The onset of COVID-19 led many makers to dive deeply into the potential applications of their work to help with the pandemic. Our group’s efforts on this front, all of which were collaborations with a variety of people from multiple universities, led me to this reflective talk about the additional work that is needed for us to take the next step towards democratizing fabrication.
This talk is based on a series of papers studying and working with people who make, including the following recent COVID-related papers:
Megan Hofmann, Udaya Lakshmi, Kelly Mack, Scott E. Hudson, Rosa I. Arriaga, Jennifer Mankoff: The Right to Help and the Right Help: Fostering and Regulating Collective Action in a Medical Making Reaction to COVID-19. CHI 2021: 654:1-654:13- Udaya Lakshmi, Megan Hofmann,Kelly Mack, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, Rosa I. Arriaga: Medical Maker Response to COVID-19: Distributed Manufacturing Infrastructure for Stopgap Protective Equipment. CHI 2021: 426:1-426:13