Mechanisms of exploitation and empowerment in health innovation themed open design events

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Mechanisms of exploitation and empowerment

in health innovation themed open design events

Master’s thesis

Name: Joost Kaan UvA ID: 6052940

Track: Cultural Sociology Supervisor: Christian Broër Date: August 2018

Location: Amsterdam Word count: 22,309

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Abstract:

Social science scholars warn for the inherently exploitative nature of commercial design events. Research into whether this is also true in open design events is sparse however. This research set out to identify mechanisms of exploitation and empowerment that can be identified in one such open design event. A case study of the MakeHealth: Prototyping workshops, hosted by Waag, was undertaken using critical theory. Several mechanisms of exploitation and empowerment were identified but relatively more mechanisms of empowerment were found compared to commercial design events. This is argued to be in a large part the result of the relative lack of commercial incentives in open design events because of the open design philosophy they adhere. This philosophy attracts certain archetypical categories of participants with differing rationales, each with their strengths and challenges.

1 Introduction

Design events have seen an enormous rise in prevalence in the last ten years because of their potential for innovation (Figure 1). Their growth in popularity is partially because they fit into “the current zeitgeist of social innovation” (Johnson & Robinson, 2014: 349) and the techno-optimism that has become ever more present since the digital revolution (Grazian, 2004). The rise of design events has been met with some concern from social science scholars, warning for their inherent exploitative nature: design events often include precarious working conditions and co-optation of both ownership and labour for their participants. In this sense, the growth in popularity of design events also fits into the current wave of neoliberal labour policies (Zukin & Papadantonakis, 2017).

Two sorts of design events can be distinguished; open design events and commercial design events. The former category is part of a larger movement called the maker movement, an artisan subculture based on designing and tinkering that often manifests itself in meet-ups and design events such as

hackathons, and the latter category is associated with Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture that

manifests itself in commercial hackathons and start-up weekends. Most of the research into the exploitative nature of design events concerns commercial design events. This research aims to explore the similarities and differences between open and commercial design events in order to infer whether the concerns about commercial design events are also applicable to open design events.

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5 Figure 1: World-wide google searches for ‘start up weekend’ + ‘hackathon’ over time. Source: Google Trends. The maker movement has been predicted to be a potential solution to society’s most pressing issues (Lee, 2015). Correspondingly, an increasing amount of corporate and legislative bodies including national and intra-national governments are funding projects aimed at organising and educating maker communities. Research into design events and maker communities is therefore much needed. This research consists of a case study of the ambitious eight-week open source design event MakeHealth: Prototyping (MH:P) organised by Waag, institute for technology & society, in Amsterdam.

The MH:P workshops brought together citizens from all sorts of disciplines to work together on health challenges that participants themselves were facing. Every Thursday night, from 20:00 onwards, participants were welcome at Waag’s spectacular location De Waag, situated in the middle of the Nieuwmarkt in central Amsterdam, to work on their products. Participants were facilitated in all their design needs; materials, machinery, and design expertise to guide them along the way. At the end of the event, six prototypes for innovative health products were presented to an audience of interested listeners.

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6 Two things made the MH:P workshops stand out to me; its theme and its philosophy. Firstly, Waag believes in the open design philosophy, which is focussed around careful documentation of design processes and publicly making this documentation available for others to learn and build upon. Open design is in its essence synonymous to open source, with the extra connotation of also working on physical products rather than exclusively software.

Secondly, the MH:P workshops revolved around a specific theme: health. Design events are often built around a specific theme or challenge, but rarely are these themes so integral to our existence and autonomy as human beings. I expected this theme to play a decisive role in people’s engagement with the event.

Waag amongst other things strives to empower citizens through organizing events. I was charmed by Waag’s social reputation when I started this research and I felt sceptical about finding precarious working conditions or exploitation in any of their events because of this. At the same time, I know that the intentions of institutions often do not match the practical outcomes they have on people’s lives. Participants of MH:P could be experiencing exploitation despite Waag’s intention to empower. I was interested in investigating in how far a discrepancy between intention and outcome existed within design events organised by Waag and, in a greater scope, within the open design philosophy.

I opted to use multiple data gathering methods because of the subtle workings of exploitation and co-optation and because it is generally the best way to obtain accurate data (Glaser 1965). I was inspired by the critical theory approach, which aims to study societal problems in their totality through interdisciplinary means. I used a combination of historical analysis to sketch the genesis of design events, network analysis to identify power relations, and ethnographic observation and interviews to investigate the MH:P workshops. I observed forms of engagement within the MH:P workshops and asked respondents to reflect on their engagement. In all these endeavours I focussed on the question:

which mechanisms of exploitation and empowerment can be identified in open design events?

The emphasis lies on the interviews and the other data types allow for contextualization and triangulation. Interviews alone would have likely not been enough, due to the fact that people are often not cognisant of exploitation. Triangulation would make it possible for me to reach the deeper meanings behind my respondents’ words, much as a great inspiration to me, Ann Swidler, did in her book Talk of Love. I expected respondents to have all sorts of narratives explaining their rationale for participation in MH:P. I needed to be able to look beyond those narratives to be able to truly discern the exploitative and/or empowering mechanisms at play.

Chapter 2 will introduce the theoretical framework needed for this investigation, and chapter 3 will discuss the research design I chose in further detail. Chapter 4 will concern the genesis of design

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7 events and the structural context of the MH:P workshops. I had little experience with design events when I started this research. In order to make myself familiar with the topic, I needed to know more about innovation itself; its processes, its subculture, its jargon. This was made possible by Waag, where I had the opportunity to get to know the institute and get to know the design and innovation culture. My initial impressions were that this subculture was relatively small but relatively tightknit and with a strong historical foundation. As such, I started this research with a historical analysis of

open source and the maker movement. This yielded an account that starts with Linus Torvalds, the

creator of the Linux kernel and the father of open source, and ends with Neil Gershenfeld, the founder of fabrication labs and the maker movement. This context is crucial to understanding the sociological relevance of the case and will be introduced in paragraph 4.1. Paragraph 4.2 will continue in the contemporary time, describing the structural context of the MH:P workshops.

