This is a CTP of initiative: FabLab 4 (East England)
NB. MATERIAL ASSOCIATED WITH THIS CTP IS FOR INTERNAL TRANSIT USE ONLY
This CTP refers to the decision made by the co-founders to present a conservative and low-risk identity when meeting with funding bodies and local higher education institutions. These strategic decisions included the choice of abstracting the organization away from any ‘hack’ names and identities. From its formation, the makerspace’s practice and identities seemed at odds with its local surroundings – one of the co-founders had originally run a maker society in the university, but to host it in rooms with “oak panels and portraits [where] they didn’t really feel they could solder under aged artwork”.
As described in CTP1, the co-founders did extensive research into the different qualities of makespaces, hackerspaces, FabLabs, tech shops, and suchlike. Through this work and their own prior experience, they were extremely aware of the prevalent negative cultural connotations around the terms ‘hack’ and ‘hacker’. As described in [CTP3], the search for a space to host the organization was difficult and complicated, involving navigating complex social and professional networks across Cambridge University and the wider business and local government ecosystem. To ease these difficulties, the co-founders decided to avoid “raising any red flags” in their interactions. This included being mindful of their presentation:
“We had meetings with Estates [The university department responsible for buildings, accommodation, and other property] with the two of us wearing suits and that was actually quite important. I was going in like, ‘I’m a chartered engineer, I’m wearing my suit’. I talked about the space in terms of safety first. I described it as a ‘community workshop’, I never used words like ‘hackspace’. I told people how it would allow people to develop new skills. We presented very conservatively, and I think that helped us’.
This approach deliberately drew on and emphasized legitimizing aspects of the co-founders such their engineering backgrounds; and primarily framed the organization in known and legitimate terms of STEM learning. It resulted in the organization obtaining support from various stakeholders and, ultimately in September 2012, space to host the organization for extremely low costs: “We emphasized that we were non-profit, aiding unemployed people, and so we got the premises without rent, or for peppercorn rent”.
Events defining this CTP included engaging with local stakeholders to obtain support and resources, and the specific time period in which hacker and ‘maker’ culture were less known in the UK. In order to find a space to be located in, the organisation’s co-founders had to engage with a number of local bodies, including the council and the local university. All of the co-founders were graduates of the university and were aware of how the institution perceived risk, and the wider city itself which was dominated by the university:
“The university is very risk-averse, that’s often how universities are. Cambridge hasn’t go to 800 years old by taking risks”.
Similarly, the local council as landlords was also perceived to be extremely cautious about who they would support, at least in part because they were a public body and had to be able to justify any funding decisions to be in the public interest. This risk aversion was seen as separate from the culture of the university town per se:
“Dealing with landlords must be universal. When we talked about spaces, we were talking about spaces in the city which is small, and space is at a premium. But likely we would have had similar conversations with any landlord about non-conventional office space. We were already a non-conventional company doing non-conventional things. Landlords are risk-averse too, they don’t want their premises burnt down.”
These events also occurred at a time where the hackspaces and associated technologies and processes (eg digital fabrication) were not in the public consciousness, and the notion of ‘hacking’ was associated more with dangerous, illegal, and underground activities than with grassroots innovation, education, and liberation:
“People had no idea what ‘hack’ is. If you say hackspace, hackerspace, hacking, it’s just utterly alien…We didn’t learn this anywhere, we just knew that hacking had positive and negative connotations. Newspaper headlines in that era were wholly negative, so we were pretty sure that anyone who wasn’t in maker culture would have a negative connotation with it”.
Events co-defining this CTP include engaging with stakeholders to obtain support and resources, and the specific time-period in which hacker and ‘maker’ culture were less known in the UK.
This CTP was not defined so much by tensions and conflict so much as the active desire to avoid such dynamics: “We didn’t want to set off any red flags or add a huge amount of friction”. As described above, the political meaning of ‘hack’ and ‘hacking’ strongly defined this approach, particularly in the context of the socially conservative university environment, and with public sector bodies. Instead, the co-founders emphasized on the elements of the organization which were – to stakeholders – seen as safe and knowable:
“We didn’t talk about lasercutting or 3D printing because most people back then didn’t know what 3D printing was and lasers sounded scary. Woodworking skills are very normal, it’s something which people can imagine happening in the space. We wanted to make it easy for [stakeholders] to imagine the makespace as a nice thing. Everything was about sending out a very low-risk message – ‘Look, this is a safe workshop, teaching nice friendly skills like woodwork’”.
As a piece of carefully deployed strategy, this CTP was understood to be critical for the future success of the organization. The co-founders were extremely aware of how unusual and dangerous they could be seen as, had they not very carefully managed their identity and presentation. Even the fact that they were not a standard company, in a city filled with high-tech start-ups, was unusual – “We were already something pretty alien as a non-profit company”. The consequences of following this plan were well-established, in terms of finding space and gaining backing (as described in CTP3).
In the absence of this strategy, the search for resources would likely have taken even longer. One reason why the co-founders decided to minimize risk was to speed up the already-slow process of searching for housing (“It all took forever – the committees only meet twice a year”). As one described:
“We didn’t want to have to have that conversation with them when they [the council] were confused. It already took ages to explain again and again what we were – ‘It’s going to be a new space with woodworking and electronics, and people will come and learn new skills so they can get new jobs’. Just to have to explain that was quite labored, and it was bad enough, being so conservative”.
In the absence of this strategy, it is also possible that the organization would not have been able to secure the various pieces of financial support – cheap rent, charitable rate relief – that came about through presenting a careful, low-risk identity that specifically focused on skills training and support.
This CTP was important in network formation – specifically, for developing relationships within the host university infrastructure; accessing funding sources; and, eventually, finding a space for the organization. To that end, this CTP allowed the organization to meet its transformative aims (and feeds directly into the wider timeline) inasmuch as it permitted it to exist. It also supported the aims of the organization to be as accessible as possible, and gave them a vocabulary to describe their work as they were taking it forward – “a community workshop, training people in workshop skills”.
However, this CTP also shows how the co-founders were forced to develop strategies which deliberately concealed some of the more radical aims of the organisations around tools use and the wider ideologies of ‘hacking’ in order to gain approval and resources. The co-founders acknowledged that these concealing strategies were specifically, rather than universally deployed:
“We talked about hacking to folks like the IFF because they worked with all that stuff, but we were very careful with people in estates who weren’t paid to take risks, and to the council…We didn’t need to test [the strategy], we just knew that people in the council would be conservative when we went to ask if we could get charitable rate relief”.
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