This home is a factory: implications of the Maker movement on urban environments

This paper considers the matter of sites of production in view of recent technologically enabled trends toward the intersection of designing and making. These changes have been conceptualised as 'open design' or as 'consumer-as-producer' and they are specifically manifest in accessible and inexpensive 3D printing. We argue here that these developments reactivate the Arts and Crafts notion of personalised domestic-scale production in newly technologised and globally connected ways. Akin to the ideals of the 1970s Punk movement, amateurs can become agents of change as the open-source Maker movement provides individuals with the 'source code' to make, adapt and disseminate individualised products via information and communication technology (ICT) channels. This paper discusses the possible impacts of distributed making on our urban landscapes, with the increasing conflation of domestic, industrial and retail zones and what some have described as 'maker-friendly' cities.