This is a CTP of initiative: FabLab 3 (North‐East England)
This CTP describes the events which the organization ran over the space of a year as a means of intentionally developing a ‘real world’ community, before acquiring physical premises.
The organization initially began life as an Arduino meet-up group. One of the organisation’s co-founders, A, had recently moved back to the city with the intention of pivoting his software and mobile apps company into physical computing. As the field of physical computing and the Internet of Things was comparatively young at that point and he felt that it would be beneficial to build a community around it. The city itself had been one of the most economically deprived districts in the UK, and A also felt that physical computing would be a good way of encouraging redevelopment:
“I decided when I was moving back that [physical computing] was a reasonable bet to be making for the city, not that I talked to the council about it and said, ‘You should be doing this’. But it was an opportunity for the city to lead on, an interesting bet to run at. I wanted to encourage more people to adopt the new stuff. And I was thinking of the bigger picture too – making other IoT companies happen all around me, so it wasn’t just my company doing it. I wanted more people and more community. And IoT was an emerging tech that would have appeared on all the strategy documents of all the cities at that point”.
In order to seed this community, A began a series of Arduino meet-ups and hack events, both in the city and around the country, in order to build a community around the technology. Over the course of 2009, the technology became more widespread and mainstream; and ‘hackspace fever’ (as A described it) became common in the UK. The group identity shifted from an Arduino group into a wider fabrication and making space, whilst continuing to hold meet-ups, including some hosted with the local university (as described in other CTPs). Before A and his colleagues began to search for physical premises, they wanted to establish that there was sufficient desire in the city, from local communities, to warrant the investment of time and money that formally setting up the organization would entail. The meet-ups ran over the course of nearly 2 and a half years, in various incarnations, before A and his colleagues formally founded the organization and set up in permanent physical premises.
These series of events act as a CTP because they allowed A to explore whether there was sufficient local interest for the organization; create community; generate legibility around both the group and the associated emerging technologies of digital computing; and remain flexible and adaptive as the technologies themselves became more integrated into UK tech scenes.
This CTP was shaped by the introduction of the Arduino platform to the UK. Arduino is an open source hardware platform, borne out of the student program at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy in 2005. Using a variety of microprocessors and controllers, the platform was created as a low-cost and easily accessible way to create interactive sensory devices. These qualities made it a good fit with (and drove much of) the emerging ‘maker’ scene, which encouraged learning through doing around physical and material technologies, through low barriers to entry.
A had already been working with Arduino for some years after spending time in Italy; and had bought some pieces at a time when they were only available directly from the factory. By late 2008, the technology was becoming slowly available for UK users through the design studio Tinker London, and a small number of other suppliers. At a BarCamp (user-generated conferences focused on technology and the web) in late 2008, A gave a talk about what Arduinos were to an audience who knew very little about the platform; over the course of the coming year, this knowledge had spread:
“I gave a talk at that BarCamp – this is what Arduino is, and so on – and that spurred me to make a machine to go with it. We ran the Arduino hackdays round the country all the next year, got some on sale or return from various places and some prizes from O’Reilly [Techn. Loads of stuff happened in that time – there was the first MakerFaire in early 2009. Makers and Hackers which tried to introduce crafty people to Arduino to get them to make things, and then show them off. Everyone was getting excited about it. By the time Barcamp came back to Manchester in 2010 I didn’t need to do a ‘What’s an Arduino?’ talk because two other people were already doing a ‘What’s an Arduino?’ talk.”
This CTP was also shaped by the presence of meet-up groups in the city. In order to provide a space to learn about, and play with, the Arduino platform, A tapped into the existing culture of tech meet-ups. The co-founders of the organization had already met each other through these groups; and, when he had moved back to the city, A had already explored these spaces as a way of “getting to know what the tech scene was – the Linux User Group, Geek Up, and so on. When I decided to start an Arduino meet-up I wasn’t quite sure what it was going to be, but there was was already the space for it”.
This CTP was shaped by the introduction of the Arduino platform to the UK; and by the meet-up groups already present in the city.
