Digital fabrication and local participation: A community maker space dissolving boundaries

This paper reports on our experience of setting up, operating, and evaluating the Mixhaus – a mobile community maker space inside a disused shipping container in Townsville, North Queensland, Australia. The project, which emerged from a pitch at the local StartUp Weekend in 2015, has seen community members coalesce around a shared interest in learning about and practising digital fabrication skills and techniques. We present and discuss the data we gathered from interviews, participant observations, and community workshops. Our thematic analysis was guided by the conceptual framework of boundary objects. We found that the Mixhaus maker space presents itself as an object crossing and dissolving boundaries along four different dimensions: an organisational mix, a social mix, a disciplinary mix, and a spatial mix. Our insights inform local community engagement initiatives and policies as well as design implications.