Chapter 5 will attempt to answer the questions posed by this research. Paragraph 5.1 will compare the MH:P workshops with commercial design events on a structural level. Paragraph 5.2 will focus on the rationale of participants. It will be separated into subparagraphs, each dealing with a specific rationale narrative and the archetypical categories of participants that can be associated with the narrative. Subparagraphs will consist of data, interpretations of the data, and the sociological implications the data has for exploitation and empowerment. 5.3 will bring together all the data of this research and form a general statement on the differences between commercial and open design events. Paragraph 5.4 will discuss the sociological implications of this research for broader themes such as open design. All the implications will later be brought together and summarized in the conclusion.

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2 Theoretical framework

This chapter considers existing theories in the fields of technology, design and agency. It serves to explain the ontological position of this research and to introduce the theories that inspired it. Paragraph 2.1 will introduce theories on technology and the digital revolution. Paragraph 2.2 will introduce agency and its relevance to the digital revolution. Lastly, paragraph 2.3 will posit this research within the structure – agency debate.

Faith in technology

The question of how technology influences our lives has never been more relevant than now. Experts have been aware of negative consequences of digital technology for some time now, most extensively reflected in The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells (2010). The recent storm of controversies concerning social media as a force of division (Sunstein 2017) is putting this pool of knowledge in a renewed spotlight. This paragraph will attempt to situate this research within this pool by discussing some of the frontrunners of techno-optimism, such as Lawrence Lessig, and the technorealism of scholars such as David Grazian.

Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Harvard and founder of the Creative Commons, believes in the cultural potential of digital technology because of its ability to bring together a wide range of people to participate in creative production (Lessig, 2004: 2). He points to the “Rip, mix, and burn” culture that became prominent in the 1990’s, which enabled people to take cultural products they loved, change it into something new, and then share it through the internet with other culture remixers. Digital technology offers people “digital tools that people can use to express and recreate the culture around them” (idem., 2004). As a result, a new type of consumer arose:

[T]echnology has created the digital consumer. Digital consumers are different from analog consumers. The analog consumer was the couch potato - passive, programmed, broadcast to. The digital consumer is active, rather than passive. She programs, rather than is programmed. And in peer-to-peer manner, she spreads her creativity to the many, rather than receiving it broadcast from the few. (idem., 2004)

Thousands of examples of success stories can be identified but scholars rightly relativize this techno-optimism. David Grazian points to the tendency of digital technology-oriented research “to treat technological advancement uncritically without exploring the tentative and evolutionary nature of digital production itself” (2005: 209). He argues that the excitement surrounding the digital age relies on widely held, but questionable assumptions, such as the belief that digital advancement forebodes a Marxian revolution that will reorganize social relations (idem.: 210). This discourse of digital revolution, whilst widespread, must be critically assessed and somewhat curbed:

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Discourses surrounding the rise of the digital age commonly emphasize the taken-for-granted nature of technology and its highly deterministic impact on the production of culture. This type of technological determinism, however, should be tempered by two long-standing sociological findings: first, while culture producing activities are certainly shaped by the technological contexts in which they are embedded, they are not shaped only by such factors but by an array of social, cultural, and material forces, including localized norms of behavior, preconfigured institutional strategies, organizational structures, legal constraints (both de facto and de jure), and the dictates of the commercial marketplace. Also, while the increased popularity of the Internet has contributed to the emergence of Web-based media, it has also been put to a variety of innovative and unforeseen uses. This leads to a second caveat: different social actors will respond to this afore mentioned constellation of variables by embarking on notably divergent paths to success and failure (and sometimes both). (Idem.: 211)

Put into simpler words, the digital revolution can go either way, either leading to the empowerment or the exploitation of individuals, depending on the constellation of variables, which I will refer to as the structural context, and the attitudes of relevant actors. Consequently, this research aims to empirically ascertain empowering and exploitative mechanisms by both studying the structural context of cultural production and the attitudes of the actors within the realm of cultural production. Specifically, this research will look at the realm of design. Design events offer an interesting case of cultural production because design events are a physical and tangible manifestation of online cooperative cultural production. They rely on the information sharing and socially connecting potential of digital technology. Furthermore, design events fit into the current zeitgeist of social

innovation (Johnson & Robinson, 2014: 349) and the techno-optimism that has become ever more

present (Grazian, 2005) since the rise of the internet (www.internetworldstats.com): they are founded on the belief that individuals can make a change and that technology can be a means to that end. It is up to the people making technology to choose in which way this change will go.

Power and agency

Technology is man-made, and because of this, human agency plays a central role in the future direction of the digital revolution. Agency, in short, is the capacity of individuals to make their own choices. It is a concept with an extensive historical and philosophical background and it has seen many iterations since Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. In the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, humans are said to derive their agency based on an a priori moral code he called the Categorical Imperative (CI). This idea is no longer widely supported in contemporary theory. What Kant considered to be moral is now more often considered to be a cultural code. All sorts of theories have been suggested for the ways in which this cultural code is formed and how it affects individuals, from Elias’ social control

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10 towards self-control to George Herbert Mead’s the generalized other. The latter concept, coined in 1934, represents an individuals’ subconscious internalization of the common expectations of other people, which helps an individual clarify his own role within society. It can be said for all the theories developed on the subject of cultural codes that they can both restrict and contribute to individual agency. The following sub-paragraph will examine the concept of agency in further detail and explain its relevance for this research.

2.2.1 Exploitation and Empowerment

Agency lies at the core of both exploitation and empowerment because they too concern the capacity of individuals to make their own choices. Exploitation, in the traditional Marxist sense, is the co-optation of value and labour from the proletariat by capitalist institutions. Marx referred to this alienation in capitalist society as Entfremdung: capitalist production is characterized by the division of labour and the appropriation of the means of production by the bourgeoisie. The labourer becomes estranged from his labour, and from the means of his labour. The proletariat cannot escape this exploitation because they are interchangeable: resisting will only yield negative consequences. In this sense, their agency is restricted by the controlling structure of capitalist exploitation. However, capitalism has developed since Marx, and it has outgrown the classical Marxian scope of class struggle (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005). Capitalism aims only to grow, and as a result aims to exploit more from individuals than only their labour and value, but also their freedom of choice. This is visible in Adorno’s concept of leisure time. Adorno argues that leisure time becomes intertwined with labour and work-related motives through the influence of capitalism. According to Adorno, people pursue skills, experience and networks, rather than self-development and philosophical enrichment. If my respondents reflected a similar bias towards professional development rather than self-development, they could be said to be vulnerable for neoliberal discourse.

