{"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

1 Introduction<\/h2>\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

2 Background<\/h2>\n

2.1. Making as peer-production<\/h3>\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

2.2. Framing the makers\u2019 response as a paradigm change with transition theory<\/h3>\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

\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).
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