Making new worlds together

How could we end up in this world nobody ever wanted? This question, posed by Justyna Swat from POC21 during her talk at Monday’s event on makerspaces and sustainability, has…

Making and Sustainability

At an event at the Machines Room in London on 26 October, we discussed the roles that maker communities and the places where they interact can play in sustainable development….

Graph showing the growth of the OpenDOAR database in Argentina

Open Access and Open Science in Argentina

In this OCSDNet blogpost for Open Access Week 2015, Mariano Fressoli and Valeria Arza write about Open Access digital repositories and the culture of Open Science in Argentina.  It’s not…

Bringing vehicle sharing to China

by Dr Dennis Zuev (Research Associate, Lancaster University) & Dr David Tyfield (Reader, Lancaster University) Car-sharing is the fastest growing urban mobility innovation worldwide but is yet to take off in Chinese cities. According to a recent…

Moving beyond products to material culture

Prototyping or debating sustainable developments in makerspaces? In the previous blog I introduced some of the diverse ways that makerspaces are helping cultivate sustainable developments. Admittedly, these initiatives do not represent…

Why should we seek sustainable developments in makerspaces?

Community-based workshops like hackerspaces, fablabs and makerspaces, equipped with design, prototyping and fabrication tools have spread rapidly in recent years. Interest in the social, economic and environmental possibilities of these spaces has…

Giving flesh to the science and innovation we need to see

by Ben Ramalingam, Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies Science, technology and innovation have been integral in successful development and poverty-reduction efforts, whether in Europe, Latin America, Asia or Africa….

WSSF 2015: What role can social science play in working towards a just world?

Nearly a thousand delegates from across 84 countries are gathering right now in Durban, South Africa, for the third World Social Science Forum. The first similar forum ‘One Planet –…

STEPS at the IST2015 Sustainability Transformations conference

This week the International Sustainability Transitions Conference takes place at Sussex University, hosted by the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU). The event kicks off on the afternoon of 25 August…