{"id":7868,"date":"2019-03-22T02:13:27","date_gmt":"2019-03-22T02:13:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/?page_id=7868"},"modified":"2019-04-01T12:11:42","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T12:11:42","slug":"a-topological-space-for-design-participation-and-production","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/issues\/issue-13-open\/peer-reviewed-papers\/a-topological-space-for-design-participation-and-production\/","title":{"rendered":"A topological space for design, participation and production. Tracking spaces of transformation"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sandra \u00c1lvaro S\u00e1nchez<\/strong><\/p>\n

Download as PDF<\/a><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/h2>\n

‘Shared machine shops’ is the name proposed by Maxigas and Troxler to denominate the ‘new spaces of citizen participation and alternative production<\/em>‘ (Maxigas and Troxler, 2014). The spaces for the encounter of ’embodied communities organised in research and production units of physical and logical goods’ (Troxler and Maxigas, 2014). Originating in the margins of the ‘networked society’ and occupying the wasted spaces of the post-industrial urbs, ‘shared machine shops’ have evolved from hacker culture to became laboratories for the development of new organizational forms related to peer-production, and the prototyping of new material products, linked to entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as, of new educational projects.<\/p>\n

Shared machine shops are characterized by their locality and material labour (Ames et al., 2017), however they are also linked to the internet, not only as a preferred communication medium but because the internet is part of its history and evolution.<\/p>\n

Hacking has become the logic of the knowledge society, the creative endeavour of freeing information of its material constraints to produce new possibilities (Wark, 2004). Linked to the digital revolution, the origin of the word ‘hack’ is attributed to the members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, to refer to an ‘innovative fix for a problem characterized with technological virtuosity and pleasure’ (Levy, 2010). In this environment, programming and the production of software appears as the power of abstraction to produce new things, a new opportunity at the hands of anybody willing to work with a computer to change the world. Furthermore, information was considered a common good and the production and hacking of software, for the purpose of adapting it to new needs, was an open and sharable activity. The open production of software was facilitated by the spread of the internet. On the communication networks arose a new organizational system, characterized by decentralized command and motivated by social commitment. The peer-production of free software and projects as Wikipedia are accomplished examples of large-scale volunteer production, organized on the internet and without market incentives, neither managerial hierarchies (Benkler, 2006). Hackerspaces came into the scene like a physically located manifestation of these online communities.<\/p>\n

Maxigas situates the origin of hackerspaces in Europe around the sphere of influence of the Chaos Computer Club, and considers them closely related but differentiated of the earlier hacklabs (Maxigas, 2012). The hacklabs were linked to the squad movement emerging in Europe in the 1980s-1990s and aimed to appropriate the capitalists’ structures of power to produce public spaces in both the city and the cyberspace. Hacklabs’ members considered the internet as a new public sphere and the place for a new digital democracy, at this way, they provided free access to internet and workshops aimed at training in the use of computers and the recycling of hardware. They were engaged in the development of free software, copyright critique, and related to movements like hacktivism, media critique, alter-globalisation and indie media. The Chaos Computer Club is a civil group of hackers initiated in 1981 and aimed at the liberation of technology knowledge. They are characterised for a more pragmatic perspective incorporating research, innovation and the realization of projects. In 2007 a group of hackers including Mitch Altman, travelled to Europe to visit some hackerspaces and participate in the 24th Chaos Communication Congress. This conference introduced a series of patterns based on already working hackerspaces and aimed to guide the creation and administration of these spaces (Ohlig and Weiler, 2007). Back in San Francisco Altman took part in the foundation of the Noisebridge, and extended hackerspaces to the United States. Since then, hackerspaces have spread all over the world; one important impulse in the growth of ‘shared machine shops’ as a movement was the support provided by Maker Media (the organizers of the Makerfaires and editors of the Make Magazine) to the spread of makerspaces. Makerspaces use machines such as 3D printers and open micro-controllers for digital fabrication and hardware experimentation. Makerspaces are defined as ‘learning environments rich with possibilities’, where maker communities can experiment with new technologies and traditional tools to work in personally meaningful projects (Hlubinka et al., 2013).<\/p>\n

Makerspaces approximate ‘shared machine shops’ in the context of education, hobbyist use and entrepreneurship, but with a more open definition and variety of purpose. For example, makerspaces are not necessarily related to new technologies and set apart by political aims, and this blurs the boundaries between the different kinds of machine shops \u2013 concurrent with hacklabs and hackerspaces a variety of other community-based projects emerged, including media labs, citizen labs, real-life laboratories, repair cafes, fablabs – and has promoted their institutionalization.<\/p>\n

Makerspaces have become attached to cultural institutions like universities, museums, cultural centres and public libraries as well as big enterprises and entrepreneurial projects such as start-up accelerators, co-working spaces. The evolution and diversification of hackerspaces has not followed a linear schema but exist as a complex network, linking a variety of agents, technological artefacts, and spaces.<\/p>\n

Shared machine shops are of special interest due to: first, their commitment to the experimentation with the components of our techno-social milieu; second, their openness. They are non-hierarchical collectives integrated by people from different backgrounds that meet to produce things and create sharable knowledge; third their diversity. Hackerspaces are project-oriented places, where people engage in tasks that link multiple agents, who contribute either in situ or online. Due to these characteristics hackerspaces are giving birth to a new form of collective research and production that is sited on the borders of the system and able to incorporate noise, meaning, going across the established boundaries between disciplines to produce new things with transformative potential. It is these three characteristics that mark hackerspaces as ‘spaces of transformation’. This article tracks their mutual online relations in order to analyse how they are contributing to a global culture of social innovation.<\/p>\n

