{"id":5994,"date":"2022-01-06T16:22:52","date_gmt":"2022-01-06T16:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/?page_id=5994"},"modified":"2022-02-21T20:25:39","modified_gmt":"2022-02-21T20:25:39","slug":"plan-c-makers-response-to-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/issues\/issue-15-transition\/peer-reviewed-papers\/plan-c-makers-response-to-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"Plan C – Makers’ response to COVID-19"},"content":{"rendered":"
Peter Troxler<\/strong><\/p>\n Complement: Responses by Dyhrberg H\u00f8jgaard, Boeva, Garc\u00eda and Cuartielles [pdf]<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n The worldwide and rapid spread of Covid-19 (officially declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020) led to a number of reactions and effects, such as local and national lockdown measures, increased hospitalisation of patients, and a related surge in demand for different medical and non-medical items which caused interruptions in the globalized supply-chains \u2013 and created a hitherto unknown potential for frugal innovation.<\/p>\n The story that served as the opening scene for this development happened in Italy and goes like that: Just two days after the declaration of the pandemic, on Friday, 13 March, in a hospital in Brescia, one particular part of a breathing apparatus (a valve that changes speed and pressure in the airflow, called the \u201cventuri\u201d) broke down and there were no replacement parts available. Through personal connections, the doctors managed to find an engineer at a company specialised in 3D-printed prototypes who was able to reproduce the bestpart within 24 hours. The contact was allegedly brokered by the founder of a fablab and tech supportjournalist, Massimo Temporelli (Corsini et al., 2021; Sher, 2020a). This story made the headlines in the European and global press, and the fablabs and 3D printing were inextricably linked to fixing supply chain tribulations for healthcare.<\/p>\n The people in Brescia extended their work by proposing to use a Decathlon snorkelling mask as an improvised breathing aid at a time when these machines were believed to become a bottleneck in treating Covid-19 patients (Corsini et al., 2021; Sher, 2020b). Makers all across Europe and world-wide started to replicate the piece that would attach Decathlon masks to hospital breathing equipment. That\u2019s how the virus first infected the so-called \u201cmaker movement\u201d. Although hooking-up the scuba masks to medical devices proved more difficult than expected, makers globally continued to develop these devices that presumably were short in supply. Other popular items produced by makers included face shields and face masks. As Chalet et al. (2021) note, one particular design of a face shield by Jozef Pruza, a manufacturer of 3D printers well-known and admired amongst makers for their strong open source adherence, strongly contributed to the mobilisation of makers.<\/p>\n Self-organizing groups of makers started to defeat global supply chains by producing supplies locally \u2013 particularly personal protective equipment (PPE) \u2013 for medical professions and other frontline workers, meeting the ongoing needs of public and private organizations. The realisation that by joining together and self-organising they could manufacture meaningful products for others, rather than just quirky stuff for themselves, quickly became part of the narrative of the self-assumed \u201cmaker movement\u201d and the press reporting on it. This was supposed to be the seminal example of how distributed manufacturing could effectively and efficiently rise above the deficiencies of globalized supply-chains and centralized manufacturing and hence contribute to a transition to peer-production of physical goods.<\/p>\n In the early 2000s, several prominent figures proposed that a \u201cmaker movement\u201d would bring about a tangential development in technology design and production. Neil Gershenfeld (2005) called it \u201cpersonal fabrication, the coming revolution on your desktop\u201d. The same year, Mark Frauenfelder and Dale Dougherty launched Make: magazine, Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles presented their first Arduino boards that made microcontrollers easily accessible to artists and tinkerers, and Eric Wilhelm launched the online platform Instructables where people could share instructions on how to make things from as tree houses to 3D printed bionic hands. We called this the \u201cyear zero of making\u201d (Boeva & Troxler, 2021, p. 226; Troxler, 2015, p. 61).<\/p>\n This journal has, on various occasions, investigated making as peer-production. We found that shared machine shops were not new, sharing was not happening, or hackerspaces were not open (Troxler & Maxigas, 2014). We studied feminism, making, and hacking (Bardzell et al., 2016) and the institutionalization of shared machines shops within universities and corporations and found that they redefined making\u2019s origins and prospects (Braybrooke & Smith, 2018).