This paper sets out some of our vision of future makespaces and redistributed manufacture, a pragmatic future vision, that reflects the state of makespaces now, tests ideas and aspirations of education and circular economy, and uses insights from those studies to imagine a future and its implications.
The context for this future scoping is the Future Makespaces in Redistributed Manufacture (FMs RdM) Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) project at the Royal College of Art. Over two years, we will be hosting symposia, funding feasibility studies and undertaking cross cutting research to understand the potential relationship of makespaces to redistributed manufacture and sustainability.
‘Re-Distributed Manufacturing’, is a term which aims to encapsulate the rapidly changing geographies, organizational structures, value chains and distribution networks associated with new advances in materials sciences, engineering, digital and enabling technologies. It is akin to ‘on shoring’, but recognizes that the future of manufacturing will operate on a variety of scales according to specialism and material flows.
We consider that redistributed manufacture is a term that should not apply simply to the inevitable future of business as usual. Our framing of redistributed manufacture, taking advantage of ubiquitous computation and distributed infrastructure has the potential to apply to a different future state of production, one which is desirable not inevitable, which responds to the imperatives of our time and builds a production system fit for humans. As Sloan (2015) emphasises in his recent reflection on the sharing economy:
We are alive at a time when huge systems—industrial, infrastructural—are being remade, and I think it’s our responsibility as we make choices both commercial and civic…to extrapolate forward, and ask ourselves: Is this a system I want to live inside? Is this a system fit for humans? (Sloan 2015)