3D printing and university makerspaces: surveying countercultural communities in institutional settings

This article reports on an investigation into two experimental “Digismith” workshops held at an Australian university’s School of Engineering that aimed to provide open source education in 3D printing to university students and the general public. The research employed semi-structured interviews and surveys of participants that mirrored previous work on 3D printing communities, while our discussion develops assessments of the political economy of the course curriculum and practice. We suggest the social practice of 3D printing arises from a twin tradition of industrial design and countercultural garage-workshops. As 3D printing becomes a more common subject for tertiary and secondary schooling, educators can take lessons from these histories to flesh out curricula. The Digismith workshops were informed by both classical lecture-discussion-application based models of learning as well as problem-based learning and more radical forms of peer-to-peer learning. We found the tensions between these sometime competing pedagogies to illustrate a peripheral, but fluid space interstitial to the teaching philosophy common to tertiary institutions and the more radical hacker maker spaces that the course attempted to emulate.