<\/p>\n In my own research on making as peer production I have decidedly remained ambivalent. I have been sympathetic to the narrative of making being a form of peer production (Troxler, 2010, 2011). I have acknowledged what fab labs and similar spaces have achieved for technology appropriation, local cultures, and education (e.g. Troxler, 2018). I have highlighted the struggle for polycentric structures and a new peer-production commons in the fab lab community (Troxler, 2013). Adopting a sociotechnical perspective, I have pointed out that there was more needed than the core making technologies \u2013 3D-printing and laser cutting \u2013 particularly becoming sustainable, developing the network, embracing a lateral paradigm (Troxler, 2015), eschewing technocracy (Troxler, 2016b), and building a commons (Troxler, 2017, 2019). And I have asked myself what in making as peer-production of open source hardware could become an equivalent to the infrastructure projects known from open source software such as the Apache web server (Troxler, 2016a). So, was peer-producing personal protective equipment for healthcare and related sectors such an infrastructure project?<\/p>\n Book titles that invoke a \u201cnext revolution\u201d (e.g. Anderson, 2012; Gershenfeld, 2005) allude to something radical happening in their subject area \u2013 in this case the manufacturing of things. In science, such revolutions have attracted the interests of philosophers such as Kant and, more recently, Kuhn. In his treatise of \u201cthe structure of scientific revolutions\u201d, Kuhn (1962) describes this structure as consisting of four steps \u2013 starting with the dominant paradigm active in normal science, emerging anomalies in normal science that lead to extrapolatory activity or \u201cextraordinary research\u201d, the subsequent adoption of a new paradigm that gradually replaces the old one (as its incumbent adepts eventually die), and finally, in the aftermath of the scientific revolution, the new paradigm becoming the new normal.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n In the early 2000s, several prominent figures proposed that a \u201cmaker movement\u201d would bring about a tangential development in technology design and production. Neil Gershenfeld (2005) called it \u201cpersonal fabrication, the coming revolution on your desktop\u201d. The same year, Mark Frauenfelder and Dale Dougherty launched Make: magazine, Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles presented their first Arduino boards that made microcontrollers easily accessible to artists and tinkerers, and Eric Wilhelm launched the online platform Instructables where people could share instructions on how to make things from as tree houses to 3D printed bionic hands. We called this the \u201cyear zero of making\u201d (Boeva & Troxler, 2021, p. 226; Troxler, 2015, p. 61)<\/p>\n Similarly, Geels discusses technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes (Geels, 2002; Geels & Schot, 2007). A central concept in Geels\u2019 model is the sociotechnical regime (p. 1260), as \u201ctechnological regime\u201d defined by Rip and Kemp (1998):<\/p>\n \u201cA technological regime is the rule-set or grammar embedded in a complex of engineering practices, production process technologies, product characteristics, skills and procedures, ways of handling relevant artefacts and persons, ways of defining problems; all of them embedded in institutions and infrastructures\u201d (p. 338).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Sociotechnical regimes are at the centre of a multi-level perspective on technological transitions. At the meso-level they form a relatively stable patchwork that is embedded in a landscape of slow changing external factors at the macro-level. At the micro-level, novel configurations appear as potentially radical innovation in technological niches.<\/p>\n The central assumption is that societal systems go through long periods of relative stability and optimisation that are followed by relatively short periods of radical change. Transitions come about when the dominant structures in society (regimes) are put under pressure by external changes in society (landscape) as well as endogenous innovation (niche). Such transitions have been found in history, e.g., the replacement of sailing by steam vessels in de second half of the 19th century (Geels, 2002) or the transition in mobility from horse-carriage to automobile (Geels, 2004). Some mechanisms, according to Geels (2002), are:<\/p>\n From an initial analysis, the situation of the Covid-19 pandemic appears to fulfil a number of these characteristics. The pandemic and related supply shortages created a window of opportunity. The technical innovation of 3D printing had found adoption in niches in many sectors \u2013 three dimensional visualisations in education, prototyping in engineering design, medical models for planning surgery in healthcare, and amateurs reproducing science fiction figurines. For some applications, 3D printing has become a valid alternative for traditional manufacturing technologies.