The main frictions described by the co-founders were the challenges of hosting physical computing events in spaces – pubs, arts institutions - which were not well suited for such activities. As one co-founder described: “Meeting in the pub is far from ideal for doing any sort of hardware hacking thing. It’s ok for software – you just work from your laptops, or you can give talks. But we couldn’t do any soldering or building things”. Another member recalled how one event was run from a vegetarian café “by people squatting in the space, and then we all turned up with soldering irons – it wasn’t great”. From these instances, the co-founders realized that they needed to find more suitable premises, as potential attendees were being put off:
“It was never massively well attended. We needed more than was available in one evening a week or a fortnight. At one point just two of turned up and it was like, we see each other at loads of other geek events anyway – is it worth carrying on?”
When the group began running Maker Nights, hosted by the local university (and described in other CTPs), the issues around the suitability of premises were addressed – “Instead of being in a pub, it was in a fairly well-kitted out workshop”. The group then faced challenges around autonomy, both in accessing the building when they needed to, and of members being able to actually use the machines – for example, members were reliant on the technicians, rather than being permitted to directly use the equipment themselves:
“The technician would do the laser cutting, but you would stand next to him and watch him press ‘Print’. Maybe you’d open the lid and pull the thing out, but he’d be standing there all the time. It was supervised use of machinery, with the technician being in charge”.
As described in other CTPs, the difficulties in aligning the interests of the organization with those of the university acted as an additional spur for the founders to find physical premises, and found the underlying company. However, the time at the university also created a greater sense of identity for the group: “It gave us more of a focus, and drew people in, and showed us there was an appetite for that sort of thing”. During their time at the university, the group also constructed a 3D printer that they had been given which also drew people in “as it showed you could make things, rather than just chat”.
As the organization was initially conceived of as a meet-up the importance of this CTP was anticipated from the start as having meet-ups and developing community was the only thing that mattered. When the decision came to re-develop the meet-up into a group working with permanent physical premises, the co-founders continued to be aware of how critical the meet-up activities were for establishing interest in the area:
“Some other [hardware] groups went building-first – they got funding, cash to rent a building for 3 years, and then had to decide what they they were going to do with it because they had a space and nothing to put in it. We were building a community first, rather than just going and getting a space. It was still early days – it wasn’t quite clear who really wanted [a hardware space] and who was just turning up because it was an interesting meet”.
The shifting dynamics around different connected and hardware technologies in the UK were unanticipated, and were instrumental in changing the focus of the group from Arduino-only to a more general hardware and machine-based space:
“That wave of physical computing which came through our tech scene, with MakerFaire and Make Magazine and hack days – that was new. The early Arduino work was more about making things do stuff, not connecting things to the internet, not least because there weren’t enough Ethernet shields then. Then suddenly everyone got hackspace fever in early 2009, and what came later with that was laser-cutters and 3D printers, but at the beginning it was much more about physical computing.”
In the absence of the wave of interest around these technologies, the co-founders acknowledged that they would likely have steered their work down any number of other technological pathways – “It didn’t have to be IoT – it could have been urban farming, or biotech, or drones”.
This CTP allowed the organization to fulfil its transformational aims of becoming a space which supported local businesses and communities to engage with emerging technologies, driving both economic growth for the city and personal actualization for users. Whilst the events and workshops had developed a community for the organization, acquiring premises allowed the organization to fulfil several goals based around material practice. – having desk space for co-working, and an independent workshop for technological activities. The company structure which was set up in the same period also enabled the organization to fulfll its long term goals by existing.
This CTP laid down long-term impacts for the organization as, by having physical premises, it permitted the accretion of both machinery and community within the desk and workshop space. It was not certain when the founders took up space that this would be a definite outcome – one described how “we had no guarantees of rent initially, we were just borrowing furniture. [A local company] lent us desks, chairs, printers”. Following their experiences with the local university (as described in another CTP), the organization was also given a lasercutter when they moved into the permanent space as a means of support: “[The department] decided to sponsor a laser cutter to go into our workshop. They knew they couldn’t do anything meaningful with respect to us in terms of supporting us because we’re just a community of like-minded people, but they wanted to know what they could do that would be interesting”.
Acquiring premises also allowed the founders to learn about what type of space and resources they needed from being there. Over time, it became clear that, whilst the office desk space was adequate, the workshop space was not and that they would ideally like to eventually move to a larger space (“We need money for that though and I don’t know where that would come from”). The process of searching for a new, larger, space began in late 2016.
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