Minka, I don't think you go far enough - we should be teaching
critical thinking and media literacy to most of the adults, as
well as the next generation. That's been part of what I've been
trying to do locally, to varying levels of success; and not just
me - I think Liverpool's artistic community (with a decent strand
of tech/media artists) has helped lots in that, along with a bunch
of us older techies who've been-there-done-that with the VC
startup approach (and seen it both succeed and fail). I tried to
convey some of that to an audience of teachers at the Makernoise
maker-education conference last year - my slides and notes are at
https://doesliverpool.com/slides/makernoise-talk-we-dont-need-another-hero/
However, you've prompted me to realise that while part of my
standard patter as to why we founded DoES Liverpool is that "the
more people in the city who know about the possibilities of these
new technologies, the more interesting businesses and projects and
stuff will come out of it", I should be weaving in something about
critical-thinking into that too.
Molly, the UK maker scene also skews heavily middle-class. I
think that's something that James (I think) and I are partly
railing against with stressing the importance of it needing to
provide a way to earn a living. It's something I've been
conscious of, but have made limited inroads into addressing.
The Liverpool equivalent of Maker Faire, the (upcoming, come and
visit on the 29th!) Liverpool MakeFest [1] has always been run in
collaboration with the city's library service and filled central
library with all manner of makers and crafters. It's vehemently
free to enter, and being spread through the library means all
manner of other members of the public encounter it. It coincided
with Armed Forces Day a couple of years back, resulting in a
regimental brass band milling round the stands; another time I
explained the items on our display to a woman in her mid-80s with
failing eyesight who visits every Saturday morning to read the
papers and suddenly encountered a mass of people there too. She
had some of the fanciest tech in the place, with a little
hand-held camera that could read text out to her through
headphones, or "a black box holding a little bloke on a deck-chair
who reads things out to me" as she put it.
In the UK there seems to be a decent amount of influence from the
maker movement into education. No doubt helped by Raspberry Pi
and micro:bit, but from others too. There are definitely elements
of the tech-startup Make approach, but the more inclusive
grassroots approach seems to be winning out. The founders of
Liverpool MakeFest have been evangelising making in education, and
encouraging makerspaces in schools - one of them, Caroline Keep,
is Times Education Supplement teacher of the year, and set up
Spark Penketh makerspace [2] in her school; and it's slowly
spreading to other schools - nearby Neston High has a makerspace
with a precious plastics shredder and are currently fund-raising
to build a sit-on Strandbeest out of recycled milk bottles...
The library services in the UK are also running with the maker
activities - Denise Jones from Liverpool libraries is advising
other librarians on the MakeFest model, leading to MakeFests in
Stoke-on-Trent and Chester and more in planning; and Amy Hearn
over in Huddersfield started micro:bits in libraries [4], leading
to lots of libraries around the country having kit you can borrow
like you would a book.
Finally, to pick up Garnet's questions about 'a "Post-Making"
type of organization'. I realise I'm projecting /my/ biases onto
it, but I'm more interested in which organisation/s/ could replace
Make, or even better, how do we build a broad coalition of
organisations and initiatives to replace Make?
As you point out Garnet, the various Dorkbot groups pre-date
Make; there are now lots of makerspaces and hackspaces to provide
(at least a start on) physical spaces for making; in the UK we've
got a growing set of MakeFests to do some of the public outreach
and celebration; there are the European hacker camps to give more
inward-focused gatherings. Why replace one
not-representative-of-all-of-us over-arching organisation with
another (with all the politics and "but I've been making far
longer than so-and-so" that we'd all succumb to), when we could
promote a slightly messier and more diverse alternative.
I don't really know what that would look like, and I can see
there's a hole to be filled (in the US at least, maybe outside the
UK too) in how the community organises replacements for
(mini-)MakerFaires, but that needn't speak for all of making. It
might not need to be much beyond a wiki somewhere that people can
list themselves as maker or maker-adjacent groups, projects,
spaces, events... I'm regularly checking out (or pointing people
at) https://www.hackspace.org.uk/ or
https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hackerspaces to help them to
find their local space. A similar resource for other maker
activities and a communal culture of sharing it with people might
get us 80% of the way there...?
Cheers,
Adrian.
[1] https://lpoolmakefest.org/
[2] https://www.penkethhigh.org/spark/
[3] https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/neston-high-school-makers
[4] https://microbit.org/en/2017-10-23-libraries/
On 14/06/2019 23:05, Molly Hankwitz
wrote:
Death of Maker
Maker Faire promoted, as many have pointed out, an
artisanal/technological relationship and hands on DIY
production and in areas of education and experimentation. All
great!
They tried to be inclusive with low-cost
materiality and open access workshops and free-timed events,
but underlying this effort was the perpetually ignored issue
of class; presumed capacity to afford the 25.00US ticket, and
parking fees in San Mateo, or own a car or ride a train ride
to be part of it from small towns or near by cities of San
Jose and San Francisco here in the West. I’m sure there were
such caveats of inclusion in NY Maker Faire as well. That
Maker ethos spread to many cities and had such great public
relations is certainly excellent. The project tried to be
inclusive with its appeal to generic materials, organicism,
and everyday technology but there were inhibitors and
ultimately the Maker Faire, at least, was a middle-class,
largely white, and increasingly commercial event. For
contrast, Gray Area and Intersection's Urban Prototyping
'fair' (2012?) was in the streets - with techno-artists
'making' or demonstrating all over San Francisco's middle
Market St area - with great exposure to all kinds of publics.
That said, great upshot of widespread Maker
movement/campaign, publication; experimental-like idea
promotion and heralding of “non-expertise”as means to learn,
and the putting of collaboration within reach of many has been
the growth of “maker
spaces” in public sector zones. This surely helps counteract some class
issues which evolve from pricing and historic exclusion in
tech and the arts such
as public library systems, (SFPL has The Mix, teen
space), our
K-12 public schools (Hoover MS built a Maker-space),
storefronts (there are several walk-in and work, including
Double Union, also in SF, which is trans/LBGTQ space) and
maybe even websites such as Adafruit (though not sure of
timeline) emerged during the Maker heyday.
How these spaces will survive and change without
umbrella Maker movement, or leading publication, remains a
question.
Disney got involved with Maker Faire, and
that should tell everyone a lot.
One hopes the spirit of ‘making’ and
‘collaboration’ promoted to non-technologists and to many
outsiders of the arts/technology fields, will have subtle and
lasting repercussions in the next wave - and will continue to
permeate education and beyond.
How has “Maker” influenced European education?
https://www.urbanlibraries.org/member-resources/makerspaces-in-libraries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_makerspace
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/everyone-is-a-maker/473286/
http://redtri.com/new-york/hands-on-nycs-best-makerspaces/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048623.2016.1228163
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/73071/1/73071.pdf
https://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/view/rmit:22717/n2006043067.pdf
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/designing-a-school-makerspace-jennifer-cooper
Molly
Hello all,
I've really been enjoying this discussion in the wake
of Make's dissolution. As noted, the corporatization,
whitewashing, and delocalization of potentially critical
and creative diy approaches was certainly a problem with
the "maker movement" as defined by Make. I also completely
agree that the focus on 3D printing over CNC, laser
cutting, or (even) traditional building is a problem. I'm
excited about Garnet's proposals for a new
direction/umbrella for critical approaches as well as
Adrian's proposals, that recall arts and crafts ideas for
21st century problems.
I wonder though, about the educational angle. My own
local makerspace as well as local non-profits that aim to
bring tech education to young people (often underserved)
relied on the Make / "maker" phenomenon for tools,
educational resources, and funding. Perhaps making an LED
blink isn't really interesting for a critically-minded
artist; as a critically-minded artist, I certainly feel
that way. But, it's certainly a stepping stone for tech
education. Make had a significant role in that sphere.
However, I see an potentially interesting/exciting new
direction that could come of the dissolution of Make's
stronghold in the realm of education. Tech education could
be more than "teaching electronics to kids" -- which is very important,
in my opinion. It could (and I think, should) include
teaching critical approaches to technology, teaching media
literacy, critical thinking, and environmental thinking. I
think the discussion here could point towards ways of
bringing those perspectives into what was, under Make, a
largely naive approach.
Is there a space in what Adrian and Garnet's proposals
for youth education? ...for educating the next generation?
...or, for aiding the educators of the next generation?
Minka
(trying to contribute and not just "lurk" so much)
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.
>>>>>
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Dr.
Garnet Hertz
Canada
Research Chair in Design and Media Arts
Emily
Carr University of Art and Design
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