3D Printing Governance: transitions of local, global, physible and digital imaginaries

• In Event: How Do Governance Mechanisms for Science and Technology Travel Across Borders? 1

Abstract

This paper considers transnational governance mechanisms of 3D printing across Eurasia. It draws insight from initial data collected from participants in China, India, Russia, and Singapore, where technical experts engaged with researchers in a multi-level perspective (MLP) backcasting methodology to imagine socio-technological regimes of 3D printing practice. We view 3D printing not just as a mechanical process specified through additive manufacture, but as a the communicative and social practices enabled by the network and enacted through and by digital-physical remediation. This allows a comparative analysis of histories and imagined futures across locales and in relation to global expectations of innovation, risk, and control. Our methodology focusses on six political dimensions involved in shaping imagined socio-technical regimes of 3D printing practice. Specifically, we present data on how dimensions of markets, culture, policy, law and technology are thought to influence each other and enable shifts to socio-technical regimes. These dimensions produce complex patterns of both geo-local-specificity and convergence. Following Kostakis et al. (2016), we differentiate ideal types stretching from local knowledge structures to globally centralised ones and peer to profit based incentives of innovation. Our data present novel understandings of how socio-technical imaginaries transition from past to futures both within nations and across them. Our conclusions suggest complex patterns of how local socio-technological contexts transpire to specific constraints and generative practice.


Kostakis, V., Roos, A., & Bauwens, M. (2016). Towards a political ecology of the digital economy: socio-environmental implications of two competing value models. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 18, 82-100.

Authors

• luke heemsbergen, Deakin University

• Angela Daly, QUT

• Thomas Birtchnell, University of Wollongong