Thursday 2 October 2014

STEPS Centre's Adrian Smith on grassroots prototyping at SCORAI Europe

Adrian Smith, STEPS Grassroots Innovation project convenor, will talk about grassroots prototyping past and present to a SCORAI (Europe) workshop on sustainable consumption at Kingston University today.

The flourishing of community-based workshops for prototyping new forms of production and consumption using versatile digital design and fabrication technologies can learn from similar community workshops in the past. Experiences with Technology Networks in London in the early 1980s, for example, points to how important are matters of material culture, social movements, and political economy are to these workshops.

The presentation draws on SPRU/STEPS research on grassroots innovation, particularly grassroots digital fabrication.

For more information about the workshop, see the event page (Kingston University website).

Further reading
Two SPRU Working papers and a STEPS Working paper relate to the work: