|
Responses both to Richard, Adrian and Garnet - great points!
(Hope this doesn't make things difficult!)
I think that, taking a longer perspective, the key question we
have to ask is whether the "Maker Movement" contains (or even
could contain) potential genuinely to transform and empower
localities. Relocalisation was one of the big sales pitches for
the internet (remember all that breathless talk of working from
home, and a new layer of prosperous digital artisans?) yet what we
see, twenty five years later, is hyper-centralisation.
Just as an example, we used to use the apartment above "Makers"
for AirBNB. So British people, visiting us in Sheffield, could pay
people in San Fransico for the right to transact with us. Partly
in response, we've taken the step of scrapping the apartment,
breaking through the ceiling of the shop, reinstituting the
staircase, and opening up two more floors to local commerce,
culture and micro-industry!
But can we make that decision make sense? Are we just utopian
silly-billies, prepared to waste our resources on subsidising
local culture - or can we make it pay at least as much as we made
from our previous activities?
Only by fairly universal engagement can Making begin to address
the sorts of global issues that posters like Adrian and Garnet
have identified (resource usage, poor resource recovery, social
inequalities, alienation...). And to get fairly universal
engagement, it HAS TO PAY.
Richard, you say "my point of view the greatest value of the
maker movement has been an explosion of people making things that
don't entirely make sense and that are not intended as commercial
ventures. That's not an issue, that's the point."
If we maintain that the quirky, fascinating, but ultimately
unprofitable experiments are the core value of the Maker Movement,
then be prepared to accept that it WILL wither and die - or
rather, simply retreat into the world of hobbyists orbiting
academic institutions. Throughout history there have been
movements that have resulted in things that don't entirely make
sense - it hasn't needed the Maker Movement to make that happen.
Are you in danger of conflating the experimental excrescences of
creative young people with what we're now calling "making" (that
intersection of the physical and the digital that's made possible
by affordable digital manufacturing equipment and dirt-cheap,
programmable microelectronics)?
I believe that the Maker Movement points to value an order of
magnitude of greater - a contextual change, in which localities
are transformed and empowered as they take on the skills, the
engagement and the tools to make their own quirky, responsive and
particular products and emergent cultures suitable for their own
needs.
But just because something is fairly universal, that STILL
doesn't mean that it has potential to revitalise localities. This
is where I have an issue with 3D Print. Take, as an analogy,
inkjet printing. Inkjet printing is almost universal (who doesn't
have one, two, or more inkjet printers languishing in their attic
or office storeroom?) but the only jobs that this creates are
manufacturing and selling Inkjets and Ink. Despite the ubiquitous
distribution of hardware, the (often diabolically networked)
software, combined with proprietary ink cartridges, means that all
the profits are spirited away from where YOU live.
The product of an Inkjet printer is good enough for you to frame
and put on the mantelpiece (until it fades and you print out
another one), but they probably aren't good enough to sell. These
types of technology give you the illusion that you are a producer
(of nice colour reproductions), when actually, you are a consumer
(of ink). I think that 3D Printers currently have a similar
economic effect - they're the end of the value chain. You can
print out pirate space marines, (or marine space pirates, come to
that) and use them for your tabletop battles, but that doesn't
mean you can sell them legally, or at at a price that makes sense.
You're the end of the value chain.
On the other hand, you can feed laser cutters or CNCs with an
incredibly wide range of materials, from a vast range of
suppliers. And crucially, those materials have purposes OTHER THAN
being fed into a laser cutter or CNC. If you also have a cheap
planer-thicknesser, then almost any recovered wood product can be
your raw material.
These questions of microeconomics may get us away from the
fascination of the amateur hackathon - and researchers may feel
less immediately excited - but they matter for the shape of the
bigger picture in the longer term.
There's a whole other post - in fact, a whole thread - to be made
about Making and Open Source. Is Open Source (as distinct from
local, personal sharing) actually the thin end of the "globalised
business as usual" wedge? I'll leave it for now.
All the best,
James
=====
On 12/06/2019 17:35, Richard Sewell
wrote:
James
- I think from my point of view the greatest value of the maker
movement has been an explosion of people making things that don't
entirely make sense and that are not intended as commercial
ventures. That's not an issue, that's the point. They are learning
that they can pull ideas out of their heads into the real world,
they are learning to envision things and then make them and then
learn from them, and they are making their own marvels
I'm very much in favour of startups and the kinds of enterprises
that have sprung out of the world of makers, but only a small
fraction of the people that want to make things actually want to
make it into a business. It's one of the things about Make's
approach that I never really got on with - the idea that there was
a sort of admirable or even inevitable progression from making
things for yourself to starting a business.
