A Conceptual Framework for Co-Manufacturing Within the Economic and Social System

This chapter proposes three theoretical reflections on three themes of relevant importance for framing and understanding an economy based on principles of exchange, collaboration, and division. In fact, this seems to disagree with the prevailing orientation of the Western capitalist economy, based on concepts of competition, individualism, asset protection, and hypercompetitiveness. The first reflection, therefore, concerns the relationship between crowdworkers and the capitalist system. The second reflection concerns the type of organization that is typical of crowdworkers, based on the concept of community. The third reflection concerns the classification of all those services mutually provided by the members of the shared work spaces and how such services can be effectively classified as non-economic services of general interest, resolving a common misunderstanding regarding the lawfulness of professional exchanges not regulated by monetary transactions.

Peculiar Elements of a Co-Manufacturing Space as Perceived by Members

The chapter focuses on the reasons that bring different kinds of independent workers to establish their activities in a shared workspace and presents their values and the personal and professional advantages they perceive in being members of a co-manufacturing spaces. The chapter presents most of the themes directly from the vivid voice of people who work in these spaces and is the longest chapter of the book. During the research, some key elements came out of the interviews and the direct observation of what used to happen in the different co-manufacturing spaces. These elements covered topics that came from the approach of people to work and life, how they used to organize themselves, how they used to act in order to gain skills, and to gather help. This chapter summarizes the most relevant aspects that came out from the research and that are at the base of the multifactory model.

Background, Method, and Research

This book talks about shared workspaces, with particular attention to spaces designed to host the production of objects, and is widely based on the results of extensive experimental empirical research conducted by authors in Europe, the USA, and South America between 2012 and 2017. The research involved more than 100 shared workspaces, in which the authors spent over 1000 days. The ethnographic on-field research was carried out using direct observation and through many interviews, which were filmed and subsequently processed through typical methods of visual anthropology. This chapter provides an overview of the different types of shared workspace, illustrates research actions and explains how and where it has developed.

New Needs Require New Spaces

The chapter focuses on the multifactory model, its evolution, and a step-by-step guide to building a multifactory. The first part of the chapter will present the reasons that led the authors to the decision to elaborate a model for a co-manufacturing space, the main features that characterize a multifactory, the key points of the multifactory model, and a description of the salient elements that have characterized Bigmagma, the development environment of the multifactory model. The second part presents the result of the evolutionary path of the model, presenting the subdivision into phases and macrophases of the intervention model and describing the first complete experience of application of the multifactory model, R84 Multifactory Mantua.

Shared Workspaces Presented by the Communities

In this chapter, the authors present some relevant examples of shared workplaces they visited during the research. These are not to be intended as best practices. They are not examples of multifactories. These places are important because in each of them the authors found some relevant inspiration, issue, or practice, in order to develop the multifactory model. Authors visited and studied all of these places during the first step of the research while building the multifactory model (2012-2014) or the second step, the testing phase of the model (2015-2016). For this book, the authors asked some spaces to describe themselves following a similar presentation path. The authors wanted them to explain their own specialities and their motivation in order to better understand similarities and differences. The following chapter is based on these personal communications, which have been slightly modified in order to better stress specific points.

Future Research Direction

This chapter gives a general overview of the main issues relating to co-manufacturing spaces and which could be the direction for further research. Crowdworkers are shaping a new model of society, fair, supportive, inclusive and based on participative tools. Co-manufacturing spaces are the places to realize and experiment this model, make it grow, and spread it. But there are still many weaknesses, risks, and problems to be solved, starting from education. In this chapter, these themes are briefly presented, as they are open topics and can be traces for future research.

Crowdworkers as a New Social Class

Crowdworkers are a social class which takes form from a common social and economic situation. People in a similar situation organize themselves as a whole, in order to increase their chances to improve their lives. These people were similar among different countries, and expressed similar concepts, values, lifestyles. They organized their professional activities in a similar way, had similar goals, and in the workplaces the overall organization of the relationships between members of the co-manufacturing spaces reflected these similarities. This chapter underlines some important aspects that lead to the idea of crowdworkers as a social class. Crowdworkers are economic agents and the change in society they bring is mainly recognizable at the level of economic dynamics. That said, economic dynamics come with social ones and can have a huge social impact. Although it is never easy to define how social and economic dynamics interact and influence each other, under a general point of view the authors agree with the conclusions of Federico Caffè, who believes that in society the driving force is social, and economic dynamics follow the social ones.