This is a CTP of initiative: Hackspace 1 (North of England, UK)
This CTP refers to the decision to create a space in which intergenerational and family-oriented learning and access was priorised, through the development of a crèche and an absence of upper and lower age limits. When the space was originally founded [more from Facebook group], the co-founders had a “simple” vision held together by a narrow remit of making and the desire to create a hackspace of some sort:
“We started with a simple view. We wanted to have a place where people who like this kind of [making] stuff can get together. But it evolved. It started off as quite a simple idea, just somewhere you can go and play with Arduino [open source hardware], fix things that are broken, and that kind of stuff. Gradually it evolved to have a wider remit and fit in all the gaps elsewhere.”.
One of these gaps was around integrated education and learning, which didn’t differentiate by age group. This was in part motivated by the variety of different activity groups around Leigh – of which there were many, but segregated between “child” and “adult”; by the desire to create a space for cross-generational family groups to come and collectively engage in the space; and by the desire to engender different forms of learning. This was spurred by co-founders’ research on who their desired community would be, and the realisation that both parents, particularly of young children, would find it difficult to attend if there wasn’t support:
“We found that our target demographic are creative people who would be doing stuff at home, but because they have kids or whatever, never got quite to the point of being able to do it as a business.”
To engender these activities, the hackspace set no upper or lower age limits on membership (as some similar spaces have done), framing itself as a family-oriented space:
“We want to make this space as a gap for families getting together and being able to hack together – that’s where we see it. We don’t limit age in either direction. Our oldest member is 72 and our youngest member is 8, so we have a full range of ages, a full range of different types of craft”.
The hackspace set up a children-focused area for young people – “somewhere Mum, Dad, and two kids can come to; one parent will be in the kids area and the other is doing whatever they want to do, and then they swap over”.
This CTP was co-produced by the fragmented nature of activity groups present in Leigh at the time of the hackspace’s formation, as one of the co-founders explained:
“If you look around, there are various clubs – there’s a knitting club, a watercolour club. But they’re just single activity clubs. There’s nowhere that can bring people together like a hackspace can. And it was an age group thing. If you looked at the activities, they’re often compartmentalized. You have University of the Third Age of old people and activity groups for adults, but then kids are excluded from a lot of these things”.
In addition to exclusion from activities, there were limited educational and employment activities for young people in the city. As described in previous CTPs, the town was economically deprived and – having lost its railway station in 1969 – lacked an easy transit route to the nearest major city. These factors combined meant that opportunities for those in the area were limited:
“We’ve got no railway station, despite being close to Manchester, so we’re not a commuter town. It’s a bit of an island in terms of education and attainment. A lot of people achieve well from here but then they move out – they go and live in Manchester, or they go and live in London. Historically, we’ve had this selective population that has tended towards low educational achievement.”
As a result, the co-founders were aware of a particular need to deliver elements through the hackspace for young people, which were both educational and aspirational, allowing them to break through the social and intellectual challenges around technological practice:
“Hackspaces give you this awesome social making community, and that’s the critical bit for people who want to get involved in Arduino but can’t get over the first hump of difficulty. We get you through the first steps”.
This CTP was co-produced by the fragmented nature of activity groups present in Leigh at the time of the hackspace’s formation; and by the limited employment opportunities for young people in the town.
Co-founders reported no tensions between each other in creating this policy, which was instead intended to facilitate strong community dynamics across the space.
This CTP was understood to be critical inasmuch as it permitted the hackspace to create a supportive, social, and educational environment which was highly specific to the local needs of people in the local area. In its absence, the space would likely have only garnered the membership of the usual suspects who dominate hackspaces in other locations, viz. male attendees, already with a degree of technical skill, and the confidence to be able to navigate these spaces. Other groups – young and elderly people, and parents with primary carer responsibilities – would be less likely to attend.
The consequences of this CTP were hoped for, but not necessarily forseen – one of the facets of setting this up as a policy was that it opened up the possibility for more collective forms of engagement, but without definite certainty that they would happen. As one of the co-founders noted “The kids, because they’re all different ages, work p2p [peer-to-peer]. Generally we’re seeing a nice positive cycle of people getting involved and doing cooler and cooler things”.
By opening the space to young people, the co-founders also had to consider additional elements of care, health, and safety around young people; and had to adapt various elements of their policies to accommodate this. One of the co-founders described how he had been both pleased and surprised by the enthusiasms of a 15-year old boy who had taken on the task of fitting out the electronics lab from his own initiative: “He had the initiative to join, so his parents take care of the membership – they pay it and he pays them back. We had to adapt the payment forms for that, and check out that all of the clauses applied to him as an under-18 year old”.
This CTP was fundamental in meeting the transformational aims of the hackspace around inclusivity and challenging forms of learning around science and technology. Making the space inclusive for all ages both encouraged young people to attend, but also allowed them to learn alongside experienced practitioners, as one of the co-founders explained:
“There’s definitely an opportunity to improve digital literacy and make digital careers more accessible. When you learn code at school – if you don’t give [young people] any context to that, its just like learning Further Maths at school, it’s just completely in a vacuum without any real life applications. But if they’re a member of a hackspace, they can be learning code sat next to a professional developer. They understand there’s a job you can get that’s all about doing this full time. That gives it a whole lot more context”.
To engender this, the hackspace organizer strived not only to extend the networks of members out to younger people, but also – as part of their transformational aims to create parallel and complementary education streams - to ensue that the networks within the space were non-hierarchical:
“We firmly believe that hacking is in the blood. You want to get young people into the idea that not all education has to be teacher/student hierarchical top-down education. There’s a lot of education you can get peer-to-peer and that’s exactly what we’re about – giving permission to people to be woodworkers or electronics people who will club together and work on a project. It’s all about that type of peer-to-peer relationship.
These strategies were also important for the wider timeline of the organization, inasmuch as they were about creating a sustainable, ongoing form of education and engagement that were not limited to the one-off events characterized by other digital factions.
The co-founders were particular critical of these one-time delivery mechanisms, particularly from local governing bodies:
“It’s easy to have a strategy – any mug can write ‘Point 1: increase digital literacy. Point 2: increase employment. It’s a hit list, there’s nothing about delivery. They have no idea how to do it – for them it’s all about running events. But an event is just an event which happens on a day, children come along, they see a 3D printer – and what that teaches them is that there’s cool stuff in the world but you’ll only see it on one day, and you’ll never get to see it again. Whereas a hackspace is forever – if you’ve got membership, you can go in and use that 3D printer. You can make mistakes on it. You’ve got time to learn on it. You will make mistakes but the next one will be better”.
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