How to grow a community of makers and doers in Scotland
Say you knew exactly what the perfect chair for your living room would look like — how would you find the right person to make it? Or maybe you’re an upholsterer, and you can’t find that perfect printed pattern for your fabrics — who do you call?
Those are the kinds of problems that Fi Scott noticed when she was in her final year at the Glasgow School of Art, studying design. “I was really frustrated at not being able to find local fabricators or materials in Scotland,” she explains, “and my final year project was asking ‘what can we design to make it easy to source from local manufacturers’?”
That was in 2012 — now, three years (and a bit of grit) later, Scott’s Make Works offers a way to solve that problem. It’s a curated, glossy catalogue of small makers and doers who work in every material you can think of, from wood to metal, with hand tools to laser-cutting machinery, and acts as a community hub for Scotland’s small manufacturing ecosystem.
“I’d gone out to industrial estates and knocked on doors to ask if they were designers and if I could work with them, and word started to get out.”
Yet it was a slow slog to get started, she explains: “Initially, to find people I’d gone out to industrial estates and knocked on doors to ask if they were designers and if I could work with them, and word started to get out.” But funding was hard to come by, and momentum was slow, she says: “To counteract that we went on a road trip around Scotland to document 120 different factories in three months, and people started to get it.” The site was finished in early 2014, and there are now close to 150 different businesses and individuals on the site.
Make Works is aimed at several different types of user, Scott says. “It’s for sourcing fabrication, sourcing the materials for stuff you want to make yourself, or to find people to make stuff for you, or about collaborating on making stuff. It’s very much about process, not product.”
Simon Harlow’s company — Silo Design & Build — is just one example of a company listed on the site. “What they’re trying to do is very valuable, and just what’s needed now,” he says. “People, makers, don’t know each other, and in this line of work we don’t have the time to get out and see what others are doing.”
Harlow’s always been a bit of an doer, and says that he knew he wanted to create things after a motorcycle trip to the birthplace of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși in the mid-90s, near a town called Târgu Jiu in the centre of the country. He went to art school, but found that he was “never an artist, more a maker, a designer, an architect even”. His first commission was for a sandwich board outside a pub; his first major commission was to do the elevator doors for a new Glaswegian hotel, around a decade ago.
He got involved with Make Works through the word-of-mouth community in Scotland’s art and design team — he asked to join, was vetted by Scott and Lottie Burnley (who joined Make Works as its second — and, so far, only other — employee), and joined the site shortly after launch. “Since then I’ve had varied enquiries, from students