Makers making together
Makers love making things. We make things because we have to. There is an intense fulfilment that arrives when we spend long stretches of time to craft an unknown, incessant part of ourselves, expressed into a form. Sometimes it is not about the time, but the deep intent that goes into every step.
It can also be a rollercoaster experience: there is a lot of inane, boring repetition, paralysis, procrastination, and furrowing of brows:
Be it through ups and downs, it almost always helps to have peer support — people who can appreciate the small wins and empathize with the self-doubt. So I started to imagine a space where everyone can share their moments of clarity, insanity or weirdness:
I often tweet about the ton of random ideas I have, so I don’t always act on them. My friend Ailian emailed me to discuss more after that tweet, but I got distracted by end-of-year happenings. It took another month:
I emailed Ailian again, she was game and Buster was kind enough to reply to my tweet. Three was enough to form a party. Ailian and I had a five minute text conversation about possible names, and she went ahead to register it on Slack.
Makersmake was hence incepted.
We wanted to have an inclusive, diverse, non-judgmental space where we would welcome any making: cooking, sewing, poetry…we want to be surprised. We want to honor all stages and expressions of making. The chaos, the loneliness, the joy, the despair, the fulfilment. The multitude of ways and dimensions creativity can manifest.
The process of making something can take a long time and be very hard, so it helps to be surrounded by people who knows what it takes. Most of the time, all we see is the final outcome, without knowing how many detours, sweat and tears it took.
It is really also inspiring to see a diversity of work from multiple disciplines, to witness someone else’s determination and craft into something they really care about. To be with people who knows what it feels like to deeply engage with something that no one else is seeing or experiencing.
The relentless pursuit of making can be irrational, but that is the beauty of it, because there are no reasons needed. We make, because we have to.
What are people making
It is only a few days old, but we are now 27-people strong, a huge jump from the original three we thought we were going to have. Here is a snapshot of what people are making and sharing (we have a channel publishing directly to a public site, thanks to Gueorgui for the suggestion to try out something he made at work):
Visual art
Music
Podcast
currently recording my first 12 episodes to drop to iTunes. My hope is to investigate and uncover education and teaching methods to help parents and educators see others breaking the traditional edu mold as our world rapidly changes — Andrew Nauenburg
Web
Math
This is an incomplete math paper I’ve been working on. It’s incomplete because the last “theorem” hasn’t really been proven correctly yet. There are some flaws in the logic of the last section (section 3) — Tyler Neylon
Apart from sharing work-in-progress, we have had conversations about book printing, how to make art financially sustainable, systems to get things done. We also share resources that may help someone else’s project or engage in an exchange that may reduce the ambiguity of an early idea.
The days are early, communities are always hard to sustain but we can all look forward to see what will evolve out of it. :)
