Who does the Maker Movement belong to? And who belongs to the Maker Movement?
In the context of the FFG Project FEM*mad, we have conducted a study at Schmiede 2020, interviewing ten women* attendees of the festival about their experiences coming to Schmiede, finding their space — physical, mental and emotional — at the festival, and the contextual characteristics that supported them, or were lacking, during their artistic maker journeys.
The outcomes of these interviews are now published in the Open Access Paper, The Women* Who Made It: Experiences from Being a Woman* at a Maker Festival, by Nathalia Campreguer França, Dorothé Smit, Stefanie Wuschitz, and Verena Fuchsberger.
The findings presented in the paper were wonderfully illustrated by Stefanie Wuschitz, depicting both the artistic work that is often the foundation of women*’s engagement with tech-related making, and the struggles that the interviewees described in performing their artistic work.
The FEM*mad project is ongoing until October 2022. In the upcoming year, based on the findings from this paper and other research activities, several interventions to increase the diversity among makerspace participants, will be implemented and evaluated in makerspaces in Austria.