<\/p>\n The pandemic as a window of opportunities<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This window of opportunity for responses to the healthcare crisis has been documented in a wide range of publications. In the context of this study, collections of responses to the supply shortages are particularly interesting. Kunovjanek and Wankm\u00fcller (2020) analysed 289 3D printed products made in response to the pandemic which they collected from homepages, company reports, press releases and media articles. 119 of these products were manufactured by some kind of community \u2013 both industry-based and volunteer-based, and 195 of product designs were shared.<\/p>\n The Strategic Design Research Journal <\/em>released a double special issue on \u201cDesign contributions for the COVID-19 global emergency\u201d. The first issue collected direct accounts of the hands-on activities of designers, who in many cases worked in one way or another with volunteers, often in 3D printing (Rossi et al., 2020). The second issue collated theoretical and methodological reflections (Rossi et al., 2021). As part of this collection, Moura et al. (2020) collected 113 cases of \u201cdesign responses\u201d to the pandemic from design blogs, social media and various other sources. Similarly, Galdon et al.(2020) established a design focused collection of \u201ceverything\u201d Covid-19 related that appeared in design blogs and specialist websites assembled and categorized over 500 items \u2013 maps, charts, visualizations, products, networks, etc. \u2013 over the period of the first five months of 2020 and analysed their temporal and geographical distribution (Rodgers et al., 2020).<\/p>\n 3D printing as a dominant design in a cumulation of niches<\/strong><\/p>\n While the spread of \u201cconsumer grade\u201d printers has failed to fulfil the early hype prognoses of home printing, 3D printing has certainly become a modern pastime \u2013 25 % of respondents in sculpteo\u2019s \u201cstate of 3D printing 2021\u201d indicate their primary context of using 3D printing is personal interest (sculpteo, 2021). Yet, \u201cconsumer grade\u201d printers have also found their way into schools and libraries, onto the desks of mechanical and automotive engineers as prototyping tools, into artists\u2019 studios, and into hospitals, where they are used to print anatomical models for planning and explaining surgical interventions or to produce patient specific instrumentation like surgery templates (aka \u201csaw guides\u201d).<\/p>\n Journals like 3D Printing in Medicine<\/em>, special interest groups of clinicians developing guidelines for medical 3D printing (e.g. Chepelev et al., 2018), 3D print centres at hospitals and hospital trusts, often organised as hub-and-spoke models with 3D research and design labs at for instance a university hospital and printing labs at smaller units, have been around for over half a decade (see e.g. Calvo-Haro et al., 2021).<\/p>\n So, next to the original niche of makers and their shared machine shops, medical and point-of-care 3D printing is another, well-developed niche, that is particularly relevant in the context of the pandemic and produced its own responses to the pandemic (see e.g. Perez-Ma\u00f1anes et al., 2021; Rybicki, 2021; Tino et al., 2020), often in cooperation with the makers\u2019 niche (see e.g. Frazer et al., 2020; Hartig et al., 2020; Sugrue M et al., 2020; Throckmorton et al., 2021).<\/p>\n 3D printing technology as an add-on<\/strong><\/p>\n In the field of manufacturing, 3D printing has linked up with established technologies of mass manufacturing, particularly casting and injection moulding. 3D printing of sand moulds and cores is common practice in metal casting (see e.g. Thiel et al., 2017). Similarly, tools for injection and blow moulding can successfully made by 3D printing (see e.g. Gunbay et al., 2019).<\/p>\n In some cases, 3D printing even equals mass manufacturing capabilities, i.e., producing several hundred thousand items per day, a throughput that is rather common for injection moulding. For instance, Kunovjanek and Wankm\u00fcller (2020) found that 34 of the products were mass manufactured with 3D printing technology.<\/p>\n In the field of healthcare, 3D printing technology also serves as an add-on in a different way. 3D printed models are considered \u201can appropriate representation or extension of data contained in a medical imaging examination\u201d for certain conditions (Ali et al., 2020; Ballard et al., 2020). Here, 3D printing technology enhances traditional (visual) imaging.<\/p>\n Growth in (niche) markets<\/strong><\/p>\n A pandemic is by definition a global affair, and its management follows internationally shared patterns \u2013 lockdown measures, social distancing rules, ventilation and intensive care of patients \u2013 as do the shortages in supply of PPE, spare parts, or oxygen. Likewise, the makers\u2019 response follows a global pattern in a medially globalised world. However, national implementations of global patterns differ nationally and even across administrative regions \u2013 both, regarding governmental crisis management and the makers\u2019 response. The latter followed the global pattern of community-based endeavours of designing and manufacturing PPE and other healthcare solutions as a collective response to Covid-19, typically making use of 3D printing technology, as shown above.