A few things I still mostly think, which were the basis of questions for most of the contributors:
The things that can be made — and in fact any thing and its value — are changing under our noses — in technical, technological, connected, physical, cultural, social and personal ways.
Anyone who makes anything is shaping the world and its culture. Printing a weapon, hand-coiling a pot, designing a hospital, making a GIF, writing an app. The world (and its software) is materially different after you’ve posted a tweet (in a way that it’s not if you said it out loud).
Corporations are a material
In a new way corporations are up against individual programmers, advertising agencies, government organisations and almost anyone else — because (very recently) almost anyone can make their own products, services and ideas and distribute them to the world. It’s not normal yet, for these groups and individuals to compete, and they can’t do everything the others can, but they’re closer.
Corporations are a material. People can make them behave differently.
We could think about companies as (or encourage them to be) cultural citizens or actors. Given on the one hand the extremes of time, money, talent and effort put into developing custom, on the other hand how despised most of these efforts are.
“We like knitting”
And here’s a go at explaining some of what I was thinking:
About seven years ago a marketing director of a large technology company said “We like knitting!” as part of a creative brief for communications. It was a strange thing to say but no-one questioned it because we sort of knew what she meant, and everyone was saying things like that.
There are lots of people — it’s a slippery thing to count but upwards of 3 million (or 1 in 12 jobs) in the UK — in what are sometimes called the creative industries. Architecture, design, advertising, communications and all kinds of media production. Possibly it’s much more, as the fastest growing part of a service economy — but: A Lot. Millions of people giving companies and organisations expensive help with what to make and how to make it.
We’re learning different skills in and outside these jobs. Some of them are things like keystrokes and software, some are to do with how to design remotely. Some involve language: how to communicate and not to, online and remotely; how to make diverse groups work; how to read masses of words and imagery and find something useful (or stay sane). How to manage legal and professional relationships and “ownership”. How to navigate the mazes that emerge from jamming together elderly and immature infrastructures. And we’ve started to learn old hand-skills like knitting, sewing and building with new energy, as pastimes and sometimes spiritual practices outside work (which might also help in job interviews with technology companies).
Words […] can become toxic
As well as being funny, humane, enlightening and great, the networked age is strange and terrifying for all kinds of reasons — some big and obvious, others insidious and ghostly. Words already charged — in this context craft, making, design, companies, markets, culture — become toxic through the amplified anxiety of massive, distributed language online. It’s bothering (and sometimes worse) when someone seems to mean something different to you, and neither of you really know each other’s or anyone else’s meanings, exactly.
Craft is a good example. Some people understand it or practise it as a creative process with a kind of credibility. Richard Sennett says it can be childcare (or childcare can be it). There’s a Japanese word monozukuri, which infuses ideas of craft, technology, scientific and engineering principles and practices to describe an approach to manufacture. David Pye described it as “the workmanship of risk”. It’s used in a pejorative way to mean not-Art, or not-polished, and the opposite. Some people think it’s something their new kitchen should be made with, some people think it’s about doing anything well, or useful. Other people think it will save them from the advance of software, and there are people who think software is craft.
It’s sort of possible to imagine or dismiss the maker movement as hobbyists or even to pigeonhole it as something temporary or insubstantial, but only if you’re not looking. Somewhere in the last decade, enthusiasts, the fairs they go to, the companies that sponsor the fairs and service their making, the venture capitalists that fund the new companies, the bigger companies that acquire them, and the related publishing and marketing revenues have combined into something likened to a third industrial revolution. In other terms, makers — in this specific sense — and their activity contribute an estimated $29 billion to the US economy every year.
Fledgling not-yet-hardware-companies can earn $13m directly from individual online public pledges for promises of products. A four year-old company that makes 3D printers for use in people’s homes was bought in a $604m deal. At O’Reilly’s Maker Faires where amateur makers share and buy products, some sponsors, like Microsoft and Google, make a straightforwardish kind of sense. But what about Ford and Toyota? Or Pepsi(co)? A credit-card-sized exposed computer board designed to help anyone learn computer programming sold 5 million units in under three years. That’s around the same number of new cars sold in the UK over the same period. Or at a more comparable price, a similar rate to Beyonce’s 2013 smash album.
Support of the maker movement can be zealous, attaching a political or spiritual importance to craft and making, especially in the power it offers those who haven’t traditionally had it. It’s hard to see if people are victims or patrons, which is a bit odd, until you think Oh: Capitalism. Yeah me too.
So far these new kinds of making are often orthogonal (Dan Hill’s word and idea, here) to or supportive of existing corporations rather than a challenge or replacement: At one end amateur super-making (low barrier, low risk, networked, distributed income over time), at the other super-professional making (high expense and/or large capital, high risk, high returns), in the middle a more-concerned but still-there norm.
It’s suddenly — within the last decade — more possible for almost anyone to make something and reach the world with it. Two people can start a company, prototype a product (but no need), publicise, raise funds, then make and sell something to compete with Panasonic or Kim Kardashian, without their infrastructure or clout. Private companies, charities, artists, lone developers, Kardashians, governments, film-makers, adults, children — our tools, opportunities and means of communication are weirdly, recently similar. I could fill a factory, make a house, reach and change the entire connected world with my ideas and products, and in theory the same is true for anyone with literacy and broadband. It might be harder now than before to work out what to do. (I mean: I’m not doing any of that.) In a time where economic and social equality are both in deep trouble, children — and most of us — face not just the idea that we could be anything!, but that we could make anything, sell anything, communicate anything, to anyone. That’s an incredible predicament, and there are no patterns for it yet.
By Beeker Northam.
This is part of By Hand & Brain, an essay by 7 people.
Next: Laura Potter