Capitalism is no inherently malicious entity however. Capitalism only influences people through the power relations inherent in it. Power in general aims to create docile bodies (Foucault 1975), and this is especially the case with capitalist power. A docile body is an individual without agency, ripe for the pickings of capitalist greed. Exploitation and lack of agency are therefore correlated in capitalism. Confounding variables cannot be ruled out, so identifying an agency restricting mechanism is not enough to be able to conclude the presence of exploitation: there must also be a plausible beneficiary institution for exploitation to be present. Exploitation, then, is any identifiable mechanism which restricts individual agency for the benefit of someone or something else.

Empowerment on the other hand is any social process that contributes to individuals’ control over their own life, or in other words, their agency. “[Empowerment] is a process that fosters power in

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11 people for use in their own lives” (Page & Czuba, 1999), wherein power is “related to our ability to make others do what we want, regardless of their own wishes or interests” (idem.). Marx warned for the unequal power relations inherent in capitalism and considered breaking free from this external control to be the only measure of agency. In order to successfully break free from external control, individuals must empower themselves or be empowered.

In conclusion, this research will use agency as a predictive variable for exploitation and empowerment. Processes that inhibit individual agency will be considered exploitation, and processes that contribute to individual agency will be considered empowerment. This juxtaposition of exploitation and empowerment has one problematic consequence. As Boltsanski & Chiapello argue in The New Spirit

of Capitalism, empowerment too can be a strategy for capitalist exploitation. I would argue however

that that is not true empowerment, but perceived empowerment. These need to be distinguished from each other. The former leads to tacit improvement in the individual’s quality of life, whilst the latter leads to tacit benefits for someone or something else, and perceived improvements in the individual’s quality of life that can be logically invalidated.

Differentiating between structural or perceived exploiting and empowering mechanisms cannot be achieved by looking at communication alone: cross tabulation of structure and perception is necessary, forming the following cross table:

Perceived exploitation Perceived empowerment Structural exploitation 1: Participants have no agency;

they are exploited and stuck

2: Participants are unaware of being exploited; they are exploited and manipulated

Structural empowerment 3: Participants are unaware of their agency; they are falsely aware of being exploited

4: Participants have agency and use it; They are empowered.

Figure 3: Forms of agency distinguishable through cross examination.

In the perception of this research, only (4) counts as real empowerment. The other three situations signify: (1) a dystopian reality where individuals are bereft of their agency, (2) individuals that are lured into complacency and (3) institutional goodwill that does not come to fruition. These four positions can be schematically visualised on a scale:

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12 Figure 4: Schematic scale representation of agency in design events.

The following questions would need to be answered depending on which of the four mechanisms of agency is distinguished: (1): What is the structural context of this mechanism limiting the participants’ agency? Participants could possibly be financially incentivized to join the workshops or suffer concrete financial consequences for quitting. (2): Is this mechanism inherent to the format of design events? Could Waag structurally change anything to restore participants’ agency? (3): Why do people feel exploited, and what can Waag do to decrease that feeling amongst participants? (4) What is the structural context of this mechanism enhancing the participants’ agency? Is it inherent to open design?

Additionally, situations (2) and (3) would indicate individuals to be stuck in a discrepancy between perception and reality. This is possible because individuals are not fully cognisant of reality. This cognitive black box leaves individuals vulnerable to exploitation through external control. When external control increases and cognisance decreases, individuals lose their agency. Cultural theorists such as Anne Swidler and Paul DiMaggio offer means to understand how this discrepancy can manifest itself. These will be introduced in paragraph 2.3, but first I will introduce a case studied by Zukin & Papadantonakis, which documents the hegemonic Silicon Valley innovation culture and its exploitative mechanisms.

2.2.2 Hackathons as co-optation ritual

Zukin and Papadantonakis (2017) undertook an ethnographic investigation into seven commercial New York hackathons where the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture reigned supreme. They observed and interviewed participants of the hackathons along with a critical investigation of the hackathons’ structural context. The design events in their case study were found to have a blatant disbalance of power relations, because commercial sponsors and hosts pulled all the strings.

Hackathons reflect an asymmetry of power in favour of corporate sponsors. Hackathons incorporate the unpaid labor of entrepreneurial, highly skilled “builders” and “developers” into the production process and attempt to institutionalize innovation that sponsors can exploit. […] At their broadest

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reach, hackathons are a multi-site mechanism for both “manufacturing innovation” and “manufacturing consent” (Zukin & Papadantonakis, 2017: 161).

The respondents of this research can be said to have lost their agency, because they cannot free themselves from external control. The external control in this case takes place in two ways: the ritualistic discourse deliberately mobilized by the event hosts and sponsors and the larger, hegemonic entrepreneurial culture. Hosts and sponsors were found to lure participants into compliance “by mobilizing both self-interest and collective effervescence, in ritualistic discourse and interaction rituals” (Idem.). Furthermore, respondents were found to have internalised this manipulative discourse and to have embodied it as their own. Respondents explained that hackathons to them were not meant for the production of cultural goods, but for networking and leisurely purposes.

I was struck by the seeming ease in which people surrendered their rights and ownership because of the effects of ritualistic innovation discourse. I realised that I would need to stay cognisant of the effects it was having on me during my research to retain my neutral disposition. I identified and connected with several sceptics within and outside of the subculture and discussed the progress of my research with them in order to counter-balance the effervescent discourse.

Respondents of Zukin’s and Papadantonakis’ research only rarely showed signs of being cognisant of the effects this discourse was having on them and the imbalance of power relations it was meant to obscure (Idem., 159). This kind of embodiment of exploitative discourse is no rarity in the current socio-economic climate which makes the study of the mechanisms of this exploitation a crucial undertaking:

Hackathons, therefore, should be seen as a paradigmatic event that indicate some of the fault lines of an emerging production system. Like the Balinese cockfight analyzed by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the hackathon is both an institutionalized social gathering and an unpredictable social situation; it mobilizes participants according to an established belief system and offers them a known repertoire of social roles; and it reinforces a status system outside the event, in the larger culture and society. However, as Geertz’s critics have pointed out, paradigmatic social events must be understood in a broader, more dynamic structuration framework which, for the hackathon, is the post-financial-crisis restructuring of the contemporary economy by corporate capitalism on one hand, and digital technology on the other hand. Hackathons are significant because they shape space and time for the emergence of new social constructions that mobilize societal resources, minimize dissent, and legitimize new patterns of social, political, and economic control (Zukin & Papadantonakis, 2017: 159).

