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Authorship:
Corresponding author:
Regina Sipos, Technical University of Berlin, sipos@tu-berlin.de
Barbara Kieslinger, Centre for Social Innovation – ZSI, Vienna, Austria
Melanie Stilz, Technical University of Berlin, melanie.stilz@tu-berlin.de
Introduction
Academic attention on Grassroots Innovation Movements (GIM) has been increasing in recent years, fuelled by the “era of participation” (Smith et al., 2016). Interest in makerspaces as spaces of bottom-up innovation has been growing, together with imaginaries around the possibilities of the maker movement. Bringing about a new industrial revolution (Anderson, 2012), democratizing innovation and technology by empowering the consumer (Tanenbaum et al., 2013) to make their own products through prosumerism (Paltrinieri and Esposti 2013). Maker communities have been celebrated for potential and far-reaching impacts, be those social (Unterfrauner et al., 2020, Bosse et al., 2019), political (Maxigas, 2012), or environmental (Lange, 2017, Kohtala, 2016) impacts. Whether the promises truly deliver those positive impacts is debated, critique towards makers’ technosolutionism and ideological colonialism (Lindtner et al., 2016), its involvement with the U.S. military (Finley, 2012), and concerns regarding “forgetting open hardware” (Benchoff, 2016) have been expressed.
When conducting research on the maker movement, it is important to note that we are not faced with a uniform activity that follows one central blueprint and should be reproduced anywhere in the world exactly as prescribed. Following Ong and Collier’s definition (2004) it is rather a “global assemblage” (Lindtner et al., 2016) of hacker- and makerspaces, spaces of collaborative design and grassroots innovation, brought to life by offline and online communities that make use of the tools found in these spaces. Examining their diversity and situatedness (Lindtner and Lin, 2017) in local socio-political realit
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