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Pre-print version of chapter to appear in Making Our World: The Hacker and Maker Movements In
Context edited by J. Hunsinger and A. Schrock (New York: Peter Lang 2016).
Hacker Agency and the Raspberry Pi: Informal
Education and Social Innovation in a Belfast
Makerspace
Pip Shea
Introduction
Hackers circumvent to invent. They see the potential in things (their affordances) as
well as themselves (their abilities and capabilities) to create anew with existing
materials. Hackers model new structures, devise alternative infrastructures, or exploit
systems. This process of material reimagining can help people gain a greater
understanding of things and systems, but what forms of agency are required to hack in
the first instance? The following chapter responds to this question, supported by an
investigation of hacking activities in Farset Labs, a makerspace in Belfast, Northern
Ireland. It argues that informal education activities performed at Farset Labs are
helping individuals and groups to understand how to support hacking activities. This
is framed as nurturing hacker agency: enacting the conditions to support the
inversion, subversion, or reconfiguration of things. The inquiry unfolds around
Farset’s Raspberry Jam program—a monthly workshop exploring Raspberry Pi
single-board computers—situating it as an appropriate socio-technical system to
nurture hacker agency. Empirical data was collected over a period of one year at
Farset Labs. My observations were gleaned while participating in the co-working
space, attending public events, participating in member meetings, and volunteering at
three Raspberry Jam events.
This investigation of hacker agency in the makerspace context in Belfast attempts to
provide new sightlines for “critical hacktivism” as proposed by McQuillan (2012).
Critical hacktivism is an approach that values “messing around with the materiality of
technologies” with the aim of revealing the affordances of technology for social
innovation. This vector of inquiry responds to the current emphasis on digitally
focused projects within Northern Ireland’s community and voluntary sector (Hostick-
Boakye 2014). These initiatives are described by the umbrella term Digital Social
Innovation (DSI), a term gaining traction in the UK and Europe that refers to the
support and development of new digital solutions to address social challenges
(NESTA et al 2015).
Background
Descriptions and understandings of hacking and the hacker identity have broadened
dramatically since Steven Levy situated the practice as one performed by “whiz kids”
and “heroes of the computer revolution” in his book Hackers (1984). The practice
remains associated with grassroots computer-related activities but the term is
increasingly being appropriated by many sectors: for example, government and
commercial organizations are using the term to describe initiatives that emphasize
participation and technological development. The momentum behind the broadening
of this term nods to Wark’s (2001) conceptualization of vectoralists, who sought to
appropriate and capitalize on the work of hackers, who were responsible for
abstracting the world and creating new knowledge and systems. More recently,
Söderberg and Delfanti (2015) proclaimed, “hacking is being hacked,” in reference to
the diversification of hacking practices. Other scholarly work has attempted to define
hacking and its related activities: van Dijck uses the term “user exploit” to describe
the modification of technologies as a form of social protest (2013, 33); Dunne and
Raby situate “beta-testers” as those who “derive enjoyment” from “rejecting the
material realities on offer” (2001, 7); while Santo (2011) posits “hacker literacies” as
the capacity to tweak technology to better align it with one’s own values.
In a general sense, hacking can be situated as revealing and acting on affordances
(Gibson 1977; Gaver 1991): the visible, perceived, and hidden possibilities of objects
or systems. Traces of these types of activities are present throughout human history,
but networked communications, wireless connectivity, and low cost digital fabrication
machines have more recently catalyzed a globally connected movement of makers.
They perform activities based on DIY ethics of production and consumption, such as
repurposing old electronics for use in domestic settings.
The rise of makerspaces and hackerspaces—physical places where technology
enthusiasts meet to collaborate—are among the many new organizational forms
associated with this ‘maker movement.’ These spaces have been lauded for their
potential to foster innovative production and collaboration practices, but are also
considered ‘fringe phenomena’ (Maxigas and Troxler 2014), as their capacity to
impact the production of wealth, knowledge, and social organization is limited. Much
of the publicity surrounding makerspaces has focused on digital fabrication processes
and outcomes. A reduction in costs of machines such as laser cutters, CNC routers,
and 3D printers, combined with makerspace models such as the MIT-inspired Fab
Lab, have enabled projects that utilize radical new production approaches. One such
project—with links to a makerspace in Northern Ireland—tells the story of 3D
printing techniques being used to make prosthetic limbs for casualties of the Syrian
conflict1.
As well as innovative production and collaboration practices, makerspaces have been
positioned as a significant grassroots movement supporting informal learning
(Schrock 2014). Ad hoc, experiential learning, as well as structured classes and
outreach initiatives are examples of the kinds of informal education happening in
makerspaces. This chapter unfolds around a structured informal education event
called Raspberry Jam, hosted by the Farset Labs makerspace in Belfast, Northern
Ireland. Farset Labs is one of 97 UK makerspaces—and one of two Belfast
makerspaces—identified by NESTA in its Open Dataset of UK Makerspaces (2015).
The Raspberry Jam outreach initiative introduces people to the Raspberry Pi single-
board computer. There is no set format for a Raspberry Jam; they are mostly devised
and run by motivated individuals who offer their time on a voluntary basis. At the
time of writing, the Raspberry Pi Foundation featured eighteen Raspberry Jam events
around the world—including Berlin, Manchester, and Ottowa—held in a variety of
venues such as libraries, community centers, museums, and FabLabs. The Farset
Labs’ Raspberry Jam is the only Raspberry Jam on the island of Ireland.
Launched in 2012, the Raspberry Pi sold over 2 million units during its first two years
in production. The Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK charity, developed the system to
promote computer science in educational contexts. The initial Raspberry Pi release
combined hardware and software that would have been considered “state-of-the-art in
2001” according to a 2012 article in the MIT Technology Review.2 Much of the
current buzz surrounding the Raspberry Pi relates to its potential for use in distributed
physical computing. This describes the proliferation of projects that use digital
technologies to interface between and respond to analog systems and the surrounding
environment: for example, controlling watering systems in a domestic garden with
microcontrollers and sensors.
Farset Lab’s Raspberry Jam was chosen to investigate the conditions of hacker
agency because the Raspberry Pi was designed as both a computer and an educational
tool; and, because Farset’s Raspberry Jam offers empirical evidence where the
conditions of hacking are supported. While acknowledging the spectrum of
definitions and practices associated with hacking, this chapter focuses on the systems,
tools, initiatives, and environments that help people build their capacity to reveal the
affordances of sociotechnical systems; or, hacker agency.
1 ‘3D printers used for prosthetic limbs in Syria conflict,’ BBC News, 10 March 2015
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-foyle-west-31812040
2 ‘Review: Raspberry Pi. Can a $35 computer persuade kids to put down their smartphones and try their hands at
programming?’ MIT Technology Review, 4 September, 2012
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429048/review-raspberry-pi/
Hacker Agency: Enacting the Conditions of Hacking
Hacker agency is an asset when designing and developing appropriate technologies
for social contexts. This is relevant to makerspaces in Northern Ireland as they are
situated in relation to a sectarian conflict that began in the late 1960s. Colloquially
known as The Troubles, this period was shaped by paramilitary violence from groups
contesting the political sovereignty of Northern Ireland, and how this was affecting
the rights and responsibilities of the citizenry. The two groups in opposition were
those who fought for the reunification of Northern Ireland with the Republic of
Ireland, against those loyal to Britain who fought to remain part of the United
Kingdom. These two communities are often identified as either Catholic or Protestant.
Efforts to build peace culminated in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday
Agreement by Northern Ireland’s political parties, and the Irish and British
governments. Although violence has subsided, reconciliation is ongoing, and
Northern Ireland’s makerspaces are actors in this peace process. They run various
programs that actively engage with the politics of “good relations” between Catholic
and Protestant communities, and these activities are increasingly framed as Digital
Social Innovation. This chapter promotes hacker agency in these social contexts as
materially remodeling technology can lead to more appropriate solutions.