Zukin and Papadantonakis argue that hackathons should be seen as co-optation rituals (CR), meant to extract unpaid labour from highly skilled workers for the sake of the hosts’ and sponsors’ commercial benefit. They identified four main discursive themes hosts and sponsors of commercial hackathons

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14 mobilized for this: aspiration, the balance between recreation and career, reputation, and innovation (169). These themes were found in the discourse used by the hosts and sponsors, but also in the corresponding narratives of internalised discourse that participants seemed to adhere to. By incorporating the four themes found by Zukin and Papadantonakis into interview questions, it would become evident whether respondents had internalised this discourse or whether they were making choices based on other, potentially empowering, narratives. If the latter were found to be true, this research could plausibly offer reasons for why the ritualistic Silicon Valley discourse had not found its way into the minds of the MH:P participants.

Culture and action

Having discussed moral codes and the discursive mechanisms of exploitation in the previous paragraphs, this paragraph will discuss the relation between perception and reality, and how they can be discrepant. This comes down to the interaction between culture and action. This line of theory stems from Bourdieu’s work on the habitus concept, an individual’s cognitive structure of internalised past experiences, which guides individuals in their everyday life

2.3.1 Schemes and scripts

A hegemonic theory of cognition is that individuals have within them a cognitive structure built up of their past experiences. This idea has existed for a long time, but was recently extended by contemporary theorists to incorporate new insights in neuro-psychology. These newly added details pertain to the ways in which an individual can use, and is formed by, the cognitive structures in its mind, and are indispensable to cultural sociology.

Any cultural analysis must take into account identities: how identities (of people and things) emerge, how they are sustained, and under what conditions they become salient. Cultural analysis must also take into account the way that actors employ classification schemes to categorize one another (DiMaggio, 2014).

DiMaggio (2007) suggests that experiences form a set of schemes, or scripts in the mind. These scripts offer the individual sets of appropriate behaviours that they can enact in a given situation. Script theory offers an alternative to the external moral codes introduced in the previous paragraph. Script theory also states that people have an internalised cognitive structure, similar to a moral set of rules, but adds two important nuances: firstly, though undoubtedly culturally shared, cognitive structures can have variety amongst individuals. This implies that they cannot be completely a priori nor completely external. Secondly, cognitive structures are not deterministic: individuals have the agency to make different choices in equal situations and can be externally influenced to act outside of their

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15 moral guidelines. This external influence can be coincidental, but oftentimes stems from unequal power relations.

2.3.2 Toolkit theory

Swidler encompasses a similar epistemological logic to DiMaggio but introduces a different metaphor for the internal cognitive structure: the toolkit. This concept is coincidentally extra relevant to the case of the maker movement. Toolkit theory puts the actor in a central position, because tools are something people use whilst scripts are something people follow. Both viewpoints are useful, because neither dichotomy is completely true: people don't always use culture, nor are they always used by it. They can be both slaves and users of culture, even at the same time. Or, to put it in maker movement lingo: people can be the artisans of their own behaviour or the artisanry. To be able to differentiate between the two using interview data, a complementary concept is necessary that connects the inner cognitive structure with the words people chose to describe them.

2.3.3 Narratives

Individuals cannot be fully cognisant of the complexity of their own rationale. Any communication about one’s rationale is therefore a simplification. This simplification takes on the form of a narrative, reflecting the inner scripts that they adhere to (DiMaggio, 1997). As a result, interview data concerning individuals’ choices and perceptions must be treated as narratives of their rationale, rather than their actual rationale. These rationale narratives of respondents can be insightful, regardless of them not necessarily being factual: structural facts can be distilled from them through triangulation. If for example a respondent is found to adhere to a narrative that is not in line with the structural context of the MH:P workshops, a discrepancy indicative of exploitation arises. The cross tabulation of perception and structural facts will therefore by one of my main analytical tools.

The expectation is that respondents will emphasize their internal motivation and underestimate the importance of the structural context, which would suggest a perception of agency somewhere on the right hand of the agency scale introduced in subparagraph 2.2.1. The structural context of agency could also be represented on the scale. An example of this can be seen in figure 5, where the perception is represented by a red dot, whilst the structural context is represented by a blue dot.

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16 The further these two dots are from each other, the bigger the discrepancy between rationale narrative and structural context. With a big discrepancy, makers could be said to have an individualistic perception of their rationale, underestimating external pressure and overemphasizing their own agency. A similar discrepancy can be found in Talk of Love, where respondents frequently overestimated the relevance of their internal motivations and underestimated the relevance of external pressure. Finding this discrepancy would suggest the respondents to be the kind of people for whom “most of life is unexamined, although a rich set of cultural traditions, from wedding anniversaries to bits of remembered advice from their mothers to the lyrics of popular songs, may seem to make life more meaningful” (Swidler 2001: 5). Respondents would make because they feel the need to do so, without realising the external control that precede this need. Culture would be using them by supplying a script for respondents to follow, or, in the words of Swidler: “constructing the categories through which [they] perceive themselves and others” (Swidler 2001: 6). These types of makers are vulnerable to exploitation.

Not all respondents in Swidler’s research showed this discrepancy, some were capable of being self-reflective and cognisant of external pressure. So, if the discrepancy would not be found, and the interview data would be found to be in line with the other data, then it could be argued that makers are self-reflective about their makership, implying that makership could indeed be invaluable to innovation. This kind of self-reflectivity arms the individual against the exploitation suggested by Zukin & Papadantonakis. Makers would be the type of people that “try to live ideologically pure lives. For them, every aspect of daily life must be examined and made consistent with their beliefs” (Swidler 2001). They would be using culture as a toolkit. If that were to be true, the MH:P workshops could indeed be said to be empowering, and the maker movement could indeed be a viable alternative to traditional capitalist work forms and a potential solution to pressing societal issues as scholars have predicted (Lee 2015).

