Abstract:

This paper presents the conception of a debate about Maker Culture, which integrated the program of "Science, Café and Culture", a Science Cafe project implemented in a technological education institution since 2013. Science Cafes are characterized as discussion forums, usually external of the academic environments, where experts and society meet to discuss various topics. As main features, Science Cafes are appreciated by horizontality and recognition of knowledge and practices, multiple representativeness and facility of interaction between panelists and audience. It started from the principle that it is an enabling environment to highlight interests and questions of society in relation to controversial issues of science, including those related to this emerging technological movement. The conceptual approach sought to contemplate the issue comprehensively and brought to the space of debate prospects of academic, technological, market and social nature. Such prospects were materialized by the presence of debaters representatives of
(i) the history of science and technology;
(ii) retail trade, whose shares already articulated the Maker movement with consumers and academia;
(iii) social groups that produce technology in independent spaces;
(iv) researcher involved directly with the Maker Culture itself.

Some issues were previously raised by the design team and proposed for debaters and audience, as follows:
(i) What are the impacts, in global terms, of a movement that stimulates people to design, build, modify and produce machines and processes without relying the production system ?;
(ii) This process of personal prototyping leads to other forms of interaction between education spaces, research and production technology?;
(iii) Education, productive sector, services, State, society, security, are they subject to new processes and settings?;
(iv) What is the role of a technological education institution in this scenario that began to be built?

Methodological procedures consisted of, in addition to the broad approach, participation and audience interaction through mobile devices, which generated table questions which, after categorization, revealed the unfamiliarity of it with the theme. The crowd was distributed among secondary/technical school students, undergraduate, graduate, supporters, small entrepreneurs, industry association representatives, public servers and children.

The results indicated that the interaction dynamics proposed by the "Science, Cafe and Culture" project met the team's expectations in order to:
(i) cause the public to take knowledge on the subject;
(ii) give visibility to independent collectives that produces technology;
(iii) enable new understandings about the production of knowledge beyond the academy;
(iv) make suggestions to approximate retail sector, independent spaces and researcher institutions.

It was concluded that Maker Culture, as well as being the central axis of which can be considered as a new technological revolution, can be a transverse axis that crosses the boundaries of academia and opens doors for dialogue with different knowledge areas and sectors of society.

Keywords:

Science Cafe, Maker Culture, Technology.