Three uses of one floor
The equipment, the space and the people are one asset used for three different things. It is worth separating them, because they carry very different amounts of evidence behind them.
Young people’s projects
Where challenge-based learning and grassroots innovation actually happen, and where a project can become a venture candidate. This is the established use.
Our own applied research
A small local research capacity running a deliberate cycle from problem to root cause to tested solution. Design and intent, not yet a track record.
A partner for universities
Supervised access to equipment, to a community field site, and to a supply of real local problems. Also intent: no formal agreement is in place yet.
What counts as a lab
We publish no standing list of labs, and the default count is zero. That is a deliberate discipline rather than a description of an empty building, and it exists because a list of lab names is the easiest thing in this sector to keep publishing after it has stopped being true.
A lab is named only when it holds all four of these at once.
- A making domain — an area, equipment, a craft and an artifact somebody can point at.
- A named maintainer — a person, not a role.
- A team — because a lab with one champion closes when that person leaves.
- A date the statement is true as of.
So the available form of the claim is “as of this date, this lab is running, maintained by this person”, and never “we run n labs”. What is zero is the count of standing lab units; the work is not. Software, media and music practice runs inside the makerspace, and electronics and mechanics happen together on the shared makerspace floor rather than as separate rooms.
Labs here have closed for real reasons — one because we could not find the right person to keep it, another when its single champion left. Neither closed for want of equipment, and both delivered before they stopped. The clearest lesson in our own record is that staffing depth, rather than kit, predicts whether a lab survives. That is why a named maintainer and a team are conditions of opening one rather than an afterthought.
Artificial-intelligence literacy is treated as a thread running through all of this work rather than as a lab or a stage. It has no maintainer and no team of its own, so listing it as a lab would create exactly the paper lab this rule exists to prevent.
How a project runs
A lab project has to meet the same completion standard as any other assessed work, against a real local challenge: research, hypothesis, prototype, test, document, iterate. Our own framing of the path beyond the prototype adds the part that most maker programmes leave out.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| Local challenge | The problem is surfaced from the community, and framed with design thinking. |
| Open innovation | Adopt an existing open solution where one exists, and collaborate with its original authors rather than rebuilding it. |
| Research and development | Prototype, test with the affected community, iterate. |
| Local manufacturing | Local materials and local service providers, which is where work is created. |
| Go to market | Pilot with stakeholders, on a business model that shares benefit with the people who contributed to it. |
For a project to graduate into the venture track it needs a tested prototype against a validated local challenge, demonstrated community demand, and somebody committed to taking it forward. Below that bar, projects stay learning artifacts — which is still evidence, and often feeds a later cohort.
What has come out of it
Documented work from the floor includes a digital-fabrication build, a circular plastic recycling machine, a rice biosensor that took gold at an international synthetic-biology competition in 2020, a COVID-response tool, a biofilter for cadmium removal, a hydroponics project, an underwater glider that was named in the Parliament of Sri Lanka in 2021, a Tamil hate-speech detector built in an open collaboration, a mycelium biocomposite, and a biogas digester.
This is the part of the model with the strongest evidence behind it, and it is also the part that most needs the discipline above: a list of impressive prototypes is not the same as a list of solutions somebody depends on. The distinction is the gate.
Our own research
Beyond hosting other people’s projects, the intent is to use the same floor as a small, locally rooted research capacity, running a deliberate cycle: identify a real local problem, analyse the root cause before building anything, then develop and test a solution — adopting open designs where they exist. The middle step is what makes it research rather than tinkering, and it is where a wrong solution is cheapest to avoid.
There are two tracks, not one. Technical research covers devices, materials, software and systems. Business and social research covers business models, value chains, social-innovation and policy questions, and evaluation. A prototype that works technically still needs a tested route to market and to benefit, and the lab for that second track is fieldwork and analysis rather than a workshop.
What makes this feasible at low cost is open-source scientific hardware, which has been found to run about 87% cheaper on average than proprietary lab equipment once labour is excluded — a comparison that favours a low-wage rural setting more, not less[69].
Working with universities
The proposition is a straightforward exchange. We can offer a rural university what it usually lacks: equipment access, a community field site, and a pipeline of real local problems. A university offers what we lack: research supervision, students, methodological rigour and academic credibility.
Two established models fit that exchange without either party having to invent a structure. A science shop has students conduct research on problems posed by civil society, under university supervision and usually free of charge, as part of their coursework[70]. A living lab is the wider arrangement in which a university collaborates with companies, citizens and public bodies to co-create solutions, with academia formally embedded rather than visiting[71].
The sensible first step is a science-shop pilot: one department, a handful of supervised students, one live local problem. That is a smaller and more honest starting point than any broader framing.
What is intent, and what is record
The first use of the floor — young people building things against real problems — has years of documented output behind it. The second and third are stated design intent, grounded in established models, and not yet an evidenced track record. No formal university agreement is signed.
There is a second honesty point worth making, because it cuts against our own interest. The rigorous evidence base for makerspaces as research platforms is overwhelmingly European and North American; in one systematic review of ninety-three university-governed living labs, four per cent were in Africa and four per cent in Asia. So the right framing for what we do is that we are participating in and extending those models while generating our own evidence over time — not that we are executing a proven rural research-hub playbook. No such playbook exists.