Making open hardware manufacturing beautiful!

We share lessons on keeping open hardware values alive through manufacturing. Grounded in our projects Open.Make and LAUDS Factories, this talk asks how and when to consider production in OH projects, and how to embed openness and community stewardship used in co-design into co-production models. We propose beauty as a value framework: local rootedness, environmental honesty, and openness as a blueprint for shared urban factories, where open hardware and community governance are co-equal ingredients. Let’s explore what emerges when makers, artists, engineers, researchers and urban communities co-own a production space — open machines, open governance, open invitation — and what a civic open hardware infrastructure for Europe could look like in practice.

LAUDS Factories (local, accessible, urban, digital, sustainable) is a Horizon Europe program re-imagining what a factory can be: open, urban, sustainable, and community-driven. Open.Make is a Berlin-based academic project which has been gathering knowledge, and building communities and infrastructure in order to conceptualize an OSH center of competence in Berlin.