Makerspace Goes Digital – Digital Tools to Support Collaborative Innovation in an Academic Makerspace

Makerspaces are shared physical workspaces that aim to support experimentation and making through offering easily accessible manufacturing technology and establishing a community of makers. However, to foster collaborative innovation of new products, a certain structure is needed both at organizational and technological level, e.g. rather than a community, a team needs to be built, activities need to be structured in a project-like environment, communication and information sharing needs a common platform and tools. Recent studies show that, in addition to a physical workspace for joint experimentation, also digital workspace and tools for communication and information sharing across all stages of a collaborative innovation project are essential. In this paper, we present results from a research project where we developed a digital workspace and tools in addition to a physical makerspace to support activities in the course of innovation. In the conceptualization phase, we followed a plan with different steps: (1) workshops and focus groups with different user categories were organized to identify needs and expectations, (2) functional and non-functional requirements for our digital tools were elicited, (3) review of tools and their evaluation were carried out (4) tools were selected and the architecture designed. A quantitative analysis of usage data and user feedback revealed that tool adoption of facultative tools and functions is low and still needs to be improved. Usefulness of such tools, however, is perceived by makerspace members who actually use them as very high. Concerning ease of use, all selected tools were evaluated positively in terms of efficiency, but most of them received a rather negative feedback in terms of design satisfaction.