I understand hacker agency to be the enactment of desire, personal capacity, time,
tools, and space that leads to material remodelling. Having the desire to perform
hacking activities is directly impacted by a person’s capacity to experiment, explore,
or problem solve as well as their capacity to configure, or reconfigure the material in
question. Having access to tools and the knowledge to work them is also crucial, as is
having physical space where messiness and disorder is permissible, or at least
tolerated for periods of time. Having, or making the time to hack also figures
prominently, as experimental or playful work can sometimes be difficult to justify
within a busy modern schedule. The enactment of these conditions can support
material engagement to help reveal the affordances of technology and things. A
previous mention of the term “hacker agency” describes a scene where “high-tech
workers—no matter how inexpert—can interrupt, upset, and redirect the smooth flow
of structured communications” (Ross 1991: 92-3, cited in Lin 2004). The conditions
of hacker agency are changeable. Optimal arrangements for hacking—or material
remodelling—are not achievable at all times. This framing of agency draws on
Barad’s (2007) conceptualization of ‘agential realism’: that phenomena and
possibilities are constantly being reconfigured to reveal different conditions.
Different groups might emphasize different rationales for nurturing conditions for
hacking: large technology firms, governments, and NGOs might reference free labor
and the promise of innovation; small businesses might be driven by pragmatism born
from resource limitations; while grassroots organisations such as makerspaces might
emphasize the desire for alternatives. Individual motivations associated with hacking
also vary: people might have the need or desire to repair something, or to develop a
greater understanding of the potential for materials to be used in novel ways. These
actors all share an interest in the social—and economic—benefits of material
reimagining.
Material reimagining can lead to new understandings of the politics of artifacts and
their entanglements with people and systems. In 1980, Langdon Winner famously
argued that explicit attention should be paid to the idea that artifacts have politics
(1980). In one example, he exposes the design of bridges in Long Island—structures
deliberately designed too low for public buses to drive under—to sharpen his point
that designed systems can embody specific forms of power and authority. Winner
makes the point that we are so accustomed to infrastructure like roads and bridges that
“we see the details of form as innocuous, and seldom give them a second thought”
(1980, 123). Winner’s later focus on the unintended consequences of designed things
(Whale and Reactor 1986) is most relevant to this study as it supports the argument
that engagement with the materiality of technology can cast a critical lens over
artifacts.
Researchers are increasingly adopting methods that get people to engage more
critically with the stuff of technology, as evidenced by what has been described as
material turns across scholarly disciplines (Fuller 2006, Ratto 2011, Gillespie et al
2014, Marres 2012). Artists critically reimagining digital networks include Julian
Oliver, who does so to develop a more “rigorous personal relationship” with software
and digital technologies (Bucher 2011). Oliver is part of the Critical Engineers
working group with Gordan Savičić, and Danja Vasiliev. Oliver and Vasiliev have
collaborated on numerous projects, including Newstweek, a “network intervention”
and “reality distorting device” (Oliver and Vasiliev 2011). This project disrupts
‘public’ wireless hotspots typically deployed in coffee chains such as Starbucks. They
do this by installing an innocuous wall plug device in the shop that wirelessly
interferes with the display of major news websites. The artists provide a separate
website where people in the coffee shops can add to or edit fake news stories.
Having the skills to materially reimagine and remodel are becoming an asset in
various areas of life, such as contributing to participatory government initiatives like
civic hackathons. These events are often public forums that encourage the remixing
and reinterpretation of government datasets. They are legitimized by the premise that
citizens are participating in the systems that will shape their lives, but are limited in
scope as they involve only those who know how to hack. Irani (2015) proposes civic
hackathons celebrate a Silicon Valley-esque “entrepreneurial citizenship,” that favors
“quick and forceful action with socially similar collaborators” over approaches that
account for the politics of difference. Civic hacking practices have also been situated
as “friction-rich endeavours” (Perng and Kitchin 2015) because contention lingers in
the design and production of technologies. This contention surrounding emergent
modes of civic participation provides evidence that becoming familiar with the
conditions that optimize hacking might be a useful personal development trajectory.
