Making Meets Informal Innovation: Formalisation, Access and Openness in Indian Makerspaces

ABSTRACT Makerspaces and fabrication labs (fablabs) are inclusive and open infrastructures. They democratise access to tools and technologies and facilitate bottom‐up innovation. Research on these spaces thus highlights the importance of openness, community orientation and the ability to foster informal experimentation that these spaces enable. In this paper, I examine how these features have been operationalised in contexts characterised by a high degree of economic and institutional informality by focusing specifically on Indian makerspaces and fablabs. I ask how these spaces relate to need‐driven local innovation practices and how they are sustained. The paper uses qualitative data collected through semi‐structured interviews and analyses the organisation of access, learning and innovation in these spaces. The analysis indicates that makerspaces and fablabs in India do not work as open infrastructures in their entirety. Instead, they serve as mediators between informal innovation practices and institutionalised pathways shaped by an entrepreneurial discourse. The analysis further indicates that they create new limits of participation, expertise and knowledge exchange. The paper contributes to the body of literature on open infrastructures and informal innovations by reconceptualising the notion of openness as a result of governance rather than as a characteristic of such spaces.