<\/p>\n If the growth of academic literature on this response can be taken as an indicator, there has been a growth in this particular niche market in many regions and countries. The material on Brazil appears to be especially rich (Braida & Unanue, 2021; Ferreira dos Santos et al., 2020; Moura et al., 2020; Prado et al., 2020), with reports from Pernambucco (Ferreira et al., 2020), Porto Alegre (Freire et al., 2020), Belo Horizonte (Braga et al., 2020), Florianopolis (Pupo, 2020), or Rio de Janeiro (Braga et al., 2020; Cipolla, 2020; Santos et al., 2020). Herrera et al. (2021) adopt a broader view on Latin America. Rebola et al. (2020) and Doehler and Jones (2021) describe the situation in Cincinnati, while Budinoff et al. (2021) provide a perspective of the community-driven response in whole of the United States. Sari et al. (2021) report an example from Indonesia. Tsuda and Skauragi (2020) describe the response in Japan. Chalet et al. (2020, 2021) analyse and interprete the situation in France, and Richterich (2020) observed the hackers\u2019\/makers\u2019 projects in the UK. The Open Source Medical Supplies project collected case studies from Germany, Brazil, India, Romania, France and Spain (\u2018National Maker Response Case Studies\u2019, n.d.).<\/p>\n So, from a transition perspective, preconditions and generative mechanisms appeared to be in place: There was a window of opportunity. 3D printing had become a dominant design in various niches, and it had found hybrid and add-on use with existing manufacturing technologies. There was a growth in the niche markets of community-based, collective, and distributed 3D printing of personal protective equipment for healthcare and related sectors. So, could that novel configuration of PPE peer-production spur as radical innovation from its niches into the wider sociotechnical regime?<\/p>\n In their study, Moura et al. (2020) identify two cases of transition design in their collection of 113 design responses to the pandemic. So, they conclude that across their selection, designers \u201cneglected the transition design approach in favor of design for disaster\u2019s one\u201d (p. 339).<\/p>\n Budinoff et al. (2021) reviewed 145 publicly available news stories on community-driven 3D printing of PPE, and surveyed 74 individuals involved in these efforts. They focus mainly on the technical aspects of 3D printing and improvements that could be made, like the control of process parameters and quality, optimization of designs, minimization of adjusting designs to specific printers and design documentation. They discuss the community-driven response as an add-on to existing manufacturing technologies, specifically from a perspective of maximizing production. However, they acknowledge that community-driven use of 3D printing in response to emergencies is promising, particularly because \u201cnearly all surveyed individuals characterized their group\u2019s effort as successful\u201d (p. 35). So, from a manufacturing perspective, Budinoff et al. (2021) acknowledge the transitional potential of community-driven PPE production using 3D printing.<\/p>\n Chalet et al. (2020) described and analysed the process of self-organization among makers in France. They find that makers while driven by their individual initiative adopted organizational patterns they were familiar with \u2013 from industry, with a focus on productivity and efficiency, from the service economy, for example by establishing digital platforms to match supply and demand, or from clubs and associations, by working work on their immediate environment and using word of mouth. After the first wave of Covid-19, when demand for face shields fell, makers halted their activities or shifted from distributed manufacturing to humanitarian undertakings like sending face shields to Latin America or Africa. The main effect of the makers\u2019 response in France, so Chalet et al. (2021), was that \u201cmakers acquired, with the same enthusiasm, the recognition of society and a greater awareness of themselves\u201d (p 94). They demonstrated, that \u201cmakers have succeeded in being effective quickly by relying on the combination of self-organization and conviviality, which is a striking counterexample in the face of the dominant models of the organization of work in capitalist society, where hierarchy, hyper specialization and lack of meaning contribute to reducing work to smithereens\u201d (Chalet et al., 2020, para. 27). So, from a sociological perspective, Chalet et al. recognise the strength of the transition narrative of the makers\u2019 response.