Garnet Hertz on Sat, 22 Jun 2019 17:34:10 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel |
Lastly, here are responses to the question "Any other thoughts or ideas?" (I've edited out some people's private contact information here, other than that these are the raw responses). Which ones resonate with you?
54 responses
• the main ideas should realy come from the third world....they are way much more advance
• happy to get involved in helping build this - just let me know :) @c------- / k--.b---------@gmail.com
• b-- here. I think the zine, + on demand + downloadable format would be great. Riso !!!
• Thanks Garnet!
• Maybe a how to magazine of critical and speculative design projects?
• well... another metaphor for cats is academia, or herding cats. other
• For the organisation to be a meeting space for other locally focused groups not necessarily attached to making to encourage cross fertilisation of ideas.
• "Makers" are people, and community is people -- and we should eschew the platforming tendencies by single individuals, be it TechShop, Fab Lab, Maker Media, P2P, ecology ...
• And as I said earlier, together with m------:
"Shared Machine Shops are not new.
Fab Labs are not about technology.
Sharing is not happening.
Hackerspaces are not open.
Technology is not neutral.
Hackerspaces are not solving problems.
Fab Labs are not the seeds of a revolution."
(http://peerproduction.net/iss…/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/)
P---- T------, p.-------@--.nl
• Great thoughts and ideas on Nettime. Keep up the good work! Hope to see you again IRL some time. J----
• No DARPA grants
• Open source is a strange thing to focus on. There are many maker companies that eschew open source, and many that require retention of copyright, etc. I wonder why you chose this phrasing.
• Be political neutral, don't force political opinions on people like the left wing Make magazine did.
• I am not sure I am right. This is just my gut reaction.
• Being a “maker” is a way of living based that we can hack everything for better :) we can be better, we have to.
• The maker movement is more alive and latent than ever.
• A post Maker Media organization should imho be membership-based, with membership revenue being the basis of what is possible financially. It would be a kind of global trade organization for makers of all kinds.
• HACK OTHER EVENTS: Attend events that attract makers who don't identify as makers: comicon (almost everyone is a maker there), wood and metalworking trade shows, custom car and bike shows, etc. We grow our community by joining other communities and infecting them with our enthusiasm for blending the disciplines into one big community of makers.
• I think building an alliance or consortium that brings together various organizations and individual is much better idea. The group could consist of organizations who's business is cater to maker community (open hardware companies, open source companies).
• I think the problem you're always going to run into is an issue of that the maker community has always struggled a bit with the idea of business as a part of the movement. At its core, the movement is a hobby to most people, so the vast majority of maker organizations have to or prefer to rely on outside sources of support because if you try to fund a makerspace internally and make business an integral part of it, it just becomes another factory workshop. I don't think it works if the organization funding it is the same one as the organization trying to coordinate the non-profit programs.
• Kinda like a national science faire but more maker oriented.
• S----- H--- is severely underrated and print is dead.
• MF, by it's very nature sort of made it hard for individuals to show stuff because it was just too exhausting. I would like to see a better way to do show and tell among individuals.
• this really sucks!!!!
• We don't need so much focus on Bay Area-type artists. We need to teach people, and especially kids, how to get started for themselves, and then help them develop skills.
• Support the independent makers. They are the "talent".
• For years heard many smaller maker companies lamenting that it was too expensive to participate in a maker Faire. It was a of once a maker made the leap from maker to a maker business Make Media wanted large sums of money to have a booth/representation at an event. This amount was unproportionally large compared to the revenue the business generated. And it all makes sense why the prices were so high when there were venture capitalists that needed to see returns. Treat it the new "Make" as a company of one, then it'll succeed long term. https://ofone.co/ (no, not affiliated with the book in any way)
• Makers are strongly connected to the UN SDG's - find ways to mutual development.
• Co-create strong independent networks, portals, platforms to survive autonomy in times of crises: Signal, Protonmail, etc
• Developing of the next generation of Makers should be something that should span more than just print and digital media. Deeper integration into schools, K12 and Collegiate, to help develop the skills needed to live and work in an Internet connected, coded world.
• do not try to be too big
• I've taken the time to carve out more space in my life to make things now that Make is gone. It felt like they had a handle on the whole making things deal. And that level of fit and finish isn't really my style. I feel like I have more space to just be me and do what I want. I know this is all in my head. I really want the books to continue under a similar imprint. It'd be a shame if they were all discontinued or sold to some soulless corporation.
• More drones!
• Women are makers, and “women’s crafts” are forms of making. People living in poverty are makers, and survival invention in developing nations is a form of making. Learn from Bauhaus’s eff-ups a century ago. Learn from innovation in literal ghettos and tenements.
• "making" is too broad to go mainstream. Folks that grok makerfaire dig it hard, yet folks that don't have no clue what the hell it is. We have a big awareness problem still. Rally around right to repair and teaching folks how to fix stuff so they start taking more stuff apart and questioning how it works.
• If I had the means to start I'd do it myself
• I am sorry to waste your time
• usually monetery and community focussed efforts conflict. it would be great if this was not the case
• Occasional events are better for outreach whereas regular meetups are better for cultivating a specialism
• Consider expanding the Maker Media empire, or whatever is left of it, to the Eastern Hemisphere/East -- India and China are the future, and if Make: had some of its outposts in these economies, radical change could be seen with respect to the global maker movement
• Nothing good lasts forever. Design the business accordingly.
• I attended probably 75% of the NYC MFs, including 2010. I believe the year things changed for the worse was when Barnes&Noble got involved, makers started complaining about the cost to exhibit, and weird unrelated large sponsors showed up (some kind of new soda). The reprap festivals might be a better way to go?
• I think it makes sense at this point to look at how we can form a network of small groups in many places working together towards a common mission with the support of a board providing guidance.
