Me-to-We Design: How Can a Makerspace Nurture the Building of a Collaborative Community?

Makerspaces provide communal access to resources such as 3D printers, laser cutters, electronics equipment, and sewing machines. This way, makerspaces aspire to facilitate their users – the so-called makers – in acquiring craft skills, creating products, learning about technology, and meeting other mak-ers. The collaborative qualities of the makerspace community are key to this aspiration. Yet, just like many non-makerspace initiatives, makerspaces of-ten struggle to foster and sustain a collaborative community. In this study, we use the model of me-to-we design to analyze a makerspace that has suc-ceeded in nurturing a collaborative community. We disentangle the mak-erspace activities into the five stages of the model and, on that basis, arrive at six principles for nurturing collaborative makerspace communities: (1) ac-cept diverse entry and end points, (2) plan for transitions, (3) help makers devise meaningful projects, (4) encourage sharing and lightweight documen-tation, (5) collaborate toward communal goals, and (6) attend to the social.