I recently worked on a project with UCL’s Public Policy team exploring how universities can help to implement an inclusive economy in a post-COVID-19 London. The results of our consultation with academics, policy makers and industry experts has been written up into a blog post, check it out here.
Tucked away on University College London’s main campus in Bloomsbury is the Institute of Making, the university’s in-house makerspace and materials library. Founded in 2013 by academics at UCL, the goal of the Institute of Making is to provide a place where students and staff can get hands-on experience with tools of all kinds –
Earlier this month the Tate Modern hosted a mini exhibit on shared machine shops (i.e. makerspaces) as part of its Tate Exchange program. It featured a couple of photos from my fieldwork in the USA this summer alongside an audio piece featuring recordings from my hackerspace back home in Brighton. Read more about the exhibition here.
I’m currently working as a research assistant for a team at UCL’s Institute of Education that’s investigating the educational and identity equity potential of makerspaces for young people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Back in July we organised a research symposium at UCL’s Institute of Making. Read their write-up of the event here.
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
I spent the past couple of weekends getting my geek on at Electromagnetic Field, a camping festival for hackers and makers, and Nine Worlds, a fan culture convention that covers everything from Joss Whedon to roller derby. EMF camp has been running every two years since 2012 but I’d never made it along before: it’s
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