Abstract
This chapter turns towards ‘open digital fabrication’, one of the novel pathways for technical creativity in TechnoScienceSociety. What might have started as a curious experiment of researchers and hobbyists with 3D printing has formed a robust assemblage that produces and organizes technology and knowledge within and beyond the established institutions of industrial modernity. Not merely novel technical objects shape the becoming of TechnoScienceSociety but novel processes that organize and distribute technological skills and creativity. To turn towards these the chapter introduces the analytical concept of TechKnowledgy which highlights the practical and symbolic dimensions that organize the becoming of technology. With this conceptual apparatus open digital fabrication is then analysed to show that its TechKnowledgy is based upon desires for ‘openness’, the making public of technical objects and organizing collaborations. Open digital fabrication, however, is merely one case that shows how TechKnowledgies are transforming and multiplying in TechnoScienceSociety. Within these new assemblages of knowledge and technology science and technology studies might find new places for practical intervention as well.
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Notes
- 1.
For inspiring discussions and comments on this text, I want to thank Sascha Dickel, Bettina-Johanna Krings, Andreas Lösch, Sabine Maasen, Anne Seidenstücker, and the contributors of this book, who commented on a presentation of the argument.
- 2.
- 3.
The two case studies from which I draw from took place between 2013 and 2015 and involved expert interviews with practitioners in an open source development project for a laser cutter, the Lasersaur project, and participant observations and action research in which I was part of a group that set up a public and non-profit workshop to share digital fabrication machines, FabLab Karlsruhe. Both cases are analysed in detail in Schneider 2018.
- 4.
I draw on extensive qualitative empirical research including interviews with participants, participant observation, and action research in starting a FabLab. For an extensive analysis of the cases that feature in this text, FabLabs as a dynamic network of organisations, and the Lasersaur open source development project, see Schneider 2018.
- 5.
In fact, Noble and Deleuze and Guattari have a common intellectual inspiration in the work of Lewis Mumford (1970) and his analysis of the ‘mega machine’.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
Open digital fabrication is clearly inspired by the practices of Free Software that have been thoroughly analysed by Kelty 2008 – a classic study that was also inspirational for my work.
- 9.
Whether something is more or less ‘open’ is a question made possible by the ethos of openness. Doing research on this question remains within the frame of this ethos; seeing openness as an ethos that structures practices, however, is a meta-perspective.
- 10.
‘[Moral economy] examines and assesses the moral justifications of basic features of economic organisation, in particular property relations and what institutions and individuals are allowed and required to do. It also examines and assesses the moral influences on, and implications of, economic activities, and how economic practices and relations are evaluated as fair, unfair, good or bad by those involved in them.’ (Sayer 2015: 2)
- 11.
Warner’s ‘ontology’ of publics is, however, too narrowly focused on the circulation of texts to capture the publics of open source.
- 12.
Although, the Lasersaur’s materials cost between 5000 and 7000 €, this is still much cheaper than a similar commercial machine.
- 13.
In particular, ideas in nanotechnology, such as the ‘molecular assembler’ (Eric Drexler) and a ‘next industrial revolution’, spread widely and were incorporated into the early discursive framing of digital fabrication (Gershenfeld 2005) and nowadays feature in a broad discourse about a digitised industrial revolution (e.g., Rifkin 2014).
- 14.
They are unevenly global, however, with the densely technologised zones of rich countries dominating the global landscape of FabLabs, although they can be found on every continent by now. See also www.fablabs.io for an overview of the labs.
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Schneider, C. (2020). An Unfolding TechKnowledgy: Technology and Knowledge in Open Digital Fabrication. In: Maasen, S., Dickel, S., Schneider, C. (eds) TechnoScienceSociety. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43965-1_16
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