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ABSTRACT
This paper commences a geographical engagement with makerspaces, hacklabs, and other workshop spaces which form part of a broader ‘maker movement’. It examines the arts of inquiry and experimentation found at one such site, drawing on ethnographic field work at the Edinburgh Hacklab, and makes connections with emerging themes of interest to geographers, including creativity, experiment, art, and nonhuman agency. Putting standard innovation-driven narratives of makerspaces into question, attention is instead turned to the events of emergent experimentation and creativity taking place in these spaces. To this end, Andrew Pickering’s concept of ‘ontological theatre’, describing powerful focal instances of agential symmetry between humans and nonhumans, is engaged with, in order to understand the links between Hacklab activities and emergent and complex aspects of nonhuman agency.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to extend his appreciation to Dr Louise Reid, who commented on an early draft, the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and the editors of the Scottish Geographical Journal. The author is particularly grateful to the participants at the Edinburgh Hacklab who took the time away from their adventurous ‘doings’ to correspond with the author.
Notes
2 The provision of a broader genealogy and discussion of the socio-cultural impetus behind the creation of the hacklab and similar workshops is unfortunately outside the scope of this paper. However, such questions have been taken up elsewhere. For example, see Shea (Citation2016), Hunsinger and Shrock (Citation2016), Kohtala and Bosqué (Citation2014), and Smith (Citation2014).
3 A type of loom, dating to 1801, which automatically reads weaving patterns from punch cards, and which held great importance in the development of early computing.