Processes of material reimagining can help people gain a greater understanding of
things and systems, but what forms of agency are required to hack in the first
instance? And, how can we better understand the conditions that contribute to
material engagement and reimagining? These questions have inspired the following
investigation in to Farset Lab’s Raspberry Jam. It offers evidence of the conditions for
hacking being nurtured, resulting in practices that encourage the circumvention of
constraints through bricolage, modification, or adaptation. These events are offered
for free, and made available to those who are willing and able to spend one Saturday
afternoon a month in Belfast’s city center. The Raspberry Pi is the technical focus of
the workshops, but the activities they perform, build people’s capacities to hack.
Through material engagement, they create anew with existing materials to build new
systems and exploit incumbent ones.
Farset Labs’ Raspberry Jam
Farset Labs is a non-profit company and registered charity based in Belfast, Northern
Ireland. It began as a hackerspace in 2012 and is now also referred to as both a
hackerspace and a makerspace. It is funded primarily by membership fees, is
volunteer-run, and has a co-working space, events room, workshop, kitchen, and
lounge area. There are communal computers, dedicated high-speed internet, a 3D
printer, a vinyl cutter, a milling machine, drills, soldering irons, cabinets of cables,
and boxes of ‘redundant’ technology on offer for repurposing. Farset Labs is a “social
workshop” (Hunsinger 2010) providing physical space, communications
infrastructure, and access to a community of people who are enthusiastic about
hacking and making. Beyond these standard offerings, Farset runs public events that
build the capacities of participants: CoderDojo events invite young people to the
space to learn software programming skills, and hackathons provide incubators for
social learning in an atmosphere of experimentation, invention, sleep deprivation, and
pizza.
The Raspberry Pi can be situated as part of a broad technology activist project, but is
aimed at schools and young people. This has led to comparisons being made to the
BBC Micro,3 a computer estimated to have been in 80% of UK schools during the
1980s. Launched in 1981 by the British Broadcasting Corporation as part of a
3 ‘Raspberry Pi 2 vs BBC Micro Bit: How do the DIY computers compare?’ Trusted Reviews, 25 July 2015
http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/raspberry-pi-2-vs-bbc-micro-bit
computer literacy project, the BBC Micro helped expose UK school children to
computer programming. The Raspberry Pi project is supported by organizations that
are developing interoperable software and hardware for the device, and informal
education bridges to extend the reach of the device, such as Raspberry Jams.
The Farset Labs makerspace plays host to a free, monthly Raspberry Jam. It began in
2012, led by Andrew Bolster, one of the three Farset Labs’ founding directors.
Nineteen-year-old Andrew Mullholland—a computer science student at Queen’s
University Belfast—now runs the program. The event is “aimed at anyone from 10-
110 years old” and places an emphasis on making things, and having fun while doing
so (Bolster and Mullholland 2013). The sessions take place on the first Saturday of
the month and last for 4 hours. The organizers distinguish the Farset Raspberry Jam
from other similar events because it provides all the necessary equipment for
attendees (Bolster and Mullholland 2013). Much of the labor required to successfully
run a Raspberry Jam involves promoting the event, managing volunteers, managing
expectations of participants, plugging in equipment, moving desks, buying doughnuts,
and looking for funding to sustain all of the above. Code must also be tested so that
activity sheets can be written, photocopied, and distributed. These tasks require a
number of people with a range of skills. Currently, there are just enough volunteers to
sustain the program.
Participants at the Farset Raspberry Jam are given a choice of tutorials that focus on
such things as music making in Sonic Pi, and model making in Minecraft Pi Edition.
They also use Scratch, a program that uses a graphical user interface to teach
programming. One activity also encourages participants to program in Python, in turn
exposing them to digital networking operations. Collective problem solving is
designed in to some of the tutorials, as is the goal of hacking other participants’
computers. Farset’s Raspberry Jam also connects participants with the physical
computing potential of the Raspberry Pi. The operating system used is the Linux-
based Raspbian, the most common OS for Raspberry Pi hardware.
