FabLabs as Promissory Organizations: A future-making perspective

This paper examines FabLabs as machine-centred promissory organizations, where futures are not only imagined, but also materially enacted. Drawing on new materialist and process perspectives, we conceptualize FabLabs as promissory assemblages of entangled human and non-human actors, through which future-making is enacted. We show that machines are central agents for the materialization of imagined futures, especially for the boundaries they create between what is possible and what is not possible to actualize. Based on an ethnographic study of 20 FabLabs across nine countries conducted over twelve years, we identify two core processes – fabulation and fabrication – through which the future is first created and then materialized. Fabulation refers to narratively performed imagination leading to the creation of imagined futures, while fabrication concerns the material experimentation and prototyping to test and eventually materialize imagination. This study advances research on promissory organizations by revealing their material underpinnings; it also extends future-making research by demonstrating how futures emerge through iterative material-discursive practices, rather than through linear planning. Overall, the paper contributes a machine-centred account of future-making, highlighting how imagination, materiality, and technology co-produce what futures become possible for entrepreneurs.