Critical Making: Studying RRI Principles in the Maker Community

The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has shown the importance of the global maker community for a rapid response to the lack of medical hardware supplies and reveals the great social innovation potential of the maker movement.

In Critical Making we added scientific insights into the potentials of the maker movement for critical, socially responsible making, and showed how these communities can offer new opportunities for young makers of all genders to contribute to an open society via open innovation. We studied grassroots innovation processes taking place in maker spaces, hacker spaces, fablabs, etc. and online spaces and related them to RRI practices. More specifically, we searched for and analyse existing innovation and co-design processes taking place in these open spaces to find out in how far they reflect or contradict RRI principles.

Following a mixed method approach enabled us to collect data, analyse it, actively improve practices and develop theories and synthesise findings. Next to analysing existing practices, we co-designed, evaluatde and disseminated concrete interventions that aim to foster RRI principles in the maker movement. In three case actions the project specifically looked at aspects of gender, openness and the recruitment of young talents. As a result we co-defined measure on how to better implement RRI principles in the open innovation movement taking place across maker communities. Our findings provided hands-on input for practitioners in the field and enriched the scientific knowledge base in the RRI community on innovation processes outside of academia, aiming to harness the full innovation potential of the global grassroots maker movement.

Team:

• Dr. Barbara Kieslinger (project leader)
• Dr. Claudia Magdalena Fabian
• Magª. Teresa Schäfer / Schaefer, (formerly known as Holocher-Ertl)
• Mag. Dr. Klaus Schuch
• Lisa Mo Seebacher, MSc BA
• Magª. Dr. Elisabeth Unterfrauner

Section: Technology and Knowledge

Partners:

• Global Innovation Gathering
• Technische Universität Berlin
• VTT
• Wikifactory

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