Richard
On 12/06/2019 16:19, James Wallbank wrote:
Hi Adrian,
I'm really interested in this comment:
"There are people in the space who see it as a way to bootstrap
their startup, and there is a risk that it can be exploited by
someone only out for themselves, but the culture of the space
mostly manages to protect itself from that."
My view is that the key to wider adoption of superlocal making
is not just to allow, but to encourage people to use your space
to bootstrap their startup, and find some way to that the space
benefits via that.
In our case at "Makers", we manufacture for others for money, so
there's nobody we like better than people who are bootstrapping
a startup and shifting lots of product! As peoples'
micro-enterprises take off, we make, they pay, and they take
away items of greater value than we charge. Everyone's winning!
The issue, it seems to me, is that many makers want to make
"just out of interest" and manufacture fascinating things that
just don't make economic sense. For us, having a shop in front
of our workshop really helps - when you put something on the
shelf, you can start, quite easily, to see what price it must
have to sell (not always lower than you hoped, BTW). Typical
maker products, chock-full of sensors, logic and LEDs, often
cost more than people will pay for them.
Getting to grips with the reality of products, and the hard
facts of economies of scale (a wifi enabled, music playing,
colour changing light-bulb retails for £6!) starts people
thinking about "the new economy". Things people are prepared to
pay a sensible price for are ludicrously specific and
particular. They're about them, their lives, and their
particular context.
This flies in the face of just about everything we've been
taught (and how we've been taught) about making: look for the
common factors, ways to increase efficiency, ways to generalise
solutions, methods to scale up. Perhaps we need to start
thinking about the unique, the special, the "only works here and
now". Perhaps the things that the new artisans will manufacture
in each locality will be not just the hard to replicate at
scale, but the pointless to replicate at scale.
Cheers,
James
P.S. Was talk of the death of Nettime somewhat premature?
=====
On 12/06/2019 15:20, Adrian McEwen wrote:
There are people in the space who see it as a way to bootstrap
their startup, and there is a risk that it can be exploited by
someone only out for themselves, but the culture of the space
mostly manages to protect itself from that.
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On 13/06/2019 03:55, Garnet Hertz
wrote:
This discussion is
great - I just subscribed with Chris's message to me - it's
nice to connect with like-minded people around this topic.
I've obviously been hanging around the wrong places online
(like Facebook).
"maker as a disconnection to
class struggle" - I could talk about this for YEARS - or at
least thousands of words (see below if you don't believe
me):
In my view (and I know I'm preaching to the choir here) is
that the maker movement was primarily an attempt to
standardize, spread and commercialize what artists and hackers
were already doing into a “Martha Stewart for Geeks” by Make
magazine. The founders literally used "Martha Stewart for
Geeks" as their vision - this isn't a metaphor. My book
project, for example, looks to articulate one of the many
strands of this scene that predated making — DIY electronics
in art — and it reaches back nearly a hundred years. As many
of you know, it has a totally fascinating history. Other
strands include hacker culture since the 1970s, the free
software movement since 1983, ubiquitous computing since 1991,
open source hardware since 1997, the explosion of craft
practices since Y2K, the Arduino platform since 2003, the
FabLab movement since 2005, and the material turn of
philosophy over the past several decades — all of these are
maker movements, and most of them are more of a social
movement than what Make has envisioned. The maker movement as
articulated by Make lacks fuel of its own and offers little of
unique cultural value beyond giving us the nondisciplinary
label of the ‘maker’ in 2005. Make magazine organized,
promoted and ‘platformed’ the maker movement as its brand, but
the leadership of makers came from other sources (as noted
above).
What is most interesting about the idea of making is not
the term itself — it is the pieces of hacking, craft, DIY
culture and electronic art that were left out of constructing
the idea of the "maker" (at least in North America), which was
largely carved out by Maker Media to serve its private
business needs related to selling magazines and event tickets.
