Fablabs and the Maker Movement: Learning through Making

In all its different disguises – crafting, DIYism, Making, Fablabbing, hacktivism and so on – the Maker movement's ethos is currently brought forth as a new way of empowering innovation, learning, communities and activism. Multiple manifestos and manuals circulate to promote the norms, values, thinking and procedures of the Maker movement. However, these are often only superficially put into discourse with more established design methods. Is ‘Making’ hype? In this chapter, we attempt to extract and describe a Maker thinking methodology – or rather, propose an initial sketch of the Maker mindset as an alternative (or supplement) to design thinking, as it may be extrapolated from the various heterogeneous manifests, practices, methods and charters of parts of the worldwide Maker community. Building partly on this global, collective pool of experience and our own situated experience, built on seven years of founding, running, using, facilitating, and propagating a Maker space in a university context at Roskilde University: Fablab RUC – we will summarise this Maker mindset in six propositions we postulate characterise “Making” as a design method.