Peer2Politics

A large variety of making, fabricating, fabbing, tinkering, assembling, prototyping, coding, and manufacturing spaces are increasingly becoming a significant part of our technological landscapes, calling for more and more people to open up their devices, recreate them, create new ones, personalize some, hack others, mash them all together, understand their inner workings and their outside impacts. Fab Labs, Makerspaces, Hackerspaces, Techshops and other types of innovation and production labs are venues where a wider range of citizens and groups are getting more familiar not only with digital tools (CNC machines, CAD programs, laser cutters, 3D printers, open source hardware, etc.) for personal fabrication or manufacturing (Mota 2011), but also connecting with peer-production communities (Troxler 2010, Abel et al. 2011) who collaborate, share their work, and support others with common interests, through online communication, data and documentation repositories, or physical meetups, workshops and events where people with assorted skills meet and work together. This twofold notion of access – to technical means and to communities – represents the basic principles for the current modification and building of tangible things, but in a certain sense, it is also the most apparent or recognizable dimension of more far-reaching transformations in how we can conceptualize and act through technology.