The other day I saw this article about building makerspaces in schools and the photo showed what seemed to me to be a nice workshop, similar to what schools had when I grew up. Of course, now these spaces have things like 3D printers, not a tool we had years back, but the saws and drill presses are pretty standard fare. It made me wonder if there was any real purpose for using new words to describe the same thing.
Shop class used to be something students took unless their studies were focused on college, but it was always an available option for anyone. Wood shop, metal shop and drafting (with T-squares, compasses and protractors) taught you how to design and build things in the real, physical world. After schools dropped shop and aimed everyone at college, the space was taken over by more classrooms and after a while, traditional skills disappeared among our young.
Now, shop is returning, but schools are reluctant to look at the past and use the same words we did, so now it’s a makerspace or maker lab. Schools and promoters of these trendy labels point out the new high tech tools we never had so these makerspaces are different, so they say, from those old school shops. It’s odd because our school shops had new tools, too, just new for the time when they existed.
When you think about it, our word is better. A workshop is any space where you can do all manner of work using tools, but a makerspace is for what, making? Suppose you want to fix something that’s broken, is it now a fixerspace? If you restore something is it a re-makerspace? Workshop covers it all. Newspeak isn’t necessary and, now when I see it everywhere, it’s becoming annoying.
Perhaps those who don’t like older traditional words are concerned they might bring up associations with other traditional ideas that worked very well in the past and still do. There’s no telling what a young person might do if he or she makes the connection, so 21st century newspeak it will be. Well, I’m getting hungry, I think I’ll see what’s in the eater space.
scritch says
There has been a strong, consistent drive to denigrate “blue collar” workers and skills over many, many decades. The motives to do this may vary depending on whom you talk to, but the forces behind the denigration lie in all frequencies of the socio-political spectrum. It’s truly unfortunate, because not one of the high-tech aspects of civilization were achievable and are currently made without the skills and intelligence of the manual trades. There are many teachers in my circle of family and friends, and they all lament the foolishness of forcing just about all students into college-track educations. College educations may have generally guaranteed better pay in the past, but as we have seen, for so many now a college education merely guarantees that you get poor pay and a huge debt to boot.
I guess one benefit of dismantling the public school shops was to provide cheap (if a bit hammered) tools to those of us who still like to work with our hands to make tangible products.
Bob says
Whenever I see the term “Makerspace”, I get an image of an arts & crafts place rather than a workshop where people can spend a lot of money on cutting edge/trendy fabricating tools (3D printers, laser cutters, CNC routers, etc…) to spend time making braindead crap that the dollar store would be embarrassed to shelve. What bothers me a little is that they are seldom promoted as potentially productive industrial endeavors – maybe that sounds too much like real work and maybe even capitalism, which aren’t fashionable among the, well, I don’t know the polite term for them.
Paul Brodie’s excellent book devotes many pages into the value of having a workshop, among other things.
Paul Crowe says
I think “makerspace” began as a word referring to the communal workshops or “hackerspaces” of the kind that TechShop promoted. TechShop itself had some major financial problems and shutdown and restarted as TechShop 2.0 or something, but over time the word makerspace morphed into meaning any workshop, even the one you might have in your own garage or shed or spare room.
Serious work is certainly possible in those communal makerspaces, but they too often suffer from the tragedy of the commons and you get subpar work from poorly maintained machines in underfunded shops. The really good work always seems to come from individuals or small groups in their own workshops, you know, the traditional kind we’ve always had.
A term I like that I’ve seen used referring to a small workshop producing a real product is “microfactory.†With today’s CNC tools, laser cutters and similar items within range of an individual’s finances, you can turn out high quality items in numbers impossible before these tools became available. So you have a workshop which can scale up to a microfactory and yes, that sounds like real work, capitalism and all the rest of those traditional ideas.
And Bob, thanks for the book tip, it looks great, I placed an order.
