Researching makerspaces

Noisebridge Hackerspace – Photo by Mitch Altman

Together with colleague Hannah Stewart, I’ve just started working on a new research project for Nesta. Our objective is to map the current state of makerspaces in the UK, to provide a resource for people running a makerspace (or thinking about starting one), for researchers, policy makers and users.

It’s great to be back researching this area; a couple of years ago I did some not dissimilar research for O’Reilly, but while in that case, the output was business-focused and not something we could share freely, in this case, we’ll be producing an open data set that anyone can use.

We’re also planning on doing our work ‘in the open’, as much as possible, to work with the maker community and others to get the most useful data we can.

We’ll be carrying out our research over the winter, and reaching out to all of the publicly accessible makerspaces in the UK. If you’re interested in taking part, or want to know more about the project, check out the research blog on the Nesta website, or say to me or Hannah on Twitter.