This is a CTP of initiative: FabLab 3 (North‐East England)
This CTP describes the development of an ongoing relationship between the organisation and a local university. This relationship permitted access to space and machines; instantiating legitimacy; and offering a place to run early stage events and meet-ups (described in further CTPs).
The city which this organisation is located in is also home to several universities. One of the organisers of this space, G, works at one of the universities in the Engineering school. He met the original founder of the organistion in late 2008 at a Barcamp – an open, participatory, user-generated conference, generally run around the subjects of technology and the web – in Liverpool. The two fell into conversation about how technology might be a spur for regeneration of the city, which led G to consider the forms that this might take in his workplace:
“Meeting A gave me that kick up the arse that I needed. I’d been developing a new project at work, looking at how the university could create closer links with creative and digital companies. I thought, ok, a key part of this has to come from grassroots organising, it can’t just be top down. But for a long time it was just me doing this on my own.”
Through G, the organisers developed a working relationship with the university, particularly in the early stages of the group’s formation. As described in other CTPs, one of the early activities which the group engaged in to build community prior to sourcing their main physical premises was running events and meet-ups. The university was able to host several of these events for a period of time, making use of their machines and workshop spaces; but ran into difficulties when the needs of the group didn’t line up with the infrastructural capacity of the institution. Instead, the university was able to sponsor some of the equipment for the organisation when they found premises. The university chose to develop its own technology knowledge exchange programme between academic, industrial, and organisational partners in the city, which, whilst remaining close to the organisation, represented a different form of public engagement around technology. The university also continued to host ‘Maker Nights’ from 2011 onwards.
These activities acted as a CTP for the organisation as they enabled the growth of the community around the group at a time when it had few fixed and stable assets; provided greater visibility for potential new members; and facilitated links to departments and student groups.
This CTP was shaped by G’s role in the university. Following a career which had included working in regeneration and technology in the North of England, he had taken up a position with the university in the mid-2000s to work around university engagement and knowledge exchange in the field of technology and society. His personal interests in utilising technology to social innovation and regeneration ends allied with those of the other organisers; whilst the aims of some of university schemes also allied, broadly, with those of the organation itself.
The university had, like most in the UK, been exploring ways to develop forms of knowledge exchange and participation with the local city, particularly through technology-related enterprises. To address these issues, the university set up an Open Labs initiative, which supported local businesses to develop skills, expand, make use of new technologies, and move into new markets. This scheme acted as a service brokerage to “help [businesses] access the knowledge, skills, innovation, expertise, and facilities available at [the university]”, with the aim of levelling the playing field for small businesses, whilst also making the city “a more diverse, interesting and ambitious place to work”.
The technologies which the Open Labs initiative worked with were similar to those used by the organisation, including laser cutting and digital fabrication; and also offered similar material facilities to those of the organisation after it acquired its first physical premises, including deskspace and meeting rooms in the local science park. However, unlike the organisation, the Open Labs initiative was exclusively focused on business development, providing support including workshops around pitching and using agile methods; and networking across local industrial and third sector (ie.voluntary/charitable). These strategies fell very much in line with wider knowledge sharing schemes in the UK academic sector, underlining the role that universities were framed as playing in ensuring “that the UK remains competitive in the global market by supporting greater business innovation and export-led, knowledge-intensive growth”. This contrasted with the looser strategies developed by the organisation which also were explicitly tied to regeneration of the city but through a more holistic technology-as-enabler across a range of schemes, rather than solely via business based engagement. Rather than supporting the organisation on an ongoing basis, the university subsequently decided to support it through supplying machinery once it had found a permanent space.
This CTP was shaped by G’s role in the university; and the decision of the university to explore ways of engaging with, and supporting, the local technology communities.