Networks of cultural production

In order to fulfil its predicted potential, the maker movement must not only be free from external control, but also produce innovation. This innovation can be seen as a cultural product:

Much social-scientific work on culture examines settings – industries, professions, organizations, informal work groups – in which cultural products are produced. By “cultural product”, I refer to discrete and apprehensive human creations – songs, paintings, newspaper articles, meals, sermons, laws, poems, scientific papers, garments – associated with institutional fields of cultural production.

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Such cultural products are produced in and by networks of collaborating firms and persons (DiMaggio, 2014: 287).

The cultural product produced within design events are prototypes. Prototypes are much more than simply a first version of a product. Rather, they are the communicative expression of an individual’s wants, needs, and hopes. In the case of this research, prototypes are developed in the MH:P setting and in the Amsterdam metropolitan area maker community network. This network is not only relevant because of its potential influence on rationales, but also because of its shared culture. Shared culture not only influences people’s behavioural choices but also their interactions:

Shared culture facilitates the construction and persistence of social networks through two mechanisms. First, visible symbols permit persons to recognize other with whom they share a status or identity (Goffman, 1951). Second, shared knowledge, tastes, and styles produce bonding by facilitating and by enhancing emotional rewards derived from conversational exchange (DiMaggio, 2014: 287).

This is especially relevant for the forming of network ties during the MH:P workshops: the pre-MH:P network influences rationale, but the network ties formed during MH:P eventually determine the successfulness of the event. Participants who can recognize categories of shared culture, commonalities that people can form shared identities around, with other participants are more likely to succeed in the development of a prototype. Identifying categories of shared culture in MH:P will aid in identifying different categories of participants and the different mechanisms of exploitation and empowerment that they are faced with. Furthermore, forming ties is likely to play a role in respondents’ rationales. Zukin and Papadantonakis explain in their research that commercial design events mobilize network-related discourse, and it is not unthinkable that some of this discourse can also be found in open design events. If the same kind of discourse is found, but the forming of ties during the MH:P workshops turns out to be sparse, participants could be said to have been lured into participation and consequently exploited. If the discourse is present, then I will have to confirm that ties are indeed formed during the MH:P event. If this is the case, then the discourse would match the reality and open design events could indeed be beneficent to participants through the forming of ties. Whether these ties be strong or weak ties does not matter, since both can make concrete difference in people’s lives (Granovetter, 1977).

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3 Research design

Research goals

This research focusses on the forms of engagement amongst open design event participants or

makers, as is the preferred nomenclature within the subculture. The main research question is the

following: Which mechanisms of exploitation and empowerment can be identified in open design

events? This is an explorative question and is meant to generate theories rather than correlations.

The question was intentionally broadly formulated because I was striving for a wide and rich data set, in line with the critical theory approach. This enabled a deeper theoretical step to be taken in the analysis, which was guided by four separate analytical questions: How are commercial design events

similar and different from open design events?, Which archetypical actors can be identified in open design events and what are their rationale narratives for participation in open design events?, What do their rationale narratives reveal about the mechanisms of exploitation and empowerment that they are immersed in?, and lastly What is the relevance of the open design philosophy concerning the agency of participants in design events?. These questions will guide the analysis of the data in chapters

5.

Regardless of my preference for critical theory, one important thing separates this thesis from the Frankfurter Schule: the goal of this research is not primarily to liberate people from the culture that enslaves them (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1972), but first and foremost to put the claim made by neo-Marxist research into perspective. After all, we cannot assume the presence of exploitation in advance. Accordingly, we must first analyse how the case of Zukin & Papadantonakis differs from the MH:P case.

The data gathering consisted of four stages, each with their own methodology. Firstly, an ethnographic exploration of the subculture and the actors and institutions within it. Secondly, a literature review of case related literature. Thirdly, observations during the MH:P workshop series. Lastly, eleven interviews with participants of the MH:P workshop series. Chapter 2.3 will discuss all four stages separately in approximate chronological order (stages overlapped to some extent), but several concepts need to be discussed and operationalized prior to this.

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Operationalization

3.2.1 Rationale narratives

Because interviews and observations form the main source of my data, the data must be treated as a rationale narrative, rather than concrete fact. A rationale narrative consists of two aspects, a rationale, and a narrative. An individual’s rationale is a complex conglomerate of different kinds of mechanisms, including conscious considerations and unconscious tendencies.

Most of the narratives encountered during the research preparations emphasized the intrinsic motivations of makers. For example, multiple people suggested that the participants of design events are inherently altruistic, striving for innovation purely for the sake of helping others. These sorts of narratives must be asked about during the interviews.

The reality of rationales is that they do not solely consist of intrinsic motivation. External factors also play a role in decisions. For example, one participant of the Spaarne Gasthuis hackathon explained that she couldn’t find a job, so she decided to participate in the hackathon in the hope of meeting potential employers. This participant consequently became a colleague at Waag several months later. Two external factors can be recognized here: lack of job opportunities and presence of potential employers at design events. These external factors can also spur a person to participate in design events and must therefore be included in the interview questions.

Both intrinsic and external factors are formed by a person’s past. For example, if an individual has already followed countless maker workshops and spent hours browsing internet maker forums, then he or she will participate in the MH:P workshops in a completely different way than a beginner. Path dependency must also be taken into account therefore. As a result, a participant’s past paths of action will also need to come up during the interviews.

It should also be mentioned that rationale narratives were also partially chosen as the focal point because they put an individual’s agency in the foreground. An individual’s choice can of course be formed and influenced by a conglomeration of structural mechanisms, but an individual always has some form of choice to make. Individuals are no passive receivers of exploitation but play an important role in it.

