Lead Essay

By Stine Broen Christensen & Asger Nørregård Rasmussen

As the capital of Denmark, Copenhagen is the epicenter of experimental and innovative design practice. Just like most capitals and major cities, Copenhagen makes the scene for the majority of Danish craft, design and engineering schools that each year hatch a substantial amount of creatives within architecture, design, fashion, art, engineering and innovative craftsmanship. Add to this a great amount of makerspaces, shared workshops and fablabs that - compared to Copenhagen's population - are very well represented and offer access to shared equipment and communities to the 620.000 citizens of Copenhagen - with a presumed ratio of 1 maker per 620 citizens. Together, this innovative context creates a fruitful potential for experimentation, collaboration and distributed design activities in the local creative industries that currently count for 6% of the total businesses and employment in Copenhagen. Presently, new local policy strategies have been initiated to increase this substantial number in the coming years.

On a European level well over 800 fablabs and makerspaces - an average of 30 per EU28 country goes to show that this new creative paradigm, focused on collaboration, connectedness and access, has come to stay. Working in an association like Maker, we witness the growth and growing mobility of this European movement on a daily basis - 1 in 8 makers and co-creators of our annual Copenhagen Maker Festival are foreigners, some of which travel to the occasion, others settling in Copenhagen and finding a natural starting point for their enterprises in one of regions 10+ spaces.

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Maker was founded in 2015 around the goal to foster, develop, and promote talent, knowledge and methods from the growing local and global maker and design communities. As a non-profit association we do this through open and holistic approaches that engage local talent and industry, professionals and private citizens in collaborative activities and shared experiences that foster a local ecosystem from zero-to-maker-to-market and experiment with unfolding the full potentials of creative design and maker practices with Copenhagen as our playground.

In 2016 we opened Underbroen - a shared workshop and collaborative space for creative talent in the design and maker communities - to meet the need for a professional, semi-industrial productive space for Copenhagen. The space is a hybrid entity itself, as it is managed by the association Maker and the private company BetaLab. BetaLab are running two other makerspaces - betaFactory, which is a 2000 square meter flexible factory, and a makerspace for artisans in Helsingør.

Underbroen has been running as a prototype and prefabrication facility in the field of urban and local production ever since. It is a fully furnished workshop with tools for digital and more traditional hardware production currently shared by 40 members most of which are micro entrepreneurs and startups in the fields of architecture, furniture, art, light, and leather design, creative engineering and interaction design. Some of these members are fresh out of school, some still students, some recently quit their full time job while others have been running their own design and production businesses for years. This group of multidisciplinary creatives typically work as independent makers or small companies (1-4 persons). During the lifespan of Underbroen, more and more members are beginning to make a living from local and digital fabrication and design - it is all about professionalizing the maker community.

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When one workshop becomes a micro-factory with 40 experts: FABLABS AS PLATFORMS FOR DISTRIBUTED LABOR

Workshops as Underbroen are hubs designed for distributed labor, co-operation and improvised collaboration. When money talks, necessity is the Mother of collaboration. The business potential of sharing access to production facilities and tools for digital fabrication has led to the foundation of local fablabs and makerspaces. The members at Underbroen and in most other shared workshops around the world do not have the necessary resource to own and run their own workshops. Instead they crowdsource an abundance of technologies and tools that they, on their own, could only dream of using. When time is scarce, learning, research and development turn into knowledge sharing communities of practice, local at a workshop-level and global on online platforms. When every expertise is available in your workshop community, you start developing business models around ad hoc engagements and distributed labor.

Underbroen is designed to work as a prototyping and prefabrication facility. We don't have fees for machine usage or booking systems - except on out CNC mill - and we run a small 'Makershop' where the most common prototyping materials are offered at cost prices. This system works as intended. Our members use the machines when they need to - jumping from one workstation to another in often improvised ways, do quick experiments and fast prototyping. Being in the same physical space, working side by side gives way to much valuable shared learning, sparring and tutoring and creates a fruitful learning environment, both for longtime members and newcomers.

Underbroen (Credit: Asger Nørregård Rasmussen)

Underbroen is shared by startups, independent makers and SME owners with backgrounds in different fields, various disciplines and the combined experience of a large-size design business department. In many ways, Underbroen has developed both informal and formal structures of a co-operated design studio with 40 highly skilled experts in design, business and production models inhouse - ones you would pay hundreds of Euros for just a few hours of R&D consultancy elsewhere. And the best part is: they love to work on each others projects! This flexibility is an important asset in spaces like Underbroen. Furthermore, the model functions as a continuing education and skills development system where new, lesser-skilled members are taken under the wings of the more experienced as they hire and engage in one another in projects - and they get paid for their apprenticeship as they learn by observing how others run their businesses, organize productions and handle customers.

We truly believe in the distributed model we have developed over the past three years and experiences from the Distributed Design Market Platform project has made us even better at understanding what our members and surrounding community do, want, and need and has equipped us to better support the growth of new collaborative business models. As writing this, we are taking the first steps on co-creating a joint collaborative platform for all fablabs and makerspaces in the Capital Region from a common acknowledgement that we need and dream of the same things - some of them being technology, knowhow and the good company of fellow makers - even if we are working in different fields of interest.

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How do we design for collaboration?

So what makes these distributed labor models work? How do we design for collaboration?‌

Proximity: the existence of a physical space with shared production facilities creates a community of practice around the values of openness, sharing, working and learning together, eventually employing others to work as experts on one another's projects. This proximity is also found in the form of open source communities where knowledge sharing and 'working out loud' are key activities.

Connectivity: the connectivity (both atoms and bits), interconnectedness and network within labs are key to success when talking about distributed labour and design. Many professional independent designers and makers are hard working bees, and work a lot to make a living from design and production. Therefore, guidance, gatekeeping and matchmaking often are fostered by managers or other staff within such labs, which benefit both the makers, the projects and the lab as a vibrant space.

Multidisciplinarity and a vibrant space: in relation to connectivity, multidisciplinarity is a key to the success of distributed labour in fablabs and makerspaces. Just like in traditional companies, many different competencies, interests and knowledges are present in labs. This enables a perfect opportunity to (learning from the interconnectedness, networking and matchmaking) utilize and invest in other people from the community on projects. The result when done right is a highly flexible, skilled and much appreciated way of working on projects, product development and/or production. This can be understood as a modern way of working with apprenticeships, where both the experienced and less experienced gain valuable knowledge and help.

Continuous training and skills development: In order to maintain a vibrant and innovative working environment such as the ones in fablabs and makerspaces, it is important to continuously offer courses and events that enhances skills and knowledge within the community.

Trust and transparency: From a management point of view it is important to continuously understand the actual needs and interests from the community in order to provide the best possible services and facilities, which also plays an important role in how the community will interact with the space and create ownership. In Underbroen we try to limit the amount of rules and bureaucratic systems, as we believe in a transparent system relying on trust and collective responsibility.