Makerspaces and the Dirt Way of Learning

Makerspaces are dirt spaces.

Dirt as in the “dirt way of learning” identified by Rogers Hall, Geoff Bowker, and Susan Leigh Star (as cited in Berglund and Kohtala 2020). The dirt way is the messy process learners adopt when they get to the “right answer” by following the “wrong” process. It is also how people find lateral moves to work around bureaucratic structures.

The dirt way of learning is marked by vagueness and uncertainty about aims combined with a high commitment to learning.

In the Makerspace, we are often not sure what exactly we are doing or how to get there. Goals are rarely directly connected with institutional learning outcomes. But we are committed to finding out, often far more so than makes rational sense.

Makerspaces are also dirt in the sense of compost: rich, generative, and alive with unexpected creatures; full of worms and broken eggshells. This is the sense of “dirt way” developed by Berglund and Kohtala. Not dirty in the sense of “unclean,” though that is often also true, but dirty in the sense of being conceptually messy. These are spaces that are not “cleaned” through the process of purification that brings ideas into the corridors of power, experts, and capital, where they become means of instrumental and extractive purposes.

“the dirt metaphor conveys the ad hoc, dialogic and embodied way small-scale activist projects define and reach towards sustainability-supporting objectives. ‘Dirt’ here captures a critical STS insight about how knowledge is ‘purified’ in order to give it power, but it also points to human bodies, substances and experiences that will not be contained, something increasingly highlighted in relation to the future coexistence of humans and others” (Berglund and Kohtala 2020)

References

Berglund, Eeva, and Cindy Kohtala. 2020. “Collaborative Confusion among DIY Makers.” Science & Technology Studies 33 (2): 102–19. https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.60812.