The maker movement in europe: Empirical and practitioner insights into sustainability

Abstract

In recent years, ICT has revolutionized content creation and communications. Today, everybody with Internet access can produce digital content composed of virtual ‘bits’ and make it instantly available across the globe. The same is now happening to manufacturing for all people with access to tools like 3D printers. This inter-changeability of bits and atoms is being called the maker movement, which started as a community-based, socially-driven bottom-up movement but is today also impacting mainstream manufacturing through increased efficiencies, distributed local production and the circular economy. The maker movement thus has significant promise for increasing social, economic, environmental and technical sustainability, but is it currently living up to this potential? The European-funded MAKE-IT project has examined these postulates through in-depth qualitative and quantitative empirical research.