Maker Assembly in Manchester brought together all kinds of
makers to discuss the state of making in the UK and around the world,
challenges and opportunities related to distributed manufacturing, and making
within the response to humanitarian crises.
It was a great event and a chance to catch up with many amazing people
who are active in makerspaces, prototyping and small scale manufacturing.
Field Ready and Humanitarian Makers introduced our work in
transforming humanitarian supply chains through manufacturing in the field, and
we had a workshop session exploring some of the key challenges we are facing
now.
The session explored several questions:
- how can we as makers best respond to humanitarian need?
- What are the biggest barriers to getting people involved in humanitarian relief?
- How can we get beyond the perception that humanitarian making just for engineers?
Theme 1: Collective Intelligence: How can we help capture knowledge and learnings from makers working on relevant projects and initiatives? How can we avoid reinventing wheels? Facilitated by Liz
Theme 2: Best Practice: What codes of practice and codes of conduct facilitate inclusive making communities? And what might be appropriate in a humanitarian context? Facilitated by Laura
Theme 3: Community Networks: How can we grow a global making community for humanitarian relief and organise/structure it in a that people can access it and that it can be flexible and adaptive? Facilitated by Marc
Full notes are below.
It was super to have a session where I came away with wholly new ideas,
and we started discussing these in our Field Ready team meeting just a week
later, and are thinking in more depth around them in our technical strategy
workshop this weekend.
In particular, some of the ideas which struck me were:
- How to handle quality and safety issues
- Do we build a dedicated online community – QA experts – who can help design test processes, or test in their own environments to help support validation of designs and manufacturing techniques?
- Is field testing of designs a significant area we should be investing in? how can we use non-destructive testing to validate specific items? Can we accept some failure rate (if we test 1000 items and 900 pass, is that OK?)?
- How can people around the world support and get involved with testing, as much as with design work?
- Testing is less “exciting” but probably more important – many people are already working on product designs for humanitarian response, but few of them think about how the items work at scale, reliably
- Avoiding, and avoiding working with, “art projects instrumenting refugees” and “speculative humanitarianism” – the negative sides of making, hacking and design cultures
- How we might use different skillsets to help capture and share knowledge
Theme 1: Collective
Intelligence: How can we help capture knowledge and learnings from makers
working on relevant projects and initiatives? How can we avoid reinventing
wheels?
* different kinds of knowledge - cultural and technical
* looking to best practice - eg Fixperts
* different tools for capturing knowledge - WeChat, audio logs
* making an effort to join dots - convening, linking, cowriting
* Google Drive
* professional project management
* tools
* incentivisation
* don't assume what people know
* what's the BBC microbit for adults?
* working in the open
* online, wikis, github, #weeknotes, youtube
* offline, makespaces
* prioritise capturing knowledge. set up team for that purpose. training up front.
* automated notes sourcing and generating via a hashtag - the #weeknotes system, that aggregates info from different places
* communicate - non-hierarchically!
* give others space to comment
* structure information
* organising
* indexing
* separate: quick tips, tutorials, deep dive.
* tools that scale documentation from light touch to lots of time needed
* Problems and challenges:
* time
* literacy
* storage of info
* access to info
* losing nuances
* sharing meaningful info
* capacity is limited
* writing instructions for making is hard
* also hard to read instructions
* what are the right questions to ask (to elicit info about how to make a thing)?
Theme 2: Best Practice: What codes of practice and codes of conduct facilitate inclusive making communities? And what might be appropriate in a humanitarian context? Facilitated by Laura
·
Documentation
o
Face to face working parties to look at ethics
and documentation
o
Need culturally diverse team to document
o
Technical
(or not!) writer community
o
Group mapping of maker spaces
o
More documents on topics like quality, ethics
o
More non-technical people creating docs
·
Ethics
o
What are the existing ethics frameworks?
§
Especially for innovation?
o
Create internet
of humanitarians to help with ethics
·
Quality
o
Local audit of facilities
o
Rapid test system
§
In Field Ready, QA team
§
Online test community
§
Partners? Who else does this in the field?
o
Important to QA maker-oriented designs
o
Maker community not usually concerned with
quality beyond obvious
o
Maker community not safety conscious
o
Ideas for rapid test / QA systems
§
Technologies
§
Processes
o
Framework for quality
§
“good enough”
§
“appropriate”
§
setting expectations
§
prototype vs product
·
Set expectations
o
Avoid “magical” technology
o
Balance the hype
§
3D printing
o
partnerships can help
·
Commercial design vs freely shared design
o
Needs more exploration
o
Are there other communities where free/voluntary
efforts mix with paid ones?
§
Especially where output can be reused for free
(open source)
·
Bodging
o
Personal
o
Unique
o
Contextual
o
=> hard to train!
·
Problem with current design sector – it likes
finding problems, even if they are not real
o
Ground with impactful organisations like Field
Ready
o
Better design education
o
Avoid “art projects instrumenting refugees”
o
Avoid “speculative humanitarianism”
o
Caution around data!
·
Inclusivity, diversity
·
Meetups
·
Connectivity issues – not just web!
·
Local directory of people involved in different
areas / in-country
·
Facilitation both on and offline
·
Leadership
·
Connect to existing networks
o
Local and global organisations
o
Companies eg Red Bull
o
Give to the Givers (org in S Africa)
o
Transition Town networks
·
Barriers – not just techie
·
Translation
o
Languages
o
Jargon!
·
Digital – which platform(s)?
·
Inspiring – it’s about inspiring people to be
part of the community
·
“bounty source” – pick things we need
·
community safeguards
o
from control taken away by clique
o
need principles/shared values
§
like Fablab charter
·
access to local knowledge globally
·
feedback loop – being able to se results
o
reporting back
·
existing networks
o
link to Fixperts