Maker Media very clearly sanitized things from the hacker
scene (maker = hacker - controversy) and from the art/DIY
scene (Dorkbot, especially - which I ran in Los Angeles at the
time). The newer understanding of ‘making’ is not really an
all-encompassing term for all, but is focused on a specific
subset of ideas, primarily exists in a limited geography of
influence, has a limited ecosystem of tools, and follows a
specific form for projects that are considerably different and
more constrained than the ‘making’ that existed before. The
scene envisioned by Maker Media was almost exclusively focused
on producing work as a leisure pursuit, which is a total
misunderstanding with how many hackers or artists work.
In retrospect, the maker scene rode two major waves: the
Arduino and 3D printing. I see its death as partially a result
of never being able to find a third wave. Maker Media was also
constructed as a relatively financially heavy structure that
needed a lot of fuel to survive -- it wasn't an artist
collective. In terms of financial waves, the Arduino provided
vital technological, social and ethical glue that massively
helped Make magazine launch. The Ardunio technical platform
provided an accessible and uniform venue for sharing project
prototypes, and its open source hardware provided a novel and
exciting blueprint for how physical electronic objects could
be prototyped and distributed. The Arduino and Make had a
symbiotic and intertwined relationship with each other, with
Arduino providing the hardware, mindset and seed community for
Make, and Make providing media coverage and scores of fresh
users for the Arduino hardware platform.
A similarly intertwined relationship formed a few years later
between consumer-level 3D printing and Make magazine and its
affiliated Maker Faire. In hindsight, the 3D printing movement
was synonymous with the maker movement between 2009 to 2013,
and this impact is still felt today. Of the many projects and
companies involved in the rapid expansion of inexpensive 3D
printing after 2009, MakerBot was central — and Make magazine
largely served as its promotional sidekick.
The maker movement is somewhat significant in that it
highlights how alienated contemporary western culture has
become from the manual craft of building your own objects, and
how wholly absorbed it has been enveloped in consumer culture.
The maker movement works counter this alienation, but does so
with considerably broad strokes — almost to the extent that
making anything qualifies as being part of the movement.
Instead of looking at the maker movement as a large
interdisciplinary endeavour, it can also be interpreted as a
re-categorization of all manual fabrication under a single
banner. Language typically expands into a rich lexicon of
terms when a field grows, and the generality of ‘making’ is
the polar opposite. Ceramicists, welders, sculptors, luthiers,
amateur radio builders, furniture makers and inventors have
been conflated into the singular category of makers, and the
acceptance of this shift seems to indicate that any form of
making is novel enough in popular culture that it is not worth
discerning what is being built.
If looking at what typically constitutes a social movement,
Make magazine’s maker movement never fit the bill. For
example, Glasberg and Deric define social movements as
“organizational structures and strategies that may empower
oppressed populations to mount effective challenges and resist
the more powerful and advantaged elites.” If we ask what
oppressed population Make magazine serves, it clearly doesn't
have one. If looked at from an economic perspective, Make’s
readership contains considerably more powerful and advantaged
elites than the oppressed: the publication’s own statistics
claim that its audience has a median household income of
$125,000 USD, over double the national US median of $59,039.
Make’s maker movement is primarily a pitch to sell empowerment
to the already empowered — in a 2012 Intel-funded research
study on makers, “empowerment” is identified as a key
motivator for the affluent group, and Make primarily sustained
itself by catering to this audience until it realized that 3D
printing and the Arduino weren't everything they promised to
be. Or maybe people finally realized that they had enough 3D
printed Yoda heads and blinking LED Arduino projects -- and
that building stuff of cultural or design value was actually
quite difficult.
If anybody else is interested in reading a draft of my
book, just fill this out: https://forms.gle/1F8787aJqSSapjPW9
- I'll mail out about a dozen physical hardcopies in exchange
for harsh feedback.
Some of the responses are as follows:
* Model it after dorkbot but instead of having meetings it
can be geared around smaller regional Faires
* I would run it as a non profit and make sure that there are
people from all over the world representing. Not only so US
focused.
* Focus on low tech and tech critism...as much as possible far
from western culture...let say the gambiara creative movement
in LATAM (brazil) or Cuban style repair culture
guerilla, community envisioned and run
publications/workshops/happenings without the 'red tape' so
often discussed as part of the Maker Media legacy. so, no
forced branding, no forced commonalities (other than perhaps a
shared manifesto), no minimum number of participants or
fundraising requirement for it to be a 'real' event of the
community, and much less of a focus on attracting, and then
satisfying, corporate sponsors.
* Should be about critical making, open source, skill sharing,
critical thinking and more...
