Making Spaces
Could Maker Spaces Help Communities Make Better Places?
One of my fondest memories of visiting a museum as a civilian visitor has to be attending the Maker Faires at New York Hall of Science. So much multidisciplinary creativity! So much whimsy and fun. Also - plenty of people hacking for better world, making dirt cheap medical tests, DIY environmental monitoring tools - you name it.
When it comes maker spaces, I wonder whether museums could be pushing this “make a better world” angle harder. Yes, getting visitors to use STEAM skills to make a tangible *thing* has inherent value. A lot of value. Developing hands-on exhibits is my life’s work, so I obviously believe that this kind of learning makes a better world. And I’m familiar with opportunities like See3D that allows makers to print objects for people with visual disabilities, which adds in empathy and perspective taking. But I think there’s more a maker space could do.
(Re)Making A Neighborhood
When I attended Next City’s Vanguard 2023 conference in Richmond, VA, we visited the Storefront for Community Design. The storefront offers hands-on design workshops and provides low-cost design and planning assistance projects that help people create and implement projects that improve their neighborhood. Their work bridges the significant gaps (in power and resources) between the folks who typically control the development of the City’s built environment and the folks who are affected by that development (or lack of development). I like their examples:
“Our community-led projects range from assisting a high school student to envision her idea for an urban mini-farm, to guidance on storefront and facade improvements for small businesses, to collaborating with youth and young adults to create a vision for a neighborhood food forest, and to a community visioning that empowered residents to share their ideas for the new use of an old bank building.”
~ The Storefront for Community Design
This is not a “maker space” per se, though there are plenty of hands-on materials and design curricula. But it immediately got me thinking “what if?” with my planning-curious museum person hat on. Why can’t maker spaces be places where people do planning-relevant work that gets them involved in the design of their city or town?
What if kids living near a public park could build and manipulate models of a playground or a skate park to communicate to city council their ideas for an upcoming park overhaul? What if a community center and its neighbors could design and make the materials they need for a tactical urbanism intervention? What if a group of store owners could use maker space tools to launch a Park(ing) Day event to their retail district? In each case, folks would be using design thinking and prototyping – fantastic learning goals – but applying it to their built environment.
I’ve written in the past about how the Exploratorium’s Studio for Public Spaces’ Middle Ground exhibition rewrites the social script for public spaces. What the Storefront for Community Design does, and these examples above, could do is let people do the public space script-doctoring themselves.
Urban Rooms
One Other Thought. For museums that happen to be in the right street front location, there’s the option of taking this to concept a step further by creating an Urban Room. According to The Future of Small Cities Institute,
“An Urban Room is a flexible concept—it’s a community and event space situated at sidewalk level that allows citizens to debate, explore, and create ideas about the future of their neighborhood and their city. An Urban Room can host events and neighborhood meetings; it can display exhibitions; it can be a space of study and reflection and art-making or simply a place for hanging out. An Urban Room is a civic space to bring a community together and tell the story of where people live.”
~ The Urban Room, The Future of Small Cities Institute
Are You Already Doing This?
These ideas sound like things that some maker spaces are already doing. But when I asked in a maker space forum whether any museums were doing this planning-related work, I got very little response. I am a bit suspicious of that lack – there probably are some folks out there. Maybe I hit summer vacation times when people weren’t on the forum. (If you’re out there, please let me know: betsy@exploringexhibits.com)
However, I also suspect that a lot more places could, with the right collaborators, turn their maker space into a Make My Community Better Space.
~ Betsy Loring1
The Planning-Curious Museum Person
Sharing stories and ideas for other Planning-Curious Museum People and for Museum-Curious Planning People.
I am the founder of expLoring exhibits & engagement. I’ve got over 20 years’ experience in project management and exhibit development in multidisciplinary, indoor and outdoor museum settings. My services include exhibit master planning, content and interactive development, evaluation, and writing, with a focus on hands-on STEM. I also offer staff training in exhibition planning, formative evaluation, and prototyping. My special interests include multi-institutional collaborations, peer-to-peer professional development, and of course – collaboration with municipal planning practitioners.