Mothership HackerMoms is a women’s makerspace in Berkeley, California, just across the Bay from San Francisco. Its aim is to provide a community and co-working space for women with childcare responsibilities who otherwise would find it hard to have time to work on their own projects and may end up staying at home and becoming
Double Union is a feminist hackerspace in San Francisco, located on an industrial estate in the Potrero Hill neighbourhood next door to the building that used to house the offices of the Mythbusters TV show! DU was originally inspired by another feminist hackerspace, Seattle Attic, which aimed to be a welcoming place for women to
Noisebridge was one of the first hackerspaces to open in the USA. It’s part of the wave of spaces founded after a group of American hackers including Noisebridge’s co-founder, Mitch Altman, visited existing European hackerspaces including c-base and Metalab after the 2007 Chaos Communication Camp in Germany and decided to set up their own hackerspaces
This April, Kat Braybrooke and I gathered 28 brave souls to explore algorithmic ghosts in Brighton — a city known for its blending of new-age spiritualities and digital medias, but perhaps not yet for its ghosts — through the launch of a new psychogeography tour for the Haunted Random Forest festival. Check out our write up on the Furtherfield blog.
Metalab is one of the oldest hackerspaces in Europe. Its workshop in the center of Vienna – in between the Austrian Parliament and Vienna’s Rathaus (city hall) – has been open since 2006. It got started when a few friends wanted somewhere to meet and exchange ideas, and to get access to machines that they
Surrounded by technology startups and artisan coffee shops in the hip area of Bethnal Green in East London, Machines Room is a makerspace and FabLab that provides workspace and machine shop access to local businesses, artists, designers, technologists and engineers. Machines Room’s main draw is likely its room-sized ShopBot CNC router – which is big
Located in a commuter belt town 40 miles west of London, rLAB has been the hackerspace for Reading, England for nearly six years now. rLAB – short for both “Reading Lab” and “Our Lab” – grew out of the monthly Reading Geek Night event in 2011, when a group of programmers, hardware hackers and 3D
When I tell people about my PhD—that I research ways to make technology more engaging for women—I usually brace myself for a reply like this: “Why would you bother to do that? Everyone knows men are just better at technology. It’s science!” It happens more often than you would think, and more often than I’d
A key problem created by gender imbalances in the tech and engineering industries is that it means fewer women than men have access to the means of designing and producing technological artefacts. If most programmers and engineers are men, then most software and hardware is going to be designed by men. As the sociologist Judy
In the first episode of the Freakatoms podcast I look at the world of DIY biology. Featuring interviews with Nicholas Ritzroy-Dale of London Biohackspace; Phillip Boeing, co-founder of the Bento Lab home DIYbio kit; and Dr Jack Stilgoe, lecturer in science policy at University College London.