Farset Labs’ Raspberry Jam aims to “inspire and enthuse the next generation of
technologists, through an experiment-focused programme of supported exploration”
(Bolster and Mullholland 2013). Through the enactment of software and hardware
exploits using Raspberry Pis and various digital and analogue peripherals—the
Raspberry Jam is building participants’ capacities to hack. Through social activities
that frame hacking as fun, participants are revealing the affordances of electronics and
digital technologies. This process of nurturing hacker agency is made possible by an
appropriate mix of people, place, time, and space.
Revealing Affordances Through Pi Play
The Raspberry Pi was chosen as a focus for this study as it has the potential to
contribute to a multitude of projects and systems across digital networks and in the
physical world. Its hidden affordances abound. It can be thought of as part of
“hardware’s long tail” (Buechley and Hill 2010), as it facilitates niche projects that
are reshaping physical computing. The Raspberry Pi’s original project—to
revolutionize computer science education—emphasizes learning computing through
play. Programs such as Minecraft Pi Edition have been specifically adapted to support
this aim. Farset Labs’ Raspberry Jam extends this educational paradigm through
social making and learning.
As a contemporary form of informal education, Farset’s Raspberry Jam finds support
in Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown’s (2011) framing of the “new culture of
learning” as the cultivation of play, questioning, and imagination. They assert that a
combination of self-directed online learning must be balanced out with “bounded and
structured environment(s)” that enable “unlimited agency to build and experiment”
(2011, 19). The Raspberry Jam, along with Farset Labs, are nodes in a system that has
been described in humanities research as Connected Learning, the foci of which are
social learning and the making of things that happen across different sites and
locations, online and offline. The major hypothesis of a 2013 report published by the
Connected Learning Network (Ito et al. 2013) argued that young people require
“caring adults, supportive peers, shared cultural references, and authentic ways of
contributing to shared practices in order to mobilize their skills and knowledge.”
Farset Labs’ Raspberry Jam achieves this by creating the conditions that nurture
hacking practices: activities that reveal the affordances of technologies and things.
Minecraft is used to reveal the affordances of software both on the Raspberry Pi
platform generally, and at the Farset Labs’ Raspberry Jam. The objective of Minecraft
is to use blocks to make models and create environments, and it doesn’t take long to
teach someone how to play. It is an entry point for hacking activities, as it is the
biggest selling PC game of all time (Campbell 2014, cited in Apperly 2014) and
familiar to many people. One Minecraft tutorial uses a join-the-dots game with
conductive paint to trigger a hack in the game. Conductive paint is another entry-level
activity, used to engage participants with the material stuff of electronics. Hacking
Minecraft gives participants a taste of controlling software through programming,
while also exposing them to the practice of computer game modification.
Another Raspberry Jam exercise, that demystifies the process of hacking analogue
objects, uses a decommissioned traffic light affectionately known as wizard signal. A
member of Farset Labs who has an interest in road infrastructure saw the traffic light
being dismantled by the roadside. She asked if she could take it as it was being
replaced with a newer model. She took the traffic light to Farset Labs to play around
with it. The facilitator of the Raspberry Jam took an interest in the light, and worked
with her to hook it up to a Raspberry Pi. The wizard signal is now used to teach
Raspberry Jam participants about IP addresses and linking digital and analogue
devices across a local area network (LAN). Through simple programming activities
participants are taught to turn the traffic light on and off. This becomes a race to see
who can turn the different colors on first. This example exemplifies how the
Raspberry Jam is revealing affordances through play, as it encourages participants to
become the directors of network traffic through the metaphor of road traffic signals.
Learning how to hack in informal education contexts can be thought of as an
important developmental step to reaching the critical mindsets outlined in Santo’s
(2011) “hacker literacies” literature. Increasingly, having the skills to contest the
design of technologies by questioning the intentions of its creators is being framed as
an important critical digital literacy. Learning about computing and hacking at
workshops in community makerspaces also challenges normative understandings
about the purpose of computer science, modes of play, methods of making, and the
contexts in which hacking might take place. Raspberry Jams can be considered a node
in the connected learning ecosystem that helps people learning to see the potential in
themselves through hacking things. And, the more proficient a hacker becomes the
better positioned they are to create affordances as well as reveal them.4
The hardware and software ecology of the Raspberry Pi, especially its price and size,
makes it appropriate for many projects across different contexts, proof it has the
potential to radically increase the scale and reach of physical computing. But this
hardware long tail will be shaped by who uses the devices and for what ends.