* I think the most important thing is to help local people
meet up with each other in person. This should go far beyond
people who already go to a hackerspace - this is something
that Make did well by bringing together all sorts of people
from children, university students, hackers, artists, etc. I
don't think this has to be large scale.
* Member-run co-operative; leadership positions only for
women; women-only days; focus on understanding biases built
into technologies and imagining ways around this (critical
technical practice)
And if anybody has made it this far down the page, I'm
interested in talking to people working at universities that
are working in this field.
Good
question. Can you see my hands waving from over there? :-D
There
is much still to conjure up, I feel like I'm stood looking
around and
saying "where we are now doesn't seem all that great. What
about that
ground over there, that looks like it could be better, what if
we head
that way?"
It seems to me we are facing many challenges: the climate
emergency;
labour conditions; plastic everywhere; wealth inequality...
Assuming we want to do something about all (or even some) of
that,
there's lots of work to be done.
The hair shirt environmentalism didn't succeed in the 70s,
it's even
less likely to succeed now, so we need new ways of continuing
to make
(at least a proportion of) the luxuries we're used to (Bruce's
last
viridian note [1] is my go-to on that matter) without just
outsourcing
it to huge sweatshops in China.
How do we wean ourselves off plastic? Maybe we return to more
traditional materials like wood, glass, ceramics, textiles.
Apple is
CNC milling its laptops out of blocks of metal, so we could do
similar
with wood. Or look at the experiments in materials from
groups like
Materiom [2].
What happens when container ships can no longer burn oil to
get around?
Maybe that skews economics back to more local production?
If we're repairing our products more then every town will need
a bunch
of people who can design replacement parts and make the
repairs. The
old Dyson vacuum knocking around DoES Liverpool has custom
shapes of
nozzles 3D printed and its on-off button is a 3D printed
replacement -
not to Dyson's exact shape, but perfectly functional. Over
time we'll
build a commons of parts for everything, but there'll always
be
customisations and variations.
Open hardware will then have an advantage because the
schematics and
designs will all be already available for that.
We have pick-and-place machines to assemble our electronics.
The geeks
are working out how to build the desktop versions, maybe it's
only a
matter of time before they can start designing the inverse -
machines to
selectively unsolder parts and sort them into bins for reuse.
That might not be economically viable to begin with, maybe a
citizens
dividend will give some people enough of an income that they
can decide
it's more interesting and useful than a job in a call centre.
These are all baby steps, and there are holes in my arguments
you can
drive a bus through; but they're steps in the right direction
and the
more of them we take, the more momentum will build into
attacking the
related ones that seem insurmountable now. How do we scale it
all
quickly enough? By sharing how we're doing it so others can
join in and
share their improvements.
Makers aren't the answer to everything, but I think there's an
opportunity for us to provide an important piece of the
puzzle.
Cheers,
Adrian.
[1]
https://web.archive.org/web/20160407032751/http://www.viridiandesign.org/2008/11/last-viridian-note.html
[2] https://materiom.org/
On 12/06/2019 21:31, Richard Sewell wrote:
> Adrian - I'd agree with all of that - but can you say a
bit more about
> the last bit:
> "working out how we carry that forward into ways to
manufacture
> everything else"
>
> R.
>
> On 12/06/2019 21:20, Adrian McEwen wrote:
>> I think the points both of you make are important.
Everyone should
>> have the agency (if they choose to use it, not
everyone has to be a
>> maker) to make whatever they like /and/ we should be
helping those
>> who want to build businesses around their making to
do so and succeed.
>>
>> In DoES Liverpool the more commercially-minded makers
benefit from
>> the experiments and skill-sharing of those "just"
pursuing an
>> interest; and the culture of knowledge- and
skill-sharing goes the
>> other way too, along with a greater contribution to
the financial
>> cost of running the makerspace.
>>
>> James, I think I did a poor job of crafting the
sentence you quoted.
>> As I said earlier in my post "we /did/ deliberately
choose to
>> encourage more businesses", and they do benefit the
space. Your
>> point elsewhere about the utility of laser-cutters
over 3D printers
>> is borne out in our experience too, with there being
six more
>> laser-cutters in the city as a direct result of
businesses getting
>> started using ours and then outgrowing our facilities
and buying
>> their own (and of those, four of them are
businesswomen).
>>
>> The makerspace (/maker movement) doesn't need to
protect itself
>> against businesses, it needs to protect itself
against bad actors
>> acting badly.
