From Makers to Maker Communities: A Survey on Turkish Makerspaces

ABSTRACT Today, the maker movement is regarded as a socio-cultural movement that represents designing objects for innovations. In these creativity-based activities, individuals from different backgrounds; craftspeople, DIY’ers, engineers, designers, and hackers, form a community and work collaboratively for mutual, open-source innovations. With the recently emerged technologies and digital fabrication tools, movement is continuously expanding its scope and has evolved into a new experience, and for many, it is now considered as new kind of industrial revolution. Makers create within their community by using new digital tools and technologies in spots called makerspaces, in which of learning, experience sharing, and mentoring are evolved into maker events. In literature, there are many sources on these concepts, however there is a gap about the maker communities in Turkey. Research aims to be an information source on the dynamics and process design of “making” activities in Turkish maker communities that provides insights to sustain and enhance local maker communities in the future. Within this aim, semi-structured interviews were conducted with founders and facilitators from selected Turkish maker communities. After a qualitative data analysis, research reveals that there are two main conclusions regarding the foundation of the Turkish maker mindset and emergence of self-sustaining communities.