. Working with building tenants, the creative communities of the city, and with partners including Assemble, Europa and Peter Nencini, their ambitions are to create a space that will:
be an open, affordable and public factory for the benefit of the whole city
create a new economics for the building, and increase the surplus the building generates for the council
be a cheap, rough and ready place to make things, by hand or on screen
be a place where Brighton can produce, instead of just consume
Maker Assembly is supporting a series of community events (“Talks on Production”) throughout the summer to invite people into the building, galvanise interest in the project, and learn from others working to similar ends.
So far, two events have been held; the first with Kathrin Böhm of community drinks enterprise Company Drinks, that links east London’s history of “going picking” with a full drinks production cycle. She talked about collective products; International Village Shops; undercover feminism in German villages; being an arts project and a drinks company at the same time; and how to build an economy that makes more people happy.
The second event was with Amica Dall from architects and designers Assemble, who talked about working with communities who’ve been defending their houses from the threat of demolition for decades, and refurbishing those houses with parts made from the rubble in the streets around them; setting up open-access factories that people can actually access; creating Assemble’s own factory, and sharing tools with carpenters, ceramicists and metalworkers, for mutual benefit; and the difference between making it look like something’s happening in a community vs. creating the infrastructure for a community to do it for themselves.
Our very own Liz Corbin spoke at this event held by the RSA in collaboration with the Comino Foundation to discuss: “why access to making is important for everyone; how we risk losing the chance for young people to learn through making; and what the RSA, Comino and others are doing to challenge that.”.
The full video is below. Liz is on at about 10 minutes, and gives a good overview of what we’re trying to do through Maker Assembly.
Also see this companion piece on the RSA site by Comino trustees David Perry and José Chambers: “Does Making Really Matter?”:
How can we make science and engineering come alive for more young people and for more communities? Engineers need good theoretical understanding, but do they also need hands-on experience? David Perry and José Chambers of the Comino Foundation, which has been asking these kinds of questions over many years, explore the growth of makerspaces and the kinds of experiences that should be on offer, both in schools and communities, if we are to be sure of having enough engineers in the future.
This is a guest post by David Perry of the Comino Foundation. Thanks to David for sharing his thoughts.
Maker Assembly’s progenitor was the first gathering of makers from around England in April 2014, also at MadLab, sponsored by the Comino Foundation and run by Nat Hunter, then of the RSA.
This one started with an introduction from Liz Corbin of UCL who spoke of why we make, its situation in communities and how she was hoping for a ‘critical conversation’ – which was highly likely. Notably, the participants were almost precisely balanced in gender.
This was a day of contextualisation and community expansion with the first session’s theme being Learning from International Making Cultures including speakers from South Africa, France and Shenzhen, China. The first, Craig Dunlop talked about the extreme inequalities in South African society continuing so many years after the end of apartheid. He had recently benefited from a residency in the Machines Room in Shoreditch giving him clarity through distance. Addressing local needs in Cape Town meant drawing in local unemployed and using their skills to establish their makerspace commenting that as most then went on to employment they would not continue to be makers.
Justyna Swat then described the fun, hard work, confusion and emerging success of POC21 a five week 50 people venture in an almost empty French chateau and its grounds, exploring community building through social negotiation and taking responsibility and being disruptive but creative, eg changing attitudes to climate change through music. Whilst referring to ‘the beauty of dirt and imperfection’ she also admitted to the way that the need to take hold of emerging situations led them to accept the necessity of managing the event.
David Li from Shenzhen examined that unique city’s culture of making: the problems and opportunities of open source; the long tail of niche products based on a commitment to ‘deliver to needs’. He called electronics ‘the folk art of Shenzhen and described the eco-system of component supply and transactions that is its life-blood being based on a community of trust and facilitation with no boss to see things through. Surprisingly he called this a ‘trouble free production platform’ though small businesses often amount to no more than a two minute video and a web page! He contrasted this scenario to the likes of Foxconn making huge numbers of products for the likes of Apple Corp.
The second session, entitled Making and Humanitarian Relief was led by Laura James of Field Ready who are developing a different approach to aid utilising hyper-local manufacturing as far as possible: in the location where the aid products are needed. She identified these as ‘developments forced by circumstances’ describing those involved as ‘humanitarian makers’. After seeing a number of sample products, small groups then discussed how the organisation might progress, contributing ideas which Laura said were valuable and would be carried forward.