Raspberry Jam informal education programs are helping to diversify the Raspberry Pi
user base, which in a small but significant way, contributes to a more distributed
technological ecosystem. This, combined with a focus on hacking for fun, increases
the potential for the exploitation of the visible, perceived, and hidden possibilities of
objects or systems.
Farset Labs and Digital Social Innovation
The promise of Digital Social Innovation (DSI) policy and practice includes increased
participation in civic life, building literacy capacities, and new modes of production,
communication, and evaluation. This chapter promotes critical material
engagement—or “critical hacktivism” (McQuillan 2012) —as a future trajectory for
DSI initiatives, as it helps to untangle preconceived articulations and assemblages to
4 The notion of the hacker as creator of affordances was developed in conversation with Andrew Schrock.
make way for more robust and inclusive processes of remodeling or reassembly.
McQuillan’s conceptualization of critical hacktivism builds from Von Busch and
Palmas’ (2006) “abstract hacktivism” thesis—where they position hacking as a new
conceptual model through which we can understand and approach the world—and the
critical pedagogy of Paolo Friere (1972). Previous studies of hacktivism include
Jordan and Taylor’s (2004) account of an emergent counter culture focusing on
hacking as a political activity, and Alleyne’s (2011) reminder that hacktivism is a
descendant of other counter-cultural activities, such as pirate radio.
Hacking activities are an entanglement of the socio-technical. When they take place,
relations enacted from people, places, and things are enfolded into the hack.
When designing for social contexts, the details of these entanglements can lead to
technologies being appropriate or inappropriate for the communities engaging with
them. This is certainly the case in the Northern Irish context, where ‘good relations’
projects engage people whose experience of daily life varies greatly. This provides
further rational for using critical hacktivism philosophies to encourage appropriate
DSI projects.
Farset Labs is already engaging in critical hacktivism. In late 2014, a group of Farset
members were involved in a Social Innovation Camp (Sicamp).5 Sicamp matches
social development projects with technology practitioners in a peer-to-peer learning
and making environment. The Sicamp model overtly champions the enactment of
social innovation through material engagement, and is directly linked to the
philosophy of “critical hacktivism” as it was co-founded by Dan McQuillan. The
model was developed to extend the scope of social technology applications and to
encourage social start-ups outside of institutional constraints. McQuillan has
characterized the process as ‘organising the moment of self-organisation.’
Farset Labs also hosts events that aim to critically reimagine social contexts. It hosted
the first “policy hack” organized by the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary
Action (NICVA). NICVA is a membership and representative umbrella body for the
voluntary and community sector in Northern Ireland. Through its policy hack series,
this agency is borrowing “the techniques and ethos of the tech sector, (to) apply them
to a number of social policy topics and come up with solutions to key social,
economic and environmental problems.”6 The call to action from this third sector
agency to “hack our way to better outcomes” provides further evidence that processes
of inverting or subverting incumbent systems is gaining traction in Northern Ireland,
and that Farset Labs is an actor in this social innovation movement.
5 Sicamp was hosted by Northern Ireland’s Building Change Trust, an organization established in 2008 to build
capacities within the voluntary and community sector in Northern Ireland.
6 ‘Hacking our way to better outcomes,’ 29 January, 2015, NICVA http://www.nicva.org/article/hacking-our-way-
better-outcomes
Discussion: Challenges and Opportunities
The changeable conditions of hacker agency—desire, capacity, time, tools, and
space—are thoroughly entangled in the politics of place, things, and systems. This
creates multiple challenges and opportunities for the ideas and initiatives discussed in
this study. Despite the positive rhetoric surrounding the Raspberry Pi, some have
queried whether it will encourage people to code and make, or whether it will only be
used by the usual suspects: those already familiar with computing. Informal education
programs like the Raspberry Pi succeed in exposing this as a false choice, as nerds
and noobs come together to learn, socialize, and have fun. But the existence—and
success—of the Raspberry Jam in Northern Ireland also points to the importance of
bridging initiatives that bring specialists in contact with enthusiasts. This position is
supported by Quinlan’s (2015) NESTA report that revealed only 12 per cent of UK
parents felt informed enough to signpost digital making activities for their children.
