Mizan Rahman
Ph.D. Candidate in Human-Centered Computing (HCC)
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Date: Monday, March 16th, 2026
Time: 10am - 12pm EST
Location: TSRB room 204 (IC Collaboration Space), or Zoom
Committee:
Abstract:
Makerspaces are community-operated innovation centers that promote creativity, learning, and entrepreneurship. Despite their growing role in local innovation ecosystems, many of them struggle to survive, and closures can disrupt communities, dissolve volunteer capacity, and halt public programs. This dissertation examines how makerspaces achieve organizational sustainability. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork across multiple U.S. makerspaces involving interviews, participant observation, and analysis of digitally mediated interaction, I present four studies that together characterize how socio-technical factors drive organizational sustainability of makerspaces
Study 1 defines sustainability in this context and develops a multidimensional framework that conceptualizes it as a dynamic system of interacting elements: people, community, culture, management, finance, and processes. The framework’s central insight — that “people come for the tools but stay for the community" and that culture holds the community together. Study 2 examines the “people" dimension of this framework, identifying socio-technical factors that broaden membership. Study 3 and Study 4 examined culture, the factor that emerged as the most critical for sustainability, analyzing how it is perceived through interviews and how it is practiced through analysis of the digitally mediated interaction.
Building from these findings, the dissertation contributes design implications for communication systems that support makerspaces as volunteer-run commons. I propose design guidelines that reduce friction in core cultural practices and outline how AI can function as cultural scaffolding by providing structured prompts, surfacing relevant community memory, and routing requests while keeping members in control. Together, these contributions offer theory, evidence, and design directions for sustaining makerspaces through socio-technical practice.
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