What is still missing
The usual case for a technology centre in an underserved area is about access: people are offline, so give them devices and a connection. That case was right for a long time. It is now largely out of date, and acting on it leads to the wrong kind of building.
The gap now is not the connection. It is the kinds of work that cannot be done on the device people already have.
What the national numbers say
Sri Lanka’s 2024 computer literacy report shows that 19.1% of households own a computer, with 10.7% in the Eastern Province and 31.4% in the Western Province[58]. That is a large gap between regions, and it is the first half of the argument.
The second half: in the estate sector (the plantation areas), 92.6% of internet access is by smartphone, against 3.6% by desktop or laptop[58]. People there are not offline. They go online almost entirely through a phone: one small screen, no proper keyboard, no ports, and no way to run professional software.
The statistics department itself warns that its figures for small groups in this report are less precise. The direction of the finding is not in doubt, but the exact decimal place should not be relied on.
What a phone cannot do
The work below cannot realistically be done on a phone. Some of it has a mobile app, but none of it can be done on a phone for hours at a time, at the quality paid work needs, or with a machine connected at the other end of the cable.
The list sets out what the building has to provide:
- Computer-aided design: drawing a part to exact measurements on screen, which is the first step in making it.
- Running a laser cutter, a CNC router (a computer-controlled cutting machine) or a 3D printer.
- Wiring, testing and fixing a circuit.
- Recording and mixing audio on several tracks.
- Video editing on a timeline, for anything longer than a short clip.
- Building complete software, with a terminal, a database and a browser open at once.
Each of these can lead to paid work, and none is realistically open to someone whose only computer is a phone, however good the signal is.
Giving each person a laptop does not solve it either. Most of the list also needs a machine that costs more than a laptop and is used for only a few hours a week.
For this kind of work, shared equipment in a shared space is the right answer, and it would still be the right answer in a wealthy country.
What makes a room a makerspace
A room full of equipment is not a makerspace. What defines one is the mix of subjects and the maker mindset, not the machines[2]. A small rural space that gets the culture right is a real makerspace. A well-equipped room where nobody makes anything is not.
Research on makerspaces with limited resources finds the same thing. Simple equipment that can be kept running, often low-tech, does better than costly equipment that nobody can repair[28, 26].
The cheapest technique taught here is cardboard prototyping. It costs nothing to set up, teaches learners to try and improve faster than any machine, and survives every budget cut. That is why it is still taught years after it dropped out of the written curriculum.
What this means for the design
DreamSpace Academy takes three lessons from this for how its spaces are set up:
- Choose equipment that can be maintained, not equipment that impresses. The Starter Unit is modest and can be repaired.
- Budget for people, not just for equipment. The facilitator is the costly part, and the part that decides whether anything happens. Equipment without a facilitator produces nothing.
- Protect open access time. Shared equipment pays off when people can come in and use it outside a session. That is why open making, with no set activity, is on the timetable, not squeezed into whatever time is left over.