Makerspaces Will Save Us…? A Conversation With Daniel Charny & David Li

Innovation, acceleration, regeneration, revolution – terms repeatedly cast alongside the UK’s emergent maker culture. But have Osborne’s marching makers succeeded in repairing the UK’s ailing manufacturing industry as expected? Have the roots of a third industrial revolution arisen from makerspaces as anticipated?

Today, makers and makerspaces find themselves encapsulated within a speculative bubble of ballooning expectation and hopeful hype. And as civic, social, fiscal and educational responsibilities grow, will this inflated accountability prove to be the pin that bursts the bubble?

Join us for an evening of lively discussion and debate with Daniel Charny and David Li - two thought-leaders at the forefront of UK and Chinese maker cultures - to talk bubbles, growing pains, expectations and realities. The evening’s discussion will be kick started by Nesta senior researcher Tom Saunders, who will share insight and recent outcomes of Nesta's ongoing research into UK and Chinese makerspaces.

Professor Daniel Charny is a London based creative consultant, curator and design educator. He is Creative Director at From Now On, a research studio and creative consultancy. He holds a number of creative leadership roles including Creative Director of the British Council’s global Maker Library Network and non-Executive Director of the Central Research Laboratory, a hardware incubator in West London. He is the co-founder and director of Fixperts, a creative social platform and design education programme.

He has been deeply involved in design education for over two decades including 14 years teaching at the Royal College of Art. He is a regular contributor to conferences, think-tanks, design juries and professional advisory boards. He is Professor of Design at Kingston University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His curatorial projects include the influential Power of Making exhibition and public programme (2011, V&A Museum).

David Li has been contributing to open source software since 1990. He is a member of the Free Software Foundation, committer to Apache projects and board director of ObjectWeb. In 2010, he co-founded XinCheJian, the first hackerspace in China to promote hacker/maker culture and open source hardware. In 2011, he co-founded Hacked Matter, a think tank on makers and open innovation. In 2015, he co-founded Maker Collider, a platform to develop next generation IoT. He is also the director of Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab.

Moderated by Liz Corbin, Institute of Making / Open Workshop Network