3.2.2 Health

Participation in design events is a necessary condition for this research: a non-participant can of course be familiar with the rationale narratives of participants, such as a desire for networking, but only through actual participation would an individual risk exploitation. Non-participation can have a large amount of reasons, such as simply not being aware of the events. Looking into non-participation would

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20 widen the scope of the research too much and would push it more into the direction of market research, something I specifically did not want to do. One interesting category of non-participant however is the drop out, someone who started an event but quit prematurely. One such drop out is included in the sample and another is asked about indirectly, in order to be able to consider their rationale for dropping out, and because the former played an important role in the MH:P workshops. This research is interested in a specific kind of makers, namely those that work on health products. However, the conception of health as represented by the traditional healthcare industry is problematic. The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. This definition is problematic because it implies that health is a static state, one that is practically unattainable, nor easily to operationalize (Huber, 2011: 2). The logical result of this definition is that nearly everyone is ill and redundantly striving for health, and only the most privileged among us can be healthy. Instead, Huber (2011) proposes the following definition: “the ability to adapt and to self-manage, in the face of social, physical and emotional challenges”. This is a more dynamic definition of health because it posits health on a scale. It allows us to distinguish whether a product is meant to positively influence someone’s health or not. If it is, it can be said that the product is a health product. In other words, if a product is meant to help users adapt or self-manage in the face of social, physical, or emotional challenges then it is a health product. Additionally, this definition allows us to see health related issues as a challenge, rather than a problem.

Whether the product is designed to benefit the health of the maker him- or herself (Ownership of a

health challenge) or to benefit others is of no importance to the sample. As long as the main goal of

the product is to benefit someone’s health.

Research methods

3.3.1 Stage 1: Getting to know the subculture

The first goal I had when I entered the field was to acquaint myself with the subculture of makers in Amsterdam. I wanted to really get a feel for it, not just read about it, so I decided on ethnographic methods. I took an inventory of a couple of not necessarily health related design and innovation events in Amsterdam in collaboration with Jurre Ongering, my internship coordinator at Waag. Most events were on a sign-up basis, but other than that, free to participate in. I joined these events and decided on a participatory observation strategy. A fly-on-the-wall role would only give me a partial impression, missing the hands-on experience that I thought I would need to be able to level with my future respondents. Thankfully, because of my technical background in biomedicine and IT I felt comfortable enough to participate.

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21 One such event I joined was a hackathon organised by Waag at Spaarne Gasthuis, a hospital in Haarlem, in the beginning of February, where I witnessed the design process in health innovation first hand. I took fieldnotes pertaining to the in-group jargon and interpersonal interaction to increase my understanding of what was happening. I also tried to form an impression of the networks of the participants, because this too could be an important mechanism in an individual’s rationale for participation in design events.

I also wanted to speak to some of the professionals who were active in the Amsterdam maker subculture, to experience the perspective of professionally involved actors. I interviewed three colleagues at Waag, and one ex-board member and co-founder of Waag, about the community and its core values. Additionally, I organised a monthly makerspace meeting for the six largest makerspaces in the Amsterdam metropolitan area so that I could become familiar with the professionally organised part of the Amsterdam maker subculture.

A set of hypotheses was diluted from the collected notes and a rationale model was made to guide me in the upcoming stages in the research, based on the narratives I encountered in my conversations and observations. This model will be discussed in chapter 4.

3.3.2 Stage 2: Literature review

The preliminary interviews discussed in the previous paragraph also gave me an opening into the case relevant literature. However, sociological research on design events and the maker movement seemed scarce: much of the literature I encountered stemmed from technical, judicial, and economic sources. Furthermore, the affinity with social science research seemed to be low amongst members of this subculture, so considerable brainstorming and sparring with peers was necessary to form a sociological perception of the field.

Eventually a theoretical framework formed covering several topics: firstly, technology and techno-optimism, because of the important role technology has within the maker movement. Secondly, neo-Marxian critique of design events, because it forms the basis of my sociological interest in the field. Thirdly, culture and action theory, because they best match my epistemological convictions, and because they allow me to delve into the underlying structural mechanisms behind cognitive structures. Lastly, network theory, because it helps contextualize the results of this research. All four categories will be extensively discussed in chapter 4.

3.3.3 Stage 3: Interviews

In the broadest sense, the research goal is to find out why people participated in the MH:P workshops and what motivates them to continue in the series, but this goal is motivated by an underlying

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22 theoretical interest in mechanisms of exploitation in the current neoliberal context. I have to incorporate this interest into the interview strategy to be able to pursue it. For example, an answer to the question ´why did you join this workshop series?’ such as ‘I just liked the people’ would not be helpful towards my theoretical goals. A follow up question would be necessary: ‘why did they like the people?’. A response such as ‘Because they like the same things I also like’ would already be better because it suggests that the respondent considers shared identities as an important factor in their decision, something hosts of design events could potentially abuse. As mentioned before however, respondents’ answers should not be taken at face value. What could the underlying mechanisms be for an individual to report on shared identities? Another follow up question would therefore be needed: ‘why is that relevant for you?’. This approach will enable me to engage with my respondents reflexively.

I have to make sure that I build up enough rapport with my respondents and that I have enough time to talk to them for this probing interview technique to work. This was an additional reason for also being present and observing during the MH:P workshops. The rapport I built up during the sessions also guided my sample: I chose to interview specific people in the group based on how smoothly our communication went during the sessions. I had trouble communicating with some participants, for example due to language barriers, but had an immediate click with others. I decided that focussing my attention on the latter group would yield the richest data, but I do need to take this sample choice into account during the analysis.

When the MH:P workshops started in May it was immediately clear that I would have no problem gathering respondents: I held a short introduction about my research in the first session which was met with enthusiastic reactions from the participants. After the first session I already had several interviews planned but realised that I would not be able to conduct the interviews in quick succession. All respondents preferred to have the interview shortly before the start of the Thursday evenings sessions, meaning that I had to attempt to spread the interviews.

I had several synthesizing concepts at hand when the MH:P workshops started, and I paid extra attention not to use these in the interviews in order to prevent influencing respondents. I did however split the interviews into two phases: I started off as unbiased as I can, asking open questions about the programme and letting the respondent steer the interview, switching to a more collaborative conversation in the last few minutes or so, where I could engage with the interviewee on a more theoretical level. I did not explain my theory or research goal to them, but I did attempt to elicit some form of theoretical reaction from them. This method was used as an attempt to transcend socially desirable conversation and get an impression of their ability to look beyond their own narratives. This

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23 aided in coming to a coherent theory of the interplay between rationale narratives and participation in maker events.

I used a semi-structured interview approach in both phases. I consider a structured interview to be unsuitable for this research because it makes an interview a formal experience for both researcher and respondent. A semi-structured interview allows me to steer the conversation, to stay on topic, without altering the social context too much. This will keep the respondents in their comfort zone and allow for a deeper level of conversation. Most of the interviews were transcribed by me in order to gain familiarity with the data, leaving only four relatively straight forward interviews to be transcribed by an external party.