In the case of Farset Labs, challenges to enacting hacker agency may also be seen as
opportunities, and vice versa. For example, some may view the physical premises of
Farset Labs as a barrier, as its location next to a Loyalist7 residential area might be
intimidating to a person outside of this culture. However, Farset Labs’ proximity to
Belfast city’s major train station might be parsed as a positive factor for others. Some
might consider the membership fees low-cost, while others may find them difficult to
justify. Farset Labs is also supported by its landlord through flexible rent
arrangements; but the more sustainable the organization becomes the more that is
expected of them financially. And, this could impact on the organisation’s capacity to
deliver informal education programs.
At Farset Labs, certain cultures are developed, supported, and celebrated. As a result,
these spaces are not for everyone. The ambiguity surrounding the operations, purpose,
and social protocols of Farset Labs, has created some issues for the organizers of the
Raspberry Jam. On occasion, parents have brought their children to the Raspberry
Jam thinking it is government funded. This has created expectations of the program,
around financial resourcing, the type of service it is, how it is run, who is allowed to
attend, and the longevity of the program. Such dynamics reveal the limited capacities
of this current informal education model—one that relies on a handful of altruistic
personalities with limited financial resources—to contribute to the nurturing of
making or hacking practices.
Due to their involvement in the Farset lab’s Raspberry Jam, Andrew Mullholland and
Andrew Bolster were approached to develop and deliver a Raspberry Pi training
7 Ulster Loyalism is a political ideology that emerged from sectarian conflicts in Northern Ireland. It is aligned
with Protestantism, and supports the preservation of Northern Ireland as a part of the United Kingdom as opposed
to part of Ireland. It emphasizes loyalty to the British monarchy and is often associated with paramilitary activities.
program specifically for teachers in the Greater Belfast Area in 2013. The local
agency driving the program were responding to an increased need for continuing
professional development activities focusing on computer programming in Northern
Irish schools (Carson 2013). The Raspberry Pi was chosen because it had been
developed specifically to target school students. The program’s evaluation highlighted
that more training of this kind is needed, offering evidence that an opportunity exists
for Farset Labs to establish a ‘train the trainer’ initiative. Such a program could also
be used to address gaps in the abilities of current and future Raspberry Jam
volunteers. This could relieve pressure from the main trainers, while building the
capacities of others who may be more appropriately positioned to train specific
cultural groups.
Farset Labs exists alongside two other Northern Irish makerspaces that focus on
digital technologies and making practices: FabLab Belfast and FabLab Nerve Centre
in Derry. They form part of the MIT-supported FabLab network, and funding is
linked to the running of ‘peace-building’ programs.8 Both FabLabs have full time
staff, which enables them to host school and community groups on a regular basis.
They teach practices that focus on digital fabrication, providing an entry point for
people to consider the materialities of digital technologies. By encouraging material
engagement through turning bits in to atoms (Gershenfeld 2005), these organizations
are nurturing literacies and competencies that are aligned with hacking practices.
Farset Labs have already had involvement with these organizations, but further
opportunities exist for knowledge exchange, particularly in the realm of critical
making and design processes.
A broader view of the hacking imperative is Gregg and Disalvo’s description of
hacking as “today’s preferred economic identity” (2013). This brings to attention how
values form around hacking processes, the types of things that are hacked, and the
partnerships formed in order to hack and make things. It also raises questions about
who is exposed to hacking practices, and in which cultures, or sub-cultures, hacking is
condoned. Messiness is one such condition of hacking that might seem more
acceptable for some and not others. This is a particularly gendered paradigm, in that
women have been traditionally charged with the responsibility of keeping things
clean. Scholars have highlighted other gendered dynamics, such as the suggestion that
maker culture often elevates the status of traditionally male activities over
stereotypically female ones (Powell 2012). To counter this, Powell recommends a
reframing of maker culture as a research community to account for women’s histories
and innovations of cultures past. Toupin (2014) adds to the debate proposing that the
increasing visibility of feminist hackers will “open up the hacker ecology to further
diversity and nuance” (2014).
