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 want to add scientific insights into the potentials of the maker movement for critical, socially responsible making, and show how these communities can offer new opportunities for young makers of all genders to contribute to an open society via open innovation.

Thus, we will study grassroots innovation processes taking place in maker spaces, hacker spaces, fablabs, etc. and online spaces and relate them to RRI practices.

More specifically, we will search 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 will enable us to collect data, analyse it, actively improve practices and develop theories and synthesise findings.

Next to analysing existing practices, we will co-design, evaluate and disseminate concrete interventions that aim to foster RRI principles in the maker movement.

In three case actions the project will specifically look at aspects of gender, openness and the recruitment of young talents.

As a result we will co-define measure how to better implement RRI principles in the open innovation movement taking place across maker communities.

Our findings will provide hands-on input for practitioners in the field and will enrich 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.