The Future of Making

SXSW Panel Recap

Two heavyweights in creative production sat down at SXSW on Thursday to discuss the “maker movement,” a hidden infrastructure of frugality, and the limits of our subconscious. Joie Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, and Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, hypothesized about what happens when the divide between production-grade manufacturing and in-home commodity devices begins to close.

Ito brought up compelling parallels to printing, to which Brown suggested a stair metaphor, with each step a different quality of production. We are certainly seeing the inclines between steps diminish. Ito told of factories in Shenzhen, China where he and his students have witnessed individual manufacturers generating cellphones so cheaply and quickly, that they were effectively able to use agile, iterative software techniques to optimize hardware.

The host showed some recent prototypes from IDEO and the Media Lab of wearable devices that collect more qualitative data about ourselves, like emotion. Brown quipped that he gets so tired seeing how many steps he hasn’t walked today. Devices are emerging that can tell us, with certainty, more about ourselves than we know. Our subconscious knows more than our cognitive selves. So interesting questions emerge about the danger of that data, its meaning to our existence, and the overall social implications.

Ito also expressed interest in bioengineering, and showed a clip of the MIT Media Lab’s Silk Worm Pavilion. He gave examples of bacteria being able to produce polyester quicker and cheaper than the petroleum method. “Everybody kept saying ‘I don’t have to know anything about the internet. That’s not really something I need to know about.’ Yet now everyone knows something about it,” Ito reminded. “Bioengineering will be that way too. It will affect every aspect of our lives.”