Benefits of Establishing Makerspaces in Distributed Development Environment

Abstract

Makerspace is an innovative concept of working in a community based, semi-organized groups working to tinker, design, fabricate or develop, and market the ideas. The involvement of the community is vital to the success of every application of the makerspace concept. Some areas, like Science, Technology, Engineering, and Management (STEM) are among the extremely popular areas in the makerspace, while other popular areas include programming, and curriculum development. In such areas, where the community involvement is expected to be high, it is possible that the makerspace can’t accommodate all the individuals along with their equipment, at one place. Since the cost to develop the makerspace is high, we will be interested to see that how the small makerspaces can interact with the central makerspace to share the ideas and resources. In this paper, we investigate the popular areas of community involvement, opportunities and challenges in forming the distributed makerspaces, and also provide the analyses of their productivity in terms of problems solving, fabrication of small components, and software development. A model is proposed that provides a framework of conducting activities in distributed makerspaces and integrating the activities (project components) to form a product.