Lunchtime, and while shovelling in quantities of MadLab’s enviable hot food, people added events to The Incomplete and Crowdsourced History of UK Maker Culture in timeline format, which consecutive Maker Assemblies are compiling.
The afternoon’s Making and Manufacturing session chaired by James Tooze from the RCA’s Redistributed Manufacturing project started with Alan Meron discussing informal making/repairing events, noting that Sweden has removed vat from repairs and referring to Fixperts 1:1 design projects with a 1000 people now having been involved. But how to scale this up?
Ruth Claxton from MakeWorks, Birmingham, a hybrid space with provision for arts, crafts and engineering in ‘the City of a Thousand Trades’, described their venture to link manufacturers, suppliers and fabricators to help the scaling up of makerspace innovations, also referring to the online directory of Scottish making and manufacturing resources. Both aim to facilitate access to specialist manufacturing provision beyond the capability of makerspaces improving on the capacity of the Web plus ad hoc chats with people.
The irony of reduced choice resulting from higher volumes of production was commented on.
Adrian McEwan considered how to design to accommodate scaling up to manufacturing and suggested that more sophisticated approaches to resourcing manufacturing capability than touring local industrial estates was needed! He introduced us to the RCA project’s indie manufacturing site.
Paul Sohi from Autodesk showed their Fusion 360 product which is free to startups while staying below a given turnover limit and showed us Ikea’s Space 10 innovation and a Kickstarter approach for a Morphy Richards desktop vacuum former.
The afternoon’s final session was The Role of Making in a Wider Civic Infrastructure (no small horizons here!), a keynote by Laura Billings of the Lambeth OpenWorks project showed how in suburban West Norwood a high level of local participation was achieved through six months preparation, a year of action and six months finishing-off. Hundreds of items a week were repaired or made with a lot of emphasis on bartering. But this revealed how unfamiliar people are with participatory activities.
A great day – and thanks to the organisers for all their work in setting it up.
On Wednesday 20 April, we gathered in the bar of the Roco in Sheffield to talk about what a Maker Assembly in Sheffield could look like. Here are my notes from the event. If you’d like to make suggestions for the event, comments are open on this post, so please add your thoughts below.
I said I’d follow up with some theme ideas that seemed to come out of the sessions. It’s impossible to capture or synthesise everyone’s ideas, but hopefully this will include something of interest to most of you.
Date
Current planned date, still TBC, is Wednesday 31st August. Please pencil it in.
Speakers
Do you have something to share about the topic below. If so, let us know
Themes
1. Scaling up, sustainability, economic impact
Questions about a ‘maker city’. Does it maker sense for Sheffield to brand itself based on its past?
Moving from being a small-scale maker to a larger scale manufacturer, running a maker business.
Local, national, international impact. Is bigger better?
2. Amateurism
(Maybe the opposite agenda to the above)
Should we resist the path of the ‘hardware startup’, the urge to turn everything into economic activity, jobs, etc.
The importance of free experimentation vs prescribed work
Innovation is not equivalent to ‘new products’ but ‘new thinking’
How can we learn from the failings of previous tech movements (especially the web, and Silicon Valley utopianism)
3. Diversity
In people, their experience, what they make.
In gender, ethnicity, sexuality, physical or social needs
Self-identifying as a maker, or not
4. Alternative his/herstories
C-base mythology (and other self-authored maker myths?)
The O’Reilly brand of Maker (TM)
5. Performance
Music (who was the accordian player mentioned?)
A making performance
6. Some other topics which we mentioned, but only briefly
Hi-tech/lowtech/trailing edge tech
Open Source
Adaptive design/prosthetics/hacking the body
Education, and engagement (new makers). I feel this is more the territory of STEM groups and/or Maker Faire.
Other agendas
Some things came up which we might be able to address through activities, stalls or other features at the event:
1. Connecting up
Attending and talking to others is a good start, but maybe we could have a ‘would like to meet’ wall at the event, or a ‘I can give/I can get’ noticeboard, or some other way of surfacing connections. Lightning talks (3 mins to say what you do and don’t do) – but we would need to be careful this doesn’t become a ‘me and my cool project showcase).
If you’re interested in helping facilitate this, please get in touch.
2. Diversity of attendees
A lot of people don’t use twitter, or don’t identify as makers, or just don’t feel like this event could be for them. We need help communicating about the event to more diverse communities, and figuring out how to reach them. We may need help designing the event format so people with different needs can enjoy it. If you can help with this, please get in touch.
Thanks to everyone who came along and shared their ideas.