8 FabLab NI is partially funded by the EU Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland and the
Border Region of Ireland http://www.seupb.eu/programmes2007-2013/peaceiiiprogramme/overview.aspx
This chapter has built a case to support further investigations in to the nexus between
hacking and social innovation in Northern Ireland. As the purposes and practices of
hacking become more visible in the third sector context, opportunities exist to use
material engagement to help bring political questions in to the light (Von Busch and
Palmas 2006). Hacking paradigms could increasingly be used to navigate and
negotiate overtly political contexts in Northern Ireland. New forms of material
participation could offer levels of engagement not conducive to other public forums.
This type of activity might even lead to “adversarial design” solutions (DiSalvo
2012), which focus on the productive frictions of political conflict.
Opportunities also exist for makerspaces in Northern Ireland to harness momentum
surrounding the Digital Social Innovation (DSI) policy moment. A more visible
culture of critical hacktivism within the lab would further establish it as a site for DSI.
Promoting the idea that the ethics of technologies should be disentangled in socially
focused projects is one approach. This serves to highlight the strength of the
makerspace: that those who are materially engaged with technologies are more likely
to understand their politics. If the third sector starts to associate Farset Labs with
socially engaged technology practices, they may be more inclined to seek input from
its socially engaged practitioners.
In sum, the continuation of Raspberry Pi bridging initiatives will help diversify access
to its technology. Organizational forms like the Farset Labs and its Raspberry Jam
initiative require constant gardening if they are to continue on their critical paths.
Maker cultures and the physical spaces that support them must remain open to new
inputs without forgetting important historical markers. While theory, policy, and
practices surrounding “social innovation” must be in constant dialogue to encourage
more appropriate technologies.
Conclusion
The combination of desire, capacity, time, tools, and space helps reveal the
affordances and the entanglements of socio-technical systems. This study proposed
that Farset Labs makerspace and its Raspberry Jam program are enacting these
conditions. Farset Labs facilitates hacking activities in an environment that questions
assumptions about the political entanglements of people, technology, and things. It is
a community of practice that gathers around shared infrastructure to engage in critical
material and discursive practices, and is a dedicated and sanctioned space for hacking.
The Raspberry Jam offers an informal, quarantined, discreet allocation of time that
guides making, modeling, and hacking activities using Raspberry Pi computers. This
mix of time, tools, and space encourages participants’ desire to hack, in turn building
their capacities to hack.
The interplay between Raspberry Pi technologies, makerspaces like Farset Labs,
informal education programs such as the Raspberry Jam, practices of “social
innovation,” and the aspirations of Northern Ireland’s peace processes requires further
research. Ongoing scholarly engagement with these dynamics will support processes
of disentanglement to provide scaffolding for better programs, practices, and policies
that emphasize material processes. Critical questions emerging form this study
provides sightlines for future scoping. The focus on external conditions for nurturing
hacker agency highlights the changeable conditions surrounding physical sites, and
how this can affect people’s capacities to identify and reveal affordances. So, how
might we prepare ourselves for these changeable conditions? And, how might we
fortify participants against fears associated with working on unstable ground?
Better methods for designing play in to social innovation processes are also welcome.
Resources that help non-designers playfully engage in material processes could help
critical hacktivism philosophies become integrated in to everyday social innovation.
Beyond this, philosophies of ‘critical hacktivism,’ ‘hacker agency’, and ‘social
innovation’ require deeper probing and more pragmatic interventions, lest they
become branded as marginally useful theoretical perspectives.
Biography
Pip Shea is a digital media researcher, designer, and educator. She investigates how
digital cultures and new organisational forms are shaping creative, civic, and activist
practices. She is a director at Farset Labs makerspace and technology charity in
Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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