I’ve organised a RCUK Digital Economy CDT Network- funded workshop leaning on the principles of a barCamp for researchers across the UK who are interested in making/crafts/hacking and maker culture on the day before MakerFaire UK 2014 last weekend (if you want more information about it, either ask me or check out the webpage), and the feedback I’ve received was quite good – My aim for this workshop was to get a feel of what “maker research” in the UK is focussing on and what the topics of interest from an academic perspective are, and I do think that goal has been achieved, thanks to everyone who participated and shared their thoughts on the subject!

We’ve had quite a lively mix of participants, from hardware hackers to documentary makers, creative communities such as the comic maker scene to crowdsourcing topics, textile crafters and many many more.

The entire event was organised in a very ad-hoc manner, with only two weeks time from registration opening to the event happening, the turnout turned out to be very good, and we’re going to keep the conversations we’ve started alive, so I’m as happy as I can possibly be!

MakerFaire itself was awesome too, had good chats with awesome folks, among those the EPIK project, who are enabling kids to learn programming in Java by developing mods for Minecraft, and the always-inspiring Nottingham Hackspace  as well as the Hackspace Foundation folks, who are trying to connect all hackspaces across the UK to share knowledge within these.

A big thank you for everyone involved in making this happen, especially David Green and the Digital Interaction Group at Newcastle University’s Culture Lab, who provided us with their workshop area to set the proper scene for our gathering!

 

[edit: the RCUK Digital Economy Network now has its own website, therefore I updated the link]