The transcribed data was then loaded into Atlas.ti and coded through a combination of deductive and inductive coding techniques (Charmaz 2006). I had a clear idea of where I was heading with the research before the interviews started because of the extensive preparatory research I had undertaken, and as a result I knew which broader themes I was looking for. At the same time however, I wanted to make sure that I would not force my own meaning upon the data. Whenever I found relevant citations within the data I would therefore try to stay close to the words used by the respondents. This allowed for multiple concepts to arise from the data in a bottom-up manner. This combination of deductive and inductive coding techniques helped to stay close to my research goal without being blinded by my own hypotheses and research bias. The observations during the MH:P sessions also helped for this, which I will explain in the next paragraph amongst other things.

3.3.4 Stage 4: Observations during MH:P workshops

I took on a different researcher role in this stage compared to stage 1, which was also based on observation: I purposely refrained from participating. Participating would mean that I would need to join one of the teams and would have to help in the prototyping. This would limit my research time, and my Stage 4 had a very different goal than stage 1, because I didn’t need to familiarize myself with subculture any more. This meant that I could take a bit more distance, leaving more cognitive resources for observation. I did not take a purely anonymous, fly-on-the-wall role however, since I also wanted to build rapport with the participants. This resulted in a hybrid role, wherein I was free to take a step back and observe interactions, but also free to step in and engage with the respondents. Amongst other things I helped brainstorming sessions, asked about technical details of someone’s current task, observed in-group conflict, and discussed more personal matters such as what it’s like to suffer from a disease. I took fieldnotes of the interactions I had and observations I made in a small journal. I typed out these notes in the days after the session, which helped internalize the information. All of these experiences enriched my perception of the subculture.

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4 Case study

Hacker culture

This chapter consists of two paragraphs. Firstly, a paragraph on the genesis of design events and secondly, a paragraph on the MH:P workshops themselves. The former paragraph is largely literature based and is meant to put the MH:P workshops into a historical context. The latter paragraph is the result of my immersion into Waag and the maker community and is meant to introduce the power relations inherent in MH:P before going into more detail in chapter 5.

4.1.1 Linux and cooperative development

The most important foundation for the maker movement is the rise of the internet. The internet enabled new collaborative work forms and subcultures. The subculture that led to the maker movement was hacker culture. Hacker culture emerged in the 1960’s and 1970’s, predominantly in universities who were front-runners in adopting the internet, such as MIT. Initially, hacking was associated with software development. Hacking became a social past-time because hackers regularly spent their nights coding together (Zukin & Papadantonakis, 2017: 160). This social and collaborative work form proved to be effective and spawned some of the biggest companies of the last decades:

[H]acker culture was spread by newsletters like the communications of the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, whose members included Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak, Apple’s founders, and others who went on to found and work for important tech companies. (idem.)

Raymond (2005) describes the work forms that have emerged from hacker culture in his analysis of the Linux community founded by Linus Torvalds. Raymond uses the cathedral and the bazaar analogy: rather than an organized and specialized work force carefully constructing a cathedral brick by brick, the Linux community resembled a “great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles” (idem.: 2). This demonstrates a sort of invisible hand (Smith 1759) effect. Regardless of its seeming incoherence, this type of labour is innovative, rather than menial (Irani 2015), because the Linux community yielded rapid iterations of evermore stable software, spreading menial tasks across thousands of co-developers, rather than just a few.

The cooperative work forms emerging from hacker culture culminated in open source communities such as the Linux community. In contrast to the culture it spawned from however, the Linux community did not work in spatial proximity. Rather, Linux co-developers were loosely-coupled through the internet. Spatial limitations were no longer relevant because of the internet, and more pairs of hands and eyes could be working on the same problem than ever before. The sheer number

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25 of people that could now collaborate led to what Raymond calls Linus’ Law. Linus’ Law states that as long as there are enough people working on a problem, eventually someone will find a solution. An alternative explanation for how the Linux community could be so productive simply did not exist, unless miracles could be considered to be a solid foundation for innovation.

4.1.2 Fablabs and the maker movement

The invention of digital fabrication made it possible to apply the logic of software development to the production of material goods. Digital fabrication is the combining of computer-aided design with modern manufacturing machinery; a product is designed on a computer and manufactured by a machine such as a 3D-printer. The design of a digitally fabricated product is in its essence nothing more than code, which enables it to be collaboratively altered in the same way as the Linux code was collaboratively altered. Additionally, designs in code form negates spatial limitations inherent in industrial manufacturing and spatially bound concepts such as transportation. A computer-aided design can be sent around the world in seconds using the internet and can be manufactured by anyone who has access to the relevant machinery.

Neil Gershenfeld, professor at MIT, saw the emancipatory potential of this technology and started the first fabrication laboratory, or fablab in short. Fablabs are spaces for cultural production revolving around the goal of making digital fabrication technology accessible to anyone willing to put in the time and effort. The fablab initiative was quickly picked up internationally, spawning fablabs all over the world and giving birth to the subculture that would become known as the maker movement.

Members of the maker movement, makers. share the mutual conviction that people are tinkerers by nature (Dougherty). This implies that all citizens in themselves possess the potential to be makers, but that not all people are in fact themselves makers: a maker is not only someone who possesses potential but someone who also utilizes this potential. Someone who actively participates in the making of innovations using modern technology. But just like hackers, many makers do not operate alone; they work in groups. “[I]nnovation does not happen in a vacuum. You’re never alone. No one has the key just by him [or her]self (van der Heide, 2016)”. This ideology shows strong resemblance to the hacker culture cooperative ideology, relying on the knowledge of many to solve problems that individuals cannot.

The maker movement consists of a conglomeration of network hubs around a specific (group of) fablabs. One such hub exists around the fablab at Waag and other fablabs in its proximity. These hubs bring together external visitors and internal veterans to create innovation during design events. These events are generally open design events, which means they adhere to the same open philosophy that Neil Gershenfeld champions.

