Unstitching Sustainabilty: (Re)Making visceral connections when talking about Sustainability in online, community MakerSpaces

Maker communities are evolving in lots of different ways often facilitated by contemporary technologies. I am researching ways of changing how social media communities talk about sustainability – moving from abstract and verbal conversations about global data, to more visual, tactile, domestic conversations.

Key research questions

What role and affordances do online ‘maker spaces’ provide with regards to (re)making?
How do online communities use remaking to create visceral connections around issues of sustainability?
What frameworks can be co-designed to enable successful conversations about living sustainably?
What is the role of ‘the domestic’ and ‘domestic arts’ in these conversations?


I have developed large audiences and subscribers through Instagram enabling exploration of collaborative, communal making and re-making. This has produced rich, quantifiable data sets and conversations that have gone beyond the mere act of making and touch on many aspects of domestic life. Moreover ‘the research’ itself has become part of the conversation and is enabling insights around what sustainability looks like in the lives of the community and what barriers exist to remaking. The resulting contribution is an emerging framework of ‘rules’ as to how to talk about Sustainability in a genuinely engaging way, whilst literally ‘making’ visual datasets for sharing re-making research. This will form a central aspect and method of my proposed presentation of the research at the conference.