• How, and with whom, can I accomplish this in Reutlingen, Willi Betz Gelände?
• I know people are super sad about MAKE. Me too. It's very nostalgic considering all the friends and community we have made all around the world. But I feel, this is just the passing of an industry from the early stage to a mature stage. This is very similar to all the open source hardware grassroots clubs we had such as the famous Homebrew Club, but today people hardly build computers by hand anymore. We have "matured" into another level of technology.
• It's a cycle. What starts young, will one day become matured and even die off to give birth to something else totally new, while the remnants of the old will get embedded as part of bigger and more financially stable organisations.
• connect up all loal hackerspaces in a city and have them run an event in a conglomeration.
• One thing I feel is lacking in the usual maker pedagogy is fundamental business literacy. People can develop amazing skills through self-study, but business law is arcane by design. • I think most makers stand to benefit greatly from some content demystifying business licensing, home accounting and independent consultancy work. There are already many organizations promoting independent business, but there seems to be little overlap between these and the maker community.
• The maker faire is a decentralized thing. Most of regional and mini maker faires are on. Perhaps instead of maker Media licenses we could just use a respected and recognized chapter, a document stating what is a maker faire and what is not. If the maker faire trademark will not be available for us,
then we will have to think up and to agree on a new name.
• We can do better than Maker Faire.
• If there is a open source franchise model then each location could have a contributed fee that would assist with purchasing of new equipment, insurance, repairs, staffing etc. • It is a lower-cost way of sharing resources instead of having to rely solely on local volunteers or individual sites.
• Half focus on newcomers and other half in veterans. A lot of us started with Arduino, and some made custom PCB, wich is kinda normal.
• Not for profit please :D
• Get youtubers involved, like Simone Giertz, Laura Kampf, Mark Rober,
• Be an actual maker movement, about DIY and tech learning and FUN!, and not a profit-focused startup company. Be genuinely excited about making, not fake excited about selling us marked up crap. Get into the deep dive details.
• Be more like the 8/16 bit computer user group days, the Radio and Electronics days, the glee of building and fixing and modding shit. Be photocopied zine days and not glossy magazine days. More crazy tinkerers, less TED talk. Don't be a fucking TED talk. Never be that again.
• Scrappy and inclusive, not hipster and exclusive. Geezers and kids and adults and teens all treated with respect.
• For god's sake, the project is the star! Fuck "influencers". Nobody is a fucking star of makerdom.
• Engineering is modest, good hacks get kudos. No hate for n00bs. Everybody can come. You can do the thing!
• Make did an amazing job of combining different disciplines into one community. I'd love to see that again.
• stress anti-capitalist and regenerative capitalist models
If you'd like to input ideas, here's the form - https://forms.gle/SB7FxpJVAyhVwnLp7 - and in reference to Nettime, I'm particularly interested in hearing people (by email) that might be interested in hosting some sort of events that have to do with DIY/art/tech/culture, sort of in the spirit of a revived Dorkbot - please give me a shout.
Thanks!
Garnet
Hello Iain, et al,If I have contributed with my post regarding the passing of Maker - as no big deal - this creating maker-doubt by underscoring the lack of environmental consciousness in a kabillion plastic parts (heating seals and whales applaud) my comments were not intended to squelch the beneficial maker-flow when it comes to tinkering, or imaginative play. Indeed, so important to almost all practices! However, I would not blame the screen...attachment to which may be causing a slow-down in nettime’s success as smartphone users run to real and material life for refuge. Let the maker-urge flow...let the commercialization of maker, fall. Maker’s best attribute imho is its, forgive me, horizontality as a movement touching everyone from seniors and hospital wards to high end computer labs and and universities.The maker-ethos is fantastic, even if one never gets anywhere but treads maker-water for ages.It was/is some post-industrial attempt to reunite hand/eye/heart/brain with material—arguably problematically conceived, even anti-digital thinking tied up with that. Can we not balance resistance to the virtual life through engagement with digital life as opposed to rejecting or pushing it away? So, if making did celebrate a kind of naive, non-expertise, then has it produced a generation or two of dummies with eyes wide open to new ideas? Maybe not. Maybe rather refocused elements of creativity, which along with “sharing” can be critiqued as belonging to and defined by varied economies from the anarchical to the communist to the neo-liberal.Molly lurker Hankwitz# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permissionOn Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 11:08 AM Iain Boal <boal@sonic.net> wrote:Parhaps the historical vogue for ‘making’ was a wishful reaction of passive bodies - TV’s couch potatoes - bound even tighter to the screen by the novel technics of interactivity, viz. enhanced passivity. I recently heard that 10 year olds in California are averaging 7 hours a day stroking glass. Can this be true?
Iain
On 18 Jun 2019, at 14:20, Richard Sewell <richard@jarkman.co.uk> wrote:
Sam - it's a self-description that works well for people who find themselves doing several of those things, and don't want to be pigeonholed into doing just one.
Garnet makes the same mistake, I think:
" 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 you're making some ceramics and some robots and some lutes, it just doesn't work to call yourself a luthier. You could think of the term as an acceptance that some people will be making all sorts of things, not going along with the traditional commercial specialisation of making skills.
Yes, it might mean that you get paid less, but then it's not really a description of a job, it's a description of an activity that's often happily not commercial.
One of the things about Make that made me sad was that it tended to presume that everybody aspired (or should aspire) to turn their making into some kind of business, and that was often missing the real point of the making. It assumed that if you liked to cook a nice dinner you'd be even happier running a restaurant.
R.
On 18/06/2019 21:11, Sam Dwyer wrote:
> It was always fated to be a high poser and huckster zone, because if you were really good at making stuff, wouldn't you consider yourself an engineer or a designer or an artist first?
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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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