Each week, the System Change Hive is exploring and experimenting with new solutions to societal and environmental problems, through creative arts practice. Artworks created will be exhibited in different locations around the UK and showcased online. The group is comprised of artists, communication experts, activists and STEPS researchers. In week 5, the session began by splitting…
‘What if?’ Meeting, making, dreaming, doing
Call for papers: Platform economy and new collaborative forms of production
The journal Liinc em Revista is inviting submission of articles, subject to double-blind evaluation, for publication in Vol. 14, n. 1 (May 2018). Unpublished articles in Portuguese, Spanish and English are accepted. This issue will present a dossier on “Platform economy and new collaborative forms of production”, organized by Guest Editors Valeria Arza (Cenit/Steps América…
Can open and collaborative approaches change the world?
by Patrick van Zwanenberg, Mariano Fressoli, Valeria Arza and Adrian Smith Around the world, people are changing how things are made and how knowledge is produced, by involving more people, opening up data, and sharing skills and insights with these activities across communities, countries or continents. Experimentation with radically open and collaborative ways of producing…
How can open and collaborative knowledge help to build communities?
by Adrian Smith, STEPS Centre and Patrick van Zwanenberg, STEPS America Latina Experimentation with open and collaborative ways of creating knowledge is flourishing. How might the increasing interest in initiatives such as open science, open hardware and open data lead to a transformation in knowledge production? And could this enable more inclusive and sustainable approaches…
Power to the people: making & politics at the Science Museum
by Cian O’Donovan and Adrian Smith The maker movement in the UK, and globally, has grown rapidly over recent years. Hundreds of maker spaces, equipped with 3D printers, laser cutters, design software, as well as old-fashioned hand tools, have popped up in cities, towns and on university campuses, potentially promising new forms of re-distributed and…
Six grassroots innovation movements, and why they matter
Innovation is increasingly said to be vital for responding to global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists and researchers have been innovating grassroots solutions for social justice and environmental sustainability for decades. A new STEPS book, Grassroots Innovation Movements (Routledge, 2016) examines six such movements…
Digital fabrication. Whose industrial revolution?
As the Society for Social Studies of Science & EASST build up to their annual meeting in Barcelona next month, the 4S blog is featuring preview pieces by participants. One is by Johan Söderberg, Maxigas, and Adrian Smith, with a taste of their paper about democratizing the tools of scientific-technical expertise. The last wave of…
Makerspaces: Creating inclusive spaces for sustainable innovations
Making stuff is all the rage these days. But how does sustainable development fit into this enthusiasm? The White House is celebrating a Week of Making from June 16-23 2016 after hosting its first Maker Faire in 2014 to spark a “grassroots renaissance in American making and manufacturing”. The hope is that by exposing people…
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 no short answer. It also implies a further question: if you could shape the world you wanted, what would it look like? Shared workshops –…
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. Update (13 June 2017): Adrian Smith and Ann Light have written an article arising from their learning from this event (see below). The event was…