Critical Making: Studying RRI Principles in the Maker Community

Project Information

Critical Making

Grant agreement ID: 101006285

DOI

10.3030/101006285

Project closed

EC signature date 29 October 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 30 June 2023

Funded under

• SCIENCE WITH AND FOR SOCIETY

Total cost

€ 1 194 500,00

EU contribution

€ 1 194 500,00

Coordinated by

ZENTRUM FUR SOZIALE INNOVATION GMBH
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Critical Making (Critical Making: Studying RRI Principles in the Maker Community)

Reporting period: 2022-04-01 to 2023-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Critical Making was a 2,5 years Research and Innovation Action with the aim to get scientific insights into the potentials of the maker movement for critical, socially responsible making, and to show how these communities can offer new opportunities for young makers of all genders to contribute to an open society via open innovation. We, the Critical Making consortium, studied grassroots innovation processes taking place in makerspaces, hackerspaces, fablabs, etc. and online spaces in a participatory way and related them to RRI practices and theories. The overarching objective of the Critical Making project has been to critically study the innovation processes in the maker movement with regard to RRI aspects, especially in relation to gender, openness, recruitment of young people and more generally, their social responsibility.

More specifically, Critical Making aimed to achieve the following objectives:
1. Improve the scientific knowledge on RRI in grassroots innovations
2. Increase gender awareness in maker communities
3. Involve young people in makerspaces, increase their interest in science and innovation
4. Foster responsibility in the open hardware movement
5. Manifest grassroots innovation in the RRI discourse
6. Elaborate guidelines and recommendations for transformative innovation policies

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the Critical Making project we present an ambitious research programme to explore how RRI in maker communities has the potential to enable society to help shape socially relevant, problem and not business-driven innovation and research processes and ultimately leading to more inclusive and sustainable outcomes thereof.

We achieved our main expected results as foreseen; these were:
- Extension of scientific knowledge on RRI
- Uptake of responsible innovation principles in maker communities
- Better education of young social innovators
- Higher gender-balance in the maker communities
- Increased democratisation of science
- Foster transformative innovation policies

We gain new scientific insights into RRI practices in grassroots innovations by: 1) RRI and GIM were merged into the CMRF, which was used as an analytical tool to assess maker projects and processes; it is now available as scientific framework for further analysis of grassroots innovations; 2) It was turned into a practical reflexive game for makers to reflect on their making practices, including RRI aspects; the usage of the tool by global makers is expected to impact their practice; 3) we suggested a new RRI key, namely community empowerment, to the international community of RRI and STS scholars and received positive feedback from the academic audience.

The Critical Making project worked on an updated version of the Critical Making principles together with the maker communities. These principles have been taken up in the various outputs of the project, especially those dedicated to the maker communities; it includes the various guidelines (the Critical Making Wundertüte) as well as the CMFR that was turned into an online game for makers. The reflective questions in the game are aligned with the principles and the game logic encourages players to collect stickers that relate to these principles. The practical outputs of the project have already received interest from maker communities and other projects.

Critical Making has the potential to future-proof education. We identified challenges and opportunities for Critical Making in education and developed solutions to overcome the difficulties to integrate Critical Making into school curricula, for example by expanding existing curriculum topics by maker tools and meta-level discussions to reach the goal of fostering digital skills and critical thinking simultaneously. Our educational tools and guidelines, incl. manifesto and the educational box, are now being distributed to relevant stakeholders to continue creating impact for young people.

The Critical Making guidelines for makerspaces elaborate how to become open and welcoming spaces that offer equal opportunities to all people, irrespective of their age, gender, origin, ability or socio-economic background. The assessment towards the end of the project by internationally distributed makerspaces showed the considerable impact that the mere reflection of such recommendations can have on makerspaces around the globe to become more inclusive places. One of the core strengths of the Critical making manual is that it does tackle gender alongside many other dimensions of social exclusion, and thereby takes an intersectional stance towards inequalities and underrepresentation and is more regionally diverse than what we find in literature.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Critical Making has succeeded to run impactful activities and produce results which have been relevant and well received in the maker community due to the systematic co-design and co-creation approach. We have managed to promote the awareness of critical making and diversity of voices heard within the making community with inspirational stories and active participation in different forums of discussion. We have provided concrete guidelines for inclusive making, critical making education, openness in making and responsibility evaluation. We have contributed to upskilling among the people engaged in our Critical Making interventions and mentoring programme and that way had an empowering impact, both in terms of livelihood and agency within the community.

Our academic results of the project have received good response. For example, a paper presenting the Critical Making Responsibility Framework in the FAB17 conference in 2022 won the best paper award. The results of the project provide an excellent basis to continue contributing with these results to the academic RRI discussions.

Critical Making contributed to the democratisation of science: 1) the application of truly participatory methods allowed people to be an active part in the research process that had never done any research before; they are however experts in their fields and contributed in new and unexpected ways in the co-creation of research artefacts that are now turned into common goods, such as the particle guidelines. In addition, some of our co-researchers actively contributed to our academic outputs. 2) we see great potential for the democratisation of science in Open Science Hardware. It has already proven that it can help to overcome current shortages in scientific equipment and support the engagement in the scientific process more widely, e.g. outside of well-funded research institutions. The 3D printed wireless digital stethoscope from the Critical Making mentoring programme is one such example that contributes to the democratisation of science.

Our findings contribute to a better understanding of transformative innovations in local contexts. We identified dimensions particularly important for maker projects of the Global South in terms of community empowerment, such as learning the creative use of resources under scarcity (responding to the needs of community), increasing situational awareness, learning to manage community relations and relations to broader society, access to new skills and knowledge for the disadvantaged citizen groups, and the support of sharing and knowledge exchange. There is a potential of uptake of these findings in innovation policies, but it is a long-term process.

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