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ABSTRACT
This article details findings from a multidisciplinary research team’s inquiry into the social uses of 3D printing. It applies digital research methods to 3D printing communities and their digitally shared objects. Thingiverse is one of the most well-known file repositories available for the semi-public distribution of files for use in 3D printers. The site allows for several different means of metadata classification of these files. Previous research on the site focused on the legal concerns related to the different types of intellectual property license ‘metadata’ attached to objects. Beyond these data points are numerous additional types of elected and automated connections between both users, objects and processes of creation including liking, commenting, tagging, categorising, watching, collecting, remixing, making, sharing, and attribution. Social Network Analysis of the relations between these data reveal interesting patterns towards the use and life of these objects. Our analysis also shows that despite the wealth of social functions, both actively engaged and passively automated, Thingiverse diverges from other social networks: sociality is mediated by reference to specific objects. As such, we claim Thingiverse should be considered as an object-centred social network. While such networks provoke Latourian analysis that is now well established in the study of computational culture, we also point to the need for new forms of social media analysis focused on the ways metadata constitute and guide such communities’ communications and govern their potentials.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Melbourne Network Society Institute and the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network for funding this research. We thank our colleagues in the field of 3D Printing and beyond for their insight and expertise that greatly assisted the research, although they may not agree with all of our interpretations/conclusions. We also thank the reviewers whose generous comments allowed this paper to be markedly better.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) through the grant ‘“Can I download a car?”: Emerging consumer issues for online access, communication and sharing of 3D printer files’ [grant number 2015033] and the Melbourne Network Society Institute Seed Funding Grant ‘Domestic 3D Printing Research Initiative: domestic and commercial models of use for additive manufacture’.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Robbie Fordyce
Robbie Fordyce has researched 3D printing and the study of videogames at the University of Melbourne and is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Network Society Institute. His PhD research investigates recent changes in networked activism. He is also a research assistant to the Australian Research Council project ‘Avatars and Identity’, for videogames. He has previously been published in Games and Culture, ephemera, and the Journal of Peer Production.
Luke Heemsbergen
Luke J Heemsbergen has researched digital politics, cultures, and pedagogy at The University of Melbourne, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the Melbourne Network Society Institute. His PhD research investigates radical transparency in relation to governance. He is currently the Chief investigator (with Robbie Fordyce) for two grants on the social and political aspects of 3D Printing, which enabled this research.
Thomas Apperley
Thomas Apperley, is an ethnographer that specializes in researching digital media technologies. His previous writing has covered broadband policy, digital games, digital literacies and pedagogies, mobile media, and social inclusion. Tom is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Australia (the University of New South Wales) and is a Visiting Fellow at the Research Unit in Public Cultures at the University of Melbourne. Tom’s more recent work has appeared in the journals Digital Creativity, Games and Culture, and The Fibreculture Journal. He is a chief investigator on an Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project (DP) that examines the contemporary and historic significance of videogame avatars.
Michael Arnold
Michael Arnold is a associate professor and Head of History and Philosophy of Science in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. His on-going teaching and research activities lie at the intersection of contemporary technologies, in particular digital technologies, and our society and culture.
Thomas Birtchnell
Thomas Birtchnell is a senior lecturer in Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His research interests include social futures, grassroots innovation in India, the mobilities of objects and the corporatization of spirituality. HIs latest book, co-authored with Distinguished Professor John Urry (Lancaster), is A New Industrial Future? 3D Printing and the Reconfiguring of Production, Distribution and Consumption (Routledge, 2016).
Michael Luo
Michael Luo is a graduate student in the School of Culture and Communication.
Bjorn Nansen
Bjorn Nansen is a lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne, the Melbourne Network Society Institute Digital Media Fellow, and a member of the Microsoft Social NUI Research Centre and Research Unit in Public Cultures. His research interests include technology adoption and non-use, home media environments, young children and mobile media, digitally mediated death, and post-digital interfaces.
