The Well-Maker-Space

This paper discusses a workshop that sought to build and share understandings of how making might contribute to wellness or, as we term it, ‘well-making’. To this end it offered a range of talks exploring different maker activities, processes and projects that are devised, owned, championed and offered by modern makers in support of health and well-being. The workshop also hosted discussion and reflective activities in order to interrogate the meaning of well-making and the well-maker-space. Run in a gallery space around communal tables covered in paper, cardboard, pens, sewing materials, scissors and tape, the Well-Maker-Space workshop brought together twelve paper presentations from international authors to contribute to prototyping: debating, imagining, questioning, visualising, conceptualising, critiquing and creating a framework (and potential design brief) for the well-maker-space. Participants were encouraged to listen activity to the presentations and record their thoughts and responses, generating a variety of perspectives on what a well-maker-space might be, how it might function, and what it might contain. Together with presenters they ‘made’ representations of these insights, which were then collected on our cardboard ‘making wall’, a material metaphor for our own pop-up well-maker-space. This paper discusses how the well-maker-space concept has formed thus far and how the workshop papers and activities contributed to our thinking about well-making. The workshop was be chaired by the authors - Nick Gant (Community21 and University of Brighton) and Professor Fiona Hackney (AHRC-funded project Co-producing CARE: Community-based Assets, Research & Enterprise and University of Wolverhampton) and Katie Hill (Leeds Beckett University) - all of whom have been exploring making and health with a range of collaborative partners and communities of practice.