Shared machine shops as spaces of transformation<\/h2>\n

Hackerspaces are defined as ‘spaces where people meet to do things together’ (hackerspaces.org), spaces where physical production converges with new forms of sociability, the celebration of workshops and social events; and where the experimentation with technological and traditional tools meshes with the testing of new forms of education and societal organisation. It is precisely the openness of these spaces what allows a pluralism of relations, and its transformative potential.\u00a0 Depending on the different encounters between tools, practitioners, learners, artists, societal and local needs, these spaces have been transformed into spaces for media criticism, digital literacy, techno-politics, laboratories for smart urbanism (D\u00edez, 2014), real-life laboratories (Dickel, 2014), studios for experimental artistry and new learning spaces in museums and public libraries (Babybroke, 2017).<\/p>\n

In Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time<\/em> (1995) Latour interviewed Serres about his work to explain how this author defined a new function for philosophy – the creation of the possibilities of future inventiveness – and proposed a new form of reasoning, based in algebra and topology and aimed to understand the complex relations that form our contemporary world, beyond the boundaries imposed by disciplines and the logic of representation. Accordingly, Serres\u2019 conception, the world is not formed by defined singular entities, but by the mobile nodes of a network, defined by their relative relations and positions. In this space, knowledge will not be a process of verification but a risk-taking activity, the inventiveness. The task of philosophy will consist in the creation of concepts that allow the accumulation of sense by means of bridging across disciplines. Concepts do not interface, the interface supposes that the junction between two sciences or two concepts is perfectly under control, or seamless, and poses no problems. Opposite, concepts navigate from one field to another, establishing new relations and new meaningful possibilities.<\/p>\n

Introduced by Serres in The Parasite<\/em> (1982), the ‘space of transformation’ navigates the fields of literature, mythology and mathematics to make understandable the transformative power of communication and the potential of information transmission for building human communities and produce new things. In this way, ‘space of transformation’ is an ontological concept. It opposes the system, defined as a set of codified and black-boxed messages to become the in-between systems, space where codification ends, and the message becomes noise. Using the author\u2019s image, the space of transformation is the torus or infinite space spreading in the border of all system, the space of encounter or interference where noise becomes message and vice versa. In this space of encounter the noise can penetrate into the system to transform it \u2013 ‘The noise is the end of a system and the formation of a new one’ (Serres, 1982: 67) – by virtue of this encounter, the black-boxes open themselves to what is not codified in an interchange of information which result may produce the transformation of the system into something new.<\/p>\n

In addition to being the space of creation where new things can be produced by the experimental encounter between already existent entities outside the borders of purpose and function, the space of transformation is also a process of intersubjectivity. The quasi-object (another name for the space of transformation) is circulating matter. Working as a token in a children’s game, the quasi-object assigns objects and subjects circulating from hand to hand, meanwhile, it is weaving a non-hierarchically organized collective, in which nobody is sovereign but all become involved parts. To participate is to be complicated in the meshwork of legacies, assignations, loans and transmissions that codifies the group of individuals. In this schema noise is the parasite, the newcomer able to disrupt the system making apparent the accepted codification, at the same time, that starts new processes to re-codify the system. In this sense, Serres says that the parasites are the producers of history.<\/p>\n

The quasi-object will be adopted by Bruno Latour to designate a non-fully codified nor obfuscated object, an object from where could be traced the multiple relations that sustains it. The study of the formation of this complex object will become the basis of Latour’s Network Theory (Latour, 2005) which links science to society becoming a politics of technological artefacts. The unveiling of the collectives of human and non-human agents assembled around the construction of facts and the research of how these are resulting from the multiple relations among people, instruments, institutions and the work of translation that allows moving them from one codification system to another.<\/p>\n

Hackerspaces are ‘spaces of transformation’, producers of intersubjectivity and new things by means of assembling multiple relations. 1) relations among different objects in experimental research aimed to produce new objects or products; 2) the relations between the materials at hand and the individuals working on them through a process of experimentation in which a sharable knowledge is also produced; 3) the relations between the involved human agents that participate in a process that modifies their environment at the same time that their subjectivities, producing new forms of collective organization.<\/p>\n

This lattice of relations is produced locally, inside a hackerspace where a group of individuals become self-organized working together in the experimental assemblage of different materials to produce a new object. However, the materials, practices and organizational schemas assembled in these relations are also connected to more global networks. It is the linking with these more global networks what allow shared machine shops to become a source of transformative practices.<\/p>\n

Tracing the topology of spaces of transformation<\/h2>\n

Despite hackerspaces being deeply entangled in their immediate surroundings, they do not emerge in isolation, but from the convergence of multiple agents. We have previously noted that one of these agents is the internet, which was first one of the artefacts to experiment with, and more recently, one of the vehicles behind the fast spread of the movement. Since the aim of this research is to study the global relations that define hackerspaces, we consider the web as our field site.<\/p>\n

Networked ethnography allows building the field site useful to study social practices which take place on the move, across great distances and linking up disparate entities. The application of configurations as ‘follow the object’ and ‘follow the metaphor’ lend and overarching cohesion to multi-sited ethnographies (Burrell, 2009). To build the field site of the global phenomena of hackerspaces ‘following the things themselves’ (Latour, 2005), computational methods will be deployed. More specifically, I will use a web crawler to discover how hackerspaces are linked among them, at a global and local level, and what other entities link hackerspaces globally.<\/p>\n

From the study of the discovered websites, I concluded that hackerspaces are connected to the web for multiple purposes:<\/p>\n