Making

Seattle Attic is a feminist makerspace in the suburban Fremont neighbourhood of Seattle. Since opening in 2013 they’ve inspired various other feminist hackerspaces to open around the US, including Double Union in San Francisco (which I wrote about in an earlier blog post). The Attic aims to be a welcoming place for women to work

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

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

One of my favourite things about the maker community is how it brings artists and scientists together under the same banner. I recently spoke to a few artists who are collaborating with scientists in more traditional locations—in labs, in libraries, in research groups—to find out more about their work and how collaborations between art and

A strong thread of reflexivity has run through the maker movement since its birth around a decade ago in the mid-2000s. Neil Gershenfeld, creator of the first FabLab at MIT, heralded personal fabrication as a “coming revolution on your desktop”; Cory Doctorow tempered this with a utopian/dystopian (and just barely fictional) vision of making in

This year’s Brighton Mini Maker Faire was produced on somewhat of a shoestring, with reduced funding available both from public grants and from private sponsorship compared to some previous years. Despite this we were able to produce our core event (minus a few bonuses) and attract a wide range of makers from many and varied