Eleven years ago, almost to the week, I stood in the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in Copenhagen (thank you Kirsten Drotner and Ross Parry) and argued that museums could become creative incubators: trusted institutions where audiences “making” could produce new knowledge. It was August 2015, the DREAM conference on museum communication and the best example I could offer was New Museum’s NEW INC in New York, then barely a year old; a co-working floor attached to a museum offering more promise than proof.
I ended that talk with a small history of failure. The Nintendo Knitting Machine, advertised in the 1980s with the slogan "Now you’re knitting with power" and never released. The Singer IZEK, a sewing machine driven by a Game Boy Color and the Barbie Knit Magic.
Decade after decade, someone tried to put textile manufacturing machines into the hands of ordinary people, and decade after decade the market shrugged and these extraordinary devices disappeared.
“What were they thinking?” I asked, and it got a laugh.
But the serious question underneath this history of failure was this: “if individual ownership of the machines keeps failing, where should the machines live?”
This week, in Tilburg, Netherlands I found an answer. The TextielMuseum occupies a former wool mill, and inside it runs the TextielLab: a working production facility. These aren’t machines behind glass, rather, a flat-bed industrial knitting machine mid-production, a textured panel emerging from it beside a wall of labelled yarn cones.
Jacquard looms under the sawtooth roof, their heads carried on a steel gantry threaded through the heritage structure. An island of R&D workstations where a programming screen glows next to folded samples and where the interpretation panel states, plainly, that the digital file directs the machine. Visitors watch commissioned work being made. Designers come to prototype, students come to learn and in turn, the museum manufactures.
The unexpected finding was not that this place exists; it has been in my fieldwork database for months, flagged as a priority visit. The surprise was how completely it resolves the 2015 argument, and how far the argument’s centre of gravity has moved in the meantime.
In 2015 the energy came from the maker movement: fab labs, 3D printers, STEAM education, corporate money flowing into digital fabrication. Much of that wave has receded. The publisher of MAKE magazine folded in 2019, and with them, many standalone makerspaces disappeared.
What survived, and what I saw humming in Tilburg, is the institutionally anchored form of the makerspace: making embedded in organisations that hold collections, civic mandates and durable funding. The Textiel Lab publishes an annual report which credits four public funders and sits inside a municipal redevelopment that names a circular textile hub as part of a campus carrying a 2045 circularity target. The machines eventually found their place, not in the home but in the institution.
Something else shifted. In 2015 I used a framework from the sociology of science that described new knowledge production as socially distributed, application oriented and subject to multiple accountabilities. Back then, accountability was a description of how research works. In 2026 it is becoming the validation of the product itself. Digital product passports, verified fibre provenance, recycled content claims that can be audited: the circular economy has turned accountability from an academic footnote into a market requirement. The old question matured with the field.
The 2015 paper said almost nothing about sustainability and the environment; its concerns were learning, wellbeing and participation, and circularity is an addition to that framework. Additionally, while I own the two of the Gameboy run sewing machines and the Barbie knit, across the board, consumer knitting machines failed; nothing in the Textile Lab suggests we will all become manufacturers. What we did learn though is that shared, anchored facilities can hold the machines, the skills and the trust in one place, so that individuals do not have to.
Which brings me to my findings from the Netherlands leg of my fellowship research which asks whether a design-led circular textile hub could work in on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia, a region with its own wool history and its own scattered makers.
As I sit here looking out to a rainy Amsterdam afternoon, I realise that the questions I am carrying with me over these few weeks are better articulated versions of the ones I posed in Copenhagen: who is learning, what literacies do they bring, and what kinds of citizens are we trying to create through making?
The object has changed from digital literacy in 2015 to fibre flows, repair and provenance in 2026.
There is a particular joy in walking into a building and finding the very thing that you have been banging on about for more than a decade, standing there producing beautiful materials from loop to loop additive manufacturing. I wasn’t right and the failed knitting machines of the 1980s are a permanent caution against that kind of confidence, instead, the joy is in watching a question grow up.
The machines are in the museum.
Now the task is to work out what makes a similar result possible in a regional location on the other side of the world.
Thank you to Green Industries SA and all the team at the Women in Circular Economy Leadership Scholarship. As the 2025 scholar, this field work will produce a report that provides insights to the South Australian Government. European Field Work 2-16 September 2026.