The maker movement in Europe: empirical and theoretical insights into sustainability

16 pages•Published: May 10, 2018

Jeremy Millard, Marie Nicole Sorivelle, Orfeas Konstantinos Katsikis, Elisabeth Unterfrauner and Christian Voigt

Abstract

In recent years, ICT has revolutionized content creation and communications. Today, everybody with Internet access can produce digital content composed of virtual ‘bits’ and make it instantly available across the globe. The same is now happening to manufacturing for all people with access to tools like 3D printers. This inter- changeability of bits and atoms is being called the maker movement, which started as a community-based, socially-driven bottom-up movement but is today also impacting mainstream manufacturing through increased efficiencies, distributed local production and the circular economy. The maker movement thus has significant promise for increasing social, economic, environmental and technical sustainability, but is it currently living up to this potential? The European-funded MAKE-IT project has examined these postulates through in-depth qualitative and quantitative empirical research.

Keyphrases: grassroots movements facilitated by ict, maker movement, sustainable community building via ict

In: Birgit Penzenstadler, Steve Easterbrook, Colin Venters and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (editors). ICT4S2018. 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Sustainability, vol 52, pages 227-242.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/XKql
	https://doi.org/10.29007/8lsf

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{ICT4S2018:maker_movement_Europe_empirical,
  author    = {Jeremy Millard and Marie Nicole Sorivelle and Orfeas Konstantinos Katsikis and Elisabeth Unterfrauner and Christian Voigt},
  title     = {The maker movement in Europe: empirical and theoretical insights into sustainability},
  booktitle = {ICT4S2018. 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Sustainability},
  editor    = {Birgit Penzenstadler and Steve Easterbrook and Colin Venters and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Computing},
  volume    = {52},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-7340},
  url       = {/publications/paper/XKql},
  doi       = {10.29007/8lsf},
  pages     = {227-242},
  year      = {2018}}

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