open workshops

Open workshops are communityspaces of craftsmanship, digital fabrication and technologies that you can use and help to shape. Common value is the idea of sharing knowledge, tools and machines, technology, materials and space. Open workshops are accesable for anyone who wants to be active in handicrafts or artistic work - young and old, amateurs and (semi-)professionals, artists, hobbyists, makers and tinkerers. Open workshops often originate from private initiatives, sometimes they are part of cultural-, community- or youth- centres, more rarely of companies. While some have decades of experience, others are still „in progress“.

Want to find out more? "Komm rein!", the brochure of the Association of Open Workshops (Verbund Offener Werkstätten e.V.), offers deeper insight into the variety of workshop-opportunities- view and order it free of charge here.

 

Read our self-conception here

 

In open workshops you can independently: Build or restore furniture, sew or print on clothes, produce artpieces from various materials, make paper, paint, forge, weld, glue, turn, saw, plane, mill, cast, make pottery, solder, code, try out and learn new processes and ideas, build machines ... or repair your bike ...

Qualities of Open Workshops

Open workshops are places of encounter and practical activity

  • practice-oriented
  • not profit-oriented
  • open to everyone
  • meeting place for generations

Open workshops encourage people do DIY (do it yourself) and DIT (do it together)

  • valorise work beyond employment
  • learn, make, share and pass on creative and cultural practices
  • discovering one's own strengths
  • enable a sense of achievement, strengthen self-confidence and trust in one's own abilities

Open workshops preserve traditional cultural techniques, promote new developments and pass them on to interested people

  • keep old and new crafts alive and develop them
  • counteract the loss of skills
  • teach practical skills

Open workshops promote sustainable lifestyles

  • open up alternatives to the consumer and throwaway society
  • use resources collectively
  • bringing together environments of living and learning

Open workshops enable self-determined educational experiences

  • Learning at one's own pace
  • Learning by doing
  • being creative
  • Discovering talents and inclinations
  • Promote training decisions and vocational reorientation

Open workshops contribute to health promotion

  • Experience groundedness
  • Feel self-efficacy
  • Recognising meaning in action