Bob says
Remember the Junior Achievement” program? If I remember right, they were a lot more interested in the means of production as part of their program when I was a lot younger, i.e., a half century ago. I wonder if they will refocus on that again…
Kereltje says
A workshop is for professionals, a makerspace for hobbyists.
a eliasson says
“Re-makerspace”, got a huge laugh out of that, thx …
ACE
Lostboy says
It used to be that a workshop would get messy and smell of accomplishment.
Kevin says
I was fortunate enough to grow up with a dad who like to repair, fix, and create. There are a lot of my peers who will happily run a drill-press in reverse until a hole is burned through the wood and not think twice because it made a hole. That wouldn’t be the case if more people were inclined to fix, repair, and create, but the generation of parents that don’t have created this culture that needs buzzwords to bring attention to these timeless skills.
The difference between makerspace and workshop is the difference between hobby and career – at the end of the day you’re working to make, fix, or repair something, either for enjoyment or a job. But the tools are the same. If the word makerspace rubs you the wrong way, does it also bother you that I only use my garage and tools for hobby work? If highschools are preparing students for college and moving the planer and welder to vo-tech schools, does that make the new makerspace less of a workshop? Would the vo-tech students be upset if the makerspace was called the workshop because the bandsaw can’t cut thick steel?
Does any of the semantics matter, or is it more important that language is able to adapt to generate a renewed interest in making, fixing and repairing? If changing your blog to PegScraping.com brought a renewed interest to motorcycles and building would you be upset that the name change brought more people into the community? Or would you be happy that you adapted to the ever-evolving language and encouraged more people to find the pleasure of fixing and riding motorcycles?
Paul Crowe says
The cultural change is exactly what I am referring to.
Is that the case? I don’t see it, hobby workshops abound, woodshops, especially.
Words seldom enter the room without bringing their baggage along and introducing new terminology when the old still applies is sometimes benign and possibly beneficial, though it can also bring a subtle change to the conversation that few notice. Over time, however, the old words are often deprecated and finally redefined to mean something totally different. Yes, language evolves.
Interesting, too, is how many words survive for a long time while the underlying technology changes dramatically, like car or computer, so it’s obvious the latest tech doesn’t require a new label for an entire category.
Maker and makerspace are the direct offspring of Make magazine, a publication I like a lot. The maker movement, the Maker Faires, all are a part of it, but maybe it’s the image of those large riding cupcakes that I first saw in the magazine and which seem to reappear in the various faires, that raised one of my eyebrows and made me wonder about the whole thing, was there a cultural shift? If you read Make magazine over many months, and I’ve been a subscriber or newsstand buyer since issue one, there is a definite perspective, as all magazines (and websites) have. Is it good or bad, right or wrong, that’s a larger discussion for another day, but it’s there and sometimes articles appear where the perspective is more pronounced. That’s when I feel the annoyance I refer to in the post above.
Nortley says
I called mine a garage years ago, it saved me quite a bit on the cost of the building permit compared to what it would have been if I’d called it a shop. I still call it the garage, not that it makes a difference any more, but it does almost always have at least one bike in there someplace, along with tools for maintenance, repair, customization….
JeffC says
A workshop is where work is done, sometimes resulting in something being made. A makerspace implies that something will be made. I can piddle around in my workshop working on a plethora of things and never actually make something. If I was in a makerspace, I would feel almost compelled to make something out of my time and efforts. This is just more of making something old into something new as a way to bring attention to it or appeal to a new type of audience. I have a workshop not a makerspace. And when driving through new neighborhoods and seeing garages completely drywalled and painted inside with a couple of new cars sitting inside, I think its past time to start calling a garage a car room, just like you have a bath room, family room, and dining room, already. I can remember when my trash used to be picked up by the garbage collector, now it is picked up by the “sanitation engineer”………….
Justin Willman says
Great Comment ! I am Watching The Big Change In Our Industry ( Motorcycle Industries) . I Started My Career 1986 . Watching all The Trend’s Go Round , And Around . My Workshops Are Dusty Museum’s Now. I am Reversing 20 Years How Simple the 90’s where Great Time’s In Motorcycling , Justin Willman