>>
>> If we're going to find a route to a future where an
open-source,
>> collaborative mindset and widely distributed (and
cost-effectively
>> scaleable) manufacturing allows a panoply of
individual and
>> earning-a-good-living making, we need to carve out
spaces and time
>> for that to take shape. The risk is that it's
co-opted into a
>> business-as-usual mainstream.
>>
>> A raft of new artisans succeeding at an
arts-and-crafts movement for
>> the modern day is a good step in the right direction,
and we need to
>> be working out how we carry that forward into ways to
manufacture
>> everything else.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Adrian.
>>
>> On 12/06/2019 17:35, Richard Sewell wrote:
>>> James - I think from my point of view the
greatest value of the
>>> maker movement has been an explosion of people
making things that
>>> don't entirely make sense and that are not
intended as commercial
>>> ventures. That's not an issue, that's the point.
They are learning
>>> that they can pull ideas out of their heads into
the real world,
>>> they are learning to envision things and then
make them and then
>>> learn from them, and they are making their own
marvels
>>>
>>> I'm very much in favour of startups and the kinds
of enterprises
>>> that have sprung out of the world of makers, but
only a small
>>> fraction of the people that want to make things
actually want to
>>> make it into a business. It's one of the things
about Make's
>>> approach that I never really got on with - the
idea that there was a
>>> sort of admirable or even inevitable progression
from making things
>>> for yourself to starting a business.
>>>
>>> Richard
>>>
>>> On 12/06/2019 16:19, James Wallbank wrote:
>>>> Hi Adrian,
>>>>
>>>> I'm really interested in this comment:
>>>>
>>>> "There are people in the space who see it as
a way to bootstrap
>>>> their startup, and there is a risk that it
can be exploited by
>>>> someone only out for themselves, but the
culture of the space
>>>> mostly manages to protect itself from that."
>>>>
>>>> My view is that the key to wider adoption of
superlocal making is
>>>> not just to allow, but to encourage people to
use your space to
>>>> bootstrap their startup, and find some way to
that the space
>>>> benefits via that.
>>>>
>>>> In our case at "Makers", we manufacture for
others for money, so
>>>> there's nobody we like better than people who
are bootstrapping a
>>>> startup and shifting lots of product! As
peoples' micro-enterprises
>>>> take off, we make, they pay, and they take
away items of greater
>>>> value than we charge. Everyone's winning!
>>>>
>>>> The issue, it seems to me, is that many
makers want to make "just
>>>> out of interest" and manufacture fascinating
things that just don't
>>>> make economic sense. For us, having a shop in
front of our workshop
>>>> really helps - when you put something on the
shelf, you can start,
>>>> quite easily, to see what price it must have
to sell (not always
>>>> lower than you hoped, BTW). Typical maker
products, chock-full of
>>>> sensors, logic and LEDs, often cost more than
people will pay for
>>>> them.
>>>>
>>>> Getting to grips with the reality of
products, and the hard facts
>>>> of economies of scale (a wifi enabled, music
playing, colour
>>>> changing light-bulb retails for £6!) starts
people thinking about
>>>> "the new economy". Things people are prepared
to pay a sensible
>>>> price for are ludicrously specific and
particular. They're about
>>>> them, their lives, and their particular
context.
>>>>
>>>> This flies in the face of just about
everything we've been taught
>>>> (and how we've been taught) about making:
look for the common
>>>> factors, ways to increase efficiency, ways to
generalise solutions,
>>>> methods to scale up. Perhaps we need to start
thinking about the
>>>> unique, the special, the "only works here and
now". Perhaps the
>>>> things that the new artisans will manufacture
in each locality will
>>>> be not just the hard to replicate at scale,
but the pointless to
>>>> replicate at scale.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>>
>>>> James
>>>>
>>>> P.S. Was talk of the death of Nettime
somewhat premature?
>>>>
>>>> =====
>>>>
>>>> On 12/06/2019 15:20, Adrian McEwen wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> There are people in the space who see it
as a way to bootstrap
>>>>> their startup, and there is a risk that
it can be exploited by
>>>>> someone only out for themselves, but the
culture of the space
>>>>> mostly manages to protect itself from
that.
>>>>>
>>>> # distributed via <nettime>: no
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>>>
>>>
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--
Dr.
Garnet Hertz
Canada
Research Chair in Design and Media Arts
Emily
Carr University of Art and Design
520
East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, BC, Canada V5T 0H2
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