WeekNotes for 2025 Week 10: Reading Illich in the Makerspace 1

Weeknotes are where I share what I’m working on / thinking about this week and a few things to share without worrying too much about the ideas being fully formed.

Thinking about

I’m going to use this space to slowly reflect onthe possible implications of Illich’s “Tools for Conviviality” for Makerspaces. Like all weeknotes posts, these are not meant to be fully coherent or even edited thoughts.

“It is now difficult to imagine a modern society in which industrial growth is balanced and kept in check by several complementary, distinct, and equally scientific modes of production. ==Our vision of the possible and the feasible is so restricted by industrial expectations that any alternative to more mass production sounds like a return to past oppression or like a Utopian design for noble savages.== In fact, however, the vision of new possibilities requires only the recognition that scientific discoveries can be used in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power and turns people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines. ==The second enlarges the range of each person’s competence, control, and initiative, limited only by other individuals’ claims to an equal range of power and freedom.==” Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich

It’s hard to describe why we should have sewing machines - yet alone knitting needles - in the Makerspace. Yes, sewing is a useful skill people will readily admin, but perhaps not one really relevant to post-industrial society. Maybe you justify it as a benefit for mental health. A good hobby, maybe. Or a skill that links us to the past and teaches students about technology. Or a way of increasing sustainability.

Often best if you can still link it with the myth of makerspaces as places for innovation: make it a tool for prototyping, find someone who wants to play with programmable textiles.

But really 95% of the time, our sewing machines are used to make or modify clothing. People come in to hem some pants or fix a strap on a backpack. Others make full historical replicas of 16th century Italian clothing. A lot of ribbon skirts have been made in the space. A surprising number of business students want to create brands to help launch a business.

I recently read that every piece of clothing is hand-made, there is really no automated making of any clothing. Hand-made clothing isn’t for the twee or privileged, but most of us externalize the costs to others, mostly people in the third world.

But sewing is also a tool that, in my mind perfectly “enlarges the range of each person’s competence, control, and initiative” while also not restricting our power and freedom. A sewing machine, in the right setting, like a home or a makerspace, is arguably a perfect example of a convivial tool as I understand them.

The skills you learn while sewing are real and robust. They last. We have a machine from the 1940s in the space that still works great. The design skills, the ability to plan and measure, to turn an idea into 3d reality, to fix problems along the way, transfer across domains.

I’d love to teach 3d design through sewing? Or sewing through 3d design? Could you do that?

Are 3D printers convivial tools in this sense? I suspect they can be, when used in the right way and in the right context. When open source and understandable.

I usually tell people 3d printing is like decorating a cake by squeezing icing from one of those bags (I clearly don’t bake). At its most basic level 3d printing is pretty simple.

In theory 3D printing returns some agency back to us from traditional manufacturing.

My favourite thing I’ve 3D printed was a tiny clip that stopped a folding whiteboard from falling over. It took me an hours to design and 5 minutes to print.

What about virtual reality? I suspect not. VR is still, maybe always will be, a tool that is primarily used for consumption. I’ve been part of trying to get things made for VR and it’s inherently difficult and expensive, and accessing what is made is the same.

Working on

This week is about making sure all the outreach and event plans for the rest of the term are in place:

• An Art in Community Class is making a quilt-style banner for us that will feature 80+ squares that need to be decorated by users and staff. They are going to run 4 events over the next couple weeks.
• A Repaire Cafe happening next week needs additional advertising and just making sure all the pieces are in place to make it successful. Usually, these have 100+ people attend, and the last one only had 30. We need to make this better.
• A welcome event and lunch for Indigenous students towards the end of the month. Need to make sure invites are out and lunch is ordered.