Makerspace Market 2025

The 16/16 Maker Space Market (2024 -2025)

A gathering where designers, artists, and makers share unfinished work—prototypes, experiments, and early ideas. It’s not a traditional market. It’s a space for collaboration, conversation, and discovery.

Maker Space Market is a public-facing, “tactile experiment” staged at 30 Ajasa Street to catalyze in‑house making, expose work‑in‑progress, and invite the community into an evolving research space. Vol 2 (2025) reframes a market as a living lab where objects function as nodes in a network of ideas, materials, and processes—foregrounding waste as material and everyday making as a civic practice.

What the program focused on Turning regular Ajasa activities into a shared, daily process with public visibility Perceiving and handling waste as a design material and community resource Catalyzing a conversation on circular production, local supply, and community learning Methods and approach Work‑in‑progress exhibition: Show the research and the doing, not only finished products Waste intake and transformation: Collect waste locally and convert it into functional objects and spatial decorations Workshops and timetable: Skill building and conversation sessions Peer mixer: Curated gathering of designers to exchange resources and strengthen local networks Ajasa as lab: The makerspace functions as incubator, training ground, and production pipeline for the VI hospitality site

Tracks and Themes

Waste‑as‑material and circular design Community stewardship and situated making Peer networks and resource‑sharing among local designers Prototyping distributed, small‑scale production models Markets as research: exhibition, discussion, and making as one continuous process Outcomes Launched Vol 1 2025 as an evolving research‑market format

Delivered workshops and a designer mixer to seed ongoing collaboration Skills transfer and peer networks Validated an “exhibition‑as‑process” model where discussion, making, and display are integrated.

How this connects to our wider work Builds on Ajasa’s role as a breathing space for prototyping and public programs Extends our circular flows between makerspace and hospitality, feeding VI with locally made outputs Reinforces a pedagogy of open process, peer exchange, and waste‑driven innovation used across residencies and community programming

Why it matters Offers a replicable, community‑first model for experimental design economies in Lagos. Reorients public perception from consumption to co‑production and stewardship Creates practical pathways for waste reduction, local livelihoods, and culturally grounded design futures

Core methods: Waste intake to objects Workshops with partners Community intervention Designer mixer