Our Process

In 2015, we decided to investigate how people were radically creating and maintaining equitable and welcoming makerspaces. Why? Because we were worried. While we saw the “makerspace movement” expanding, it wasn’t clear whether the democratizing mission was still in focus [1,2]. If the trend shifted from egalitarian to elitist, then what was the point? 

The design of these cards is based on an NSF-funded research project that involved visits and interviews with people participating in what we deemed as liberatory makerspaces. This meant that participants and their organizations were focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) values like: 

1. Expanding what counts as making [3,4] 
2. Fostering open, flexible, and welcoming environments 
3. Including and valuing diverse cultural knowledge and practices [5,6] 
4. Encouraging process as well as product, and 
5. Expanding the outcomes of making to include agency, identity, and the after-life of maker projects. [7] 

Our research methods were focused on learning from actual people working in actual makerspaces. Supported by an NSF grant, we traveled to visit numerous makerspace partners. We recorded our visits and conversations (with their permission and approval from the Virginia Tech Institutional Review Board (IRB 16-433)).

We then held an Unconference at the 2018 Nation of Makers conference [8] where representatives from each of our partner sites gathered with other maker leaders to discuss DEI efforts and challenges. All Unconference attendees agreed to participate in our study, so we were able to record and take notes on their discussions.

We then gathered a team of researchers to read and analyze transcriptions of our data for themes and ideas that would be good to share with others. We also checked back in with many of the participants as we started to create the action cards. The quotes that appear on the action cards come from this real data — we keep the actual wording where possible and sometimes paraphrase for clarity. 

References