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4.1.3 Commercial design events

However, hacker culture also took a second, divergent path: commercial design events. The commercial potential of design events was recognised by the budding tech companies of Silicon Valley. These companies capitulated on hacker culture’s collaborative work forms by pouring them into a commercial mould, creating commercial design events. The most radical change was that companies hosting commercial design events claimed the intellectual property (IP) of a finished product, leaving participants empty handed after their exertions. Commercial design events also include competitive elements such as prizemoney, financial gating such as participation costs, and financial incentives through sponsorship deals. Regardless of this, participants of commercial design events often look back to their participation as being a positive experience (Lara & Lockwood, 2016: 489). Possible explanations for this discrepancy can be found in the accounts of participants, praising amongst other things the networking opportunities during hackathons, though in reality, these networking opportunities turned out to be sparse (Richard et al., 2015 :118). This is just one example of an existing discrepancy between narratives and reality that could lure people into participating in a design event despite the co-optation by the event’s host. Another example is that commercial design events were marketed to have great benefits for people’s daily life by offering interaction with colleagues and a learning environment for practical skills. In reality, commercial design events often occurred within a bubble, spatially, time-wise, and thematically.

Yet these events now play a significant role in the discourse and practices of technological innovation and the broader culture of the “new” economy. In one digital researcher’s words, hacking has become hegemonic (Zukin & Papadantonakis, 2017: 158).

This is because participants internalised the discourse mobilized by commercial design events. Participants adhered to the ritualistic discourse used by the hosts and sponsors for their own benefit. Participants revealed a high level of calculatedness in their rationales, regardless of the blatant co-optation by the events’ hosts and sponsors.

Participants are well aware of [the] opportunities. Despite the waves of excitement, even euphoria at times, in the room, they express a calculated sense of how they might use the event to promote their career (Zukin & Papadantonakis, 2017: 169).

For the MH:P workshops to be empowering, participants must be proven to reap actual, concrete benefits from their participation. The next paragraph will discuss the MH:P workshops and their structural context in order to indicate whether they have the potential to do so.

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MakeHealth: Prototyping workshops

4.2.1 The Amsterdam metropolitan area maker subculture

To understand the context wherein the MH:P workshops were organised, we must first take a look at its predating design events and the Amsterdam metropolitan area maker subculture in general. The maker subculture in Amsterdam is split into several sub groups. The primary sub group revolves around the fablabs and makerspaces in Amsterdam. Each fablab has a couple of central actors and all of these central actors together form a tight network; most have had professional acquaintance with each other for years. The fablab community in Amsterdam exhibits small-world properties: “a coincidence of high levels of local clustering and very low average path distances” (DiMaggio, 2014). The fablabs share common goals such as educating citizens in the maker mentality. The fablabs do not always work in unison however, since each fablab has slightly different specialisations. For example,

ZB45 is a fablab that rents out their equipment as a business model, whilst Maakplaats 021 is a

makerspace specialised in organising educational events for kids. This leads to a difference in core demographic, which can complicate collaboration. Nonetheless, there is a strong sense of shared culture within this network, which facilitates communication.

Other sub groups of makers in the Amsterdam metropolitan area include the IoT-sense makers, hackerspaces, and workspaces. Each have a certain amount of shared culture with the fablab community but are sufficiently different that intercommunication between these groups is relatively sparse. What they all share, however, is a DIY-mentality; makers are not easily baffled and enjoy exploring new ways of getting something done with new technology. This mentality is empowering for its participants but can be result in a steep learning curve for newcomers, something I experienced myself when I joined my first design event, the Spaarne Gasthuis hackathon.

The Spaarne Gasthuis hackathon was organised by Waag in collaboration with Spaarne Gasthuis, a group of hospitals in the Haarlem region, about 15 kilometres from Amsterdam. During this event, I learned about some of the good practices in design and the importance of prototyping. I knew what the word prototype meant prior to participating in the Spaarne Gasthuis hackathon but I found out that I had a wrong conception of a prototype’s goal. I thought a prototype was only meant to convince investors but the truth is more nuanced: a prototype is more than anything else a communication tool. It is a manifestation of a maker’s vision of what the final product can become, cast into the form of a tacit product. Which role a prototype plays in communication is dependent on the actors it is engaged with and deployed by. Between commercial parties, a prototype is meant to convince, but between amateur makers a prototype is meant to inspire. As a result, the financial stakes within a maker community is of crucial importance. So how are these stakes in the MH:P workshops?

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4.2.2 MakeHealth: Prototyping workshops

The host of the MH:P workshops, Waag, is a non-profit institute for technology & society based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It is completely dependent of external financing, often through subsidies from intra and international governing bodies. The EU for example is a major subsidiser of Waag. Each project receives separate funding, which is all pre-arranged in the form of a project proposal. These project proposals include all necessary details such as long and short-term goals, deadlines, partnerships, sponsorships, etcetera.

The MH:P workshops fall under the larger, European project Made4You, a joint enterprise of several open design communities in Europe. The Made4You project proposal specifies all the details of the project including the role that Waag has within the Made4You conglomerate. Waag has been tasked specifically with community engagement, and has the following goal to reach during the workshops: “include an existing and motivated community of citizens to drive platform development” (Made4You project proposal, 2017). Waag has been tasked with this because it is renowned for its proficiency in community engagement:

Waag Society's Fab Lab Amsterdam (WAAG) has a network of 1.450 registered users, among several active communities in citizen science. One of these groups is the Make Health meetup, where a community of almost 500 ‘healthcare makers’ touch base to share examples, projects and initiatives on open healthcare. (Made4You project proposal, 2017)

The project proposal does not however include details of financial incentives, such as rewards for success or repercussions for failure. As a result, Waag has no direct financial stakes in the prototypes of the participants of the MH:P workshops. This is not to say that Waag has no financial stakes at all, but the stakes it does have are indirect. For example, there is likely to be a correlation between success in projects and the procurement of future subsidies. However, because Waag is a non-profit institute, no profit is made and therefore no surplus value is created or appropriated. In conclusion, whilst the presence of financial stakes cannot be invalidated, the financial stakes that are present are not expected nor observed to produce pressure for participants.

The MH:P workshops consisted of eight sessions spread over eight weeks, where participants were invited to create their own health innovations and publicly share them online:

With the rise of digital fabrication technology and the increasing accessibility of online knowledge, citizens can design quality health applications that suit their own needs. With MakeHealth we strive to create new open design applications and publish these online. (www.Waag.org, 2018)

Mechanisms of exploitation and empowerment in health innovation themed open design events