Welcome to this term’s first K3 seminar. It will be held by David Cuartielles, Lecturer in Interaction Design.

The title of the seminar is Maker culture in Spain fighting covid-19 from home – How the commodification of the experience could save the day

This will be an online seminar, carried out through Zoom, and it will take place on Wednesday, January 20 at 10.15-12.00. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/66899052794?pwd=NmdjR1JDSXhxQkJ3b1M4U3pDUTQ5UT09

Below you will find an abstract.uct Design, K3

Abstract for the seminar with David Cuartielles:

For the Spanish DIY communities year 2020 was the one when their actions gained international recognition. Ten of thousands of DIY aficionados without a defined political or institutional affiliation found ways to collaborate in fighting against the Covid-19 pandemic using their 3D printers and other open source tools. Thanks to the immediacy of existing instant messaging platforms, so-called makers of all ages opened hundreds of discussion channels where to share designs, and join forces in the manufacturing and distribution of over a million face shields. This group became the Coronavirus Makers movement and expanded to other countries to exchange creations and expertise.

But why did such a movement emerge in Spain and nowhere else? Spain has a strong DIY tradition that can be studied by following different types of DIY spaces: hacklabs, hackerspaces, makerspaces, fab labs, and after school academies (sorted in chronological order). The Spanish technosocial fabric grew during a period of almost 30 years. As time went by one could witness a certain commodification of the experience of the original DIY cultures – the hacker culture. Commodificaiton should be understood as the commercialisation of the experience of being part of something, a DIY culture in this case. We observed how the more commodified a culture became, the more spaces emerged dedicated to that specific DIY subgroup.

In parallel, we observed a process that we have defined as commoditisation. It consists in the progessive elimination of the essential values of a movement reducing the friction of joining it. For example, hacklabs have a very strong leftist component that hackerspaces – arriving later in time – removed from their foundational charters.

It is this parallel process of commodification and commoditisation what seems to have helped the DIY culture expand in Spain and move from the shared spaces to the homes of the makers. Having thousands of 3D printers and personal electronic laboratories available at people’s homes allowed for the distributed response of the Coronavirus Maker movement to the pandemic. The question remains on whether this movement will survive or will simply vanish after some time.

This seminar will open with a presentation of two different papers co-authored by David Cuartielles with Cesar Garcia to later introduce the challenges faced by the Coronavirus Makers movement. It will hopefully serve as an opening to discuss the construction of civic ad-hoc responses to crisis situations, the importance of existing platforms and tools, the [non] governance of emergent systems, and the role that design researchers can take in fully immersive fieldwork.

Please note that the previously announced seminar with Hugo Boothby has been moved to March 12