What Have We Learned from the AMPLE Survey of Needs?
AMPLE Survey Presentation
Date
01.09.2026
What Have We Learned from the AMPLE Survey of Needs?
As part of the AMPLE project, we developed and released a Survey of Needs to better understand what innovators, start-ups, micro-enterprises and other users might need from Advanced Makerspaces.
The responses have provided useful insight, but we also learned a great deal through the process of developing the survey itself. At the beginning of this work, there was not yet a common understanding across the AMPLE consortium of exactly what an Advanced Makerspace should be.
Working together on the survey helped us explore this question and develop a shared definition:
“Advanced Makerspaces create multifunctional product concepts directly with the proposer, using reconfigurable additive and subtractive tools, informed by material science and advanced metrologies, which are strategically included for future scaling and early-stage production partly-enabled by digital simulations.”
Our new Survey of Needs presentation introduces some of the findings and explores three key questions:
What is an Advanced Makerspace?
How is the transition towards early-stage pilot production envisaged?
What are some of the barriers to using makerspace technologies?
These findings are now helping to guide the next stage of AMPLE. In particular, they will feed into a series of workshops where we will work more directly with innovators and explore the barriers to accessing and using Advanced Makerspace technologies.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the survey so far.
The survey is still open, and we would like to hear from more innovators, start-ups, micro-enterprises and others developing new products. Completing the survey is also a great way to introduce yourself to the AMPLE project and tell us about the support, technologies or expertise you may need.