Several organisers described the difficulties which they experienced in working with the university, which they described as a result of the different time-frames and motivations of each institution. Whilst the organisation was able to move quickly in making decisions and leveraging strategies, the university – being much larger and more complex as a structure - moved at a much slower pace, with decisions having to be fed through several layers of committees: “Working in or with a university, getting anything off the ground is always a nightmare. The person who’s helping you always has a long list of commitments that you’re always the least important part of, so it’s always a surprise if they’re there”. The organisers also described a series of tensions which arose through a combination of the organisation being an outsider to the university; and the type of machine-based work which their events involved:
“We convinced the university to let us use the Art and Design Academy workshops to host our Maker Nights. They had a big workshop space, and a powder-based 3D printer which everyone was fascinated by. So that was all signed off and started happening, but then we ran into lots of ‘Ooh, you can’t bring strangers onto campus without inductions – we have heavy equipment here and our insurance doesn’t cover you’. Suddenly it became such a pain to do that kind of stuff”.
These frictions continued to manifest, culminating in the decision of the organisers to find another venue for their activities, despite have the personal support of university members:
“The director of the Academy was still keen on doing something, but we didn’t know what. But it wasn’t working. After we’d been let down a few times and had angry emails from people turning up to find the buildings weren’t open on the nights [the events] were on, we decided to take what was originally a temporary break over the summer, but we all knew it wasn’t going to carry on as it was”.
G also described the challenges he sometimes faced in having to both commit to the organisation, and to the university as it made later strategic choices about which technology communities to support: “I was hands off when [the university] started talking about FabLabs, but it was awkward for me – I was always split between my Open Labs and [organisation] hats, had to think about which I was wearing at any time”.
This CTP was understood to be critical at the time, in a number of different ways for individual organisers, and for the organisation as a whole. The relationship developed in the early stages of the organisation’s history, when the founders were still exploring what type of identity and purpose the organisation had; and also offered a quasi-temporary space for the organisation to host events, at a time where other venues were not suited to the hardware- and electronics-heavy work that took place (as described in other CTPs). As detailed below, the act of leave-taking from the university also permitted the organisation to consider what type of activities it wanted to undertake, and how it intended to support itself.
As G had been involved with the organisation from reasonably early on, this relationship (and thus CTP) was anticipated to an extent, as it was part of G’s wider work around technology, knowledge sharing, and regeneration work. By the fact of the presence of this relationship, there would likely always have been some form of engagement between the organisation and the university. What was less anticipated or known was what form that relationship would take, and the frictions described above between the two, and the subsequent leavetaking, were unexpected.
In the absence of this CTP, the organisation would likely have been weakened. The group took on space with the university at a time when they had fallen between residency places; whilst the group took up premises in their current location (at the time of interview) in early 2011, there would still have been a gap and lack of activity in that interim time period. The CTP also permitted the group a far higher level of visibility through the university than would have been afforded otherwise, bringing in more members and a greater sense of legibility to outside stakeholders. Finally, this CTP paved the way for a different, more diverse set of relationships between the university, its students, and the organisation which permitted it to again grow its community and undertake innovative outreach projects which would not have been possible in its absence.
This CTP provided several different elements of learning for the organisation. Whilst the relationship with the university did not turn out to be sustainable, it allowed the organisers to consider which elements of the university system they wanted to bring forward into the organisation and which they did not.
In the first instance, the university offered the organisation a space to test out how they would operate the type of ‘maker’ activities which they had only been able to run in less suitable spaces in previous months (as described in other CTPs). This allowed the organisers to determine and consider which facets of these events were instrumental in allowing them to achieve their transformational aims around accessibility and openness. These factors included having a space which was open and available to members as much as possible, rather than being under the control of a larger organisation; which fitted in with the founders desires to avoid taking public and external funding support, instead favouring bootstrapping activities.
As described above, over the longer term the organisation continued to maintain a relationship with the university which strengthened its activities, albeit one more associated around shared interests and resources rather than through financial patronage and use of physical space. Some of the companies hosted in the organisation developed and won collaborative bids with the university for maker-related educational activities, introducing concepts around the Internet of Things into school environments. The organisation ran a series of workshops and events with the university, including visits to a cybernetics archive.
University students started a Maker Society, whose aims mirrored those of the organisation: “For people who want to express their creative side, create anything they can think of, learn new skills or further develop existing ones”. Based on elements of the wider maker movement, the student society was closer to the aims of the organisation than the other university-based Open Lab schemes was, attending events hosted by the organisation and also running regular workshops there. This looser, student-based relationship also allowed the organisation to engage in outreach in local communities.
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