<\/p>\n Richterich (2020) closely followed civic DIY volunteers stepping in to counteract healthcare supply shortages in the UK and analysed that response through the lens of critical making (Ratto, 2011). Critical making was particularly expressed in the DIY volunteers\u2019 careful deliberations, together with healthcare professionals, about which medical equipment could be practically and ethically produced in a hacker-\/makerspace setting in order not to compromise the safety and efficacy of its use. The study also highlights the efficiency of open design for civic innovation and co-production, contradicting the medical manufacturers claim that patents are indispensable for innovation in the sector. Richterich (2020) argues, that DIY making of medical equipment was political, as it was \u201cinextricably linked to austerity politics and the UK\u2019s strained healthcare system\u201d (p. 165). So, following Richterich, 3D printed face shields from a maker space are material signs of a destabilisation in the political regime that created a window of opportunity for niche-innovation.<\/p>\n In summary, several studies have shown that peer-production of personal protective equipment prima facies as a helpful response to disaster. However, this response revealed substantial technical potential, a new social narrative, and latent political power. So, in order to answer the questions whether PPE peer-production was a \u201ctransition\u201d, spurring radical innovation from its niches into the wider sociotechnical regime, and if it was, in that sense, an \u201cinfrastructure project\u201d, more data was needed. Such data would ideally be more maker focused and include more of makers\u2019 own voices.<\/p>\n Having been involved in the making scene and the research about it made me aware of the extra strain every new study or survey puts on the actors who are doing and organizing making. Still, aware of the drawbacks of working with already recorded evidence (see also the discussion section) I decided to first look for an extant body of makers\u2019 voices. A rich source of more information on the civic response to Covid-19, and particularly those of makers, came into focus in the form of a series of online panel discussions organized for the Make: Community. The series had title \u201cPlan C Live\u201d where C stands for civic action (Dougherty, 2020). It had the theoretical advantage to come from the heart of what Hepp (2018) identified as the driver behind the pioneer community of makers. The panels were held on Zoom, streamed on Facebook, and subsequently published to YouTube. Between April and November 2020, Dale Dougherty \u2013 together with colleagues Mike Sense, editor at Make:, and Dorothy Jones-Davis, executive director of Nation of Makers \u2013 held 23 panels on the makers\u2019 response to Covid-19 (full list of panels see Appendix: Plan C Live Panels).<\/p>\n The panels covered a variety of topics, about half of them (11) addressing the local response in particular cities, by specific organisations, and in selected European countries. Others were discussing specific projects like ventilators, masks, or even the rapid development of a vaccine (3). Several shows discussed issues specific to makerspaces (4), maker education (3), and community matters (2).<\/p>\n In a process following the lines of emergent qualitative document analysis (Altheide et al., 2008), I selected and analysed the 5 panels that addressed the makers\u2019 response in European countries (the other panels were US-centric). I had several reasons to support this choice as one of theoretical sampling. First, my personal knowledge of the situation of makers in Europe is much more involved than that\u2019s the case for the US. In the meantime, a detailed analysis of the production efforts for PPE in makerspaces in response to Covid-19 in the US has been published (Budinoff et al., 2021). Second, the (government) response to the pandemic in the United States appeared to be different to the response in many European countries \u2013 with less stringent lockdown measures than in Europe, and measures released more slowly than in continental Europe (see Footnote 3). Third, differences in the healthcare system between the US and Europe might have led to inverse stereotypical misinterpretations we tend to attribute to US-centric analyses of Europe. The 5 Europe-centric panels amounted to about six hours of video material (see Table 1).<\/p>\n Table 1. \u201cPlan C Live\u201d panels. The shows were hosted by Dale Dougherty (in the case of France, marked with *, by Mike Sense), and co-hosted by one (in the case of the UK: two [2]<\/a>) local co-host(s); the co-hosts are included in the number of panellists.<\/p>\n1 Introduction<\/h2>\n
2 Background<\/h2>\n
2.1. Making as peer-production<\/h3>\n
2.2. Framing the makers\u2019 response as a paradigm change with transition theory<\/h3>\n
\n
Under certain conditions, seemingly stable societal configurations can transform relatively quickly \u2013 i.e., much faster than the 40-60 years in the above examples. Loorbach (2007) for instance gives 15+ years for long-term systemic and cultural change on the macro level, 5-15 years for structural, institutional and regime change at the meso level, and up to 5 years for micro level innovations, e.g., in terms of change of certain practices.
Niche innovations have the potential to change or replace dominant sociotechnical regimes if some preconditions and mechanism come into play.<\/p>\n\n
\n
2.3 Peer-produced design \u2013 for disaster or for transition?<\/h3>\n
3 Method<\/h2>\n