Dorothé Smit

Makerspaces offer individuals the opportunity to bring ideas to life, access specialised tools and machinery, and join a community, thus potentially enhancing psychological needs for competence and relatedness. However, these benefits may not be equally accessible across all genders, as makerspaces are often dominated by young, educated men. To explore this, we conducted an online survey with 102 makerspace users and 259 non-users. The survey included questions on psychological concepts and open-ended questions aimed at identifying factors that prevent or encourage makers from using makerspaces. Our findings reveal that while the openness in makerspaces enhances need fulfillment for females, it has the opposite effect on males, a phenomenon we discuss in the context of social identification. Additionally, we found that the atmosphere of a makerspace influences its usage across all genders. We conclude with recommendations for designing makerspaces for all genders, emphasising the importance of aligning the space’s offering with its users’ needs, fostering an open atmosphere, and promoting an inclusive makerspace landscape.

Interest in making, crafting, and tinkering persists across hobbyist pursuits, professional applications, and academic research endeavors. However, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of the journey individuals undertake to develop respective identities, which, in turn, seem to define how people develop practices, make use of infrastructures, and become part of networks. In this half-day workshop, we aim to explore such biographies and identities, asking how maker, crafter, or tinkerer identities are developed and how they change during people’s lives. Participants will bring snippets of their making (such as artifacts, materials, tools, etc.) with them as means to reflect individually and discuss together. The envisioned outcome is a collection of relevant variables of maker, crafter, and tinkerer biographies and identities to be articulated as inspiration for future making, and as motivation to break down potential barriers.

This paper examines the profile of 10 women* makers attending Schmiede, a 10-day maker festival, which is unique not least due to its almost equal gender distribution. Drawing on interviews with women* attendees, we describe general struggles in fitting in the culture of spaces for making, the role of mentorship in childhood and adulthood, motivations and different approaches for engaging in making, limiting factors in (art-)making, and the consequences of sexism for making practice. We then discuss the characteristics of these women* makers in relation to existing literature about the culture in maker spaces and festivals and conclude by highlighting characteristics of the observed festival that may have resulted in more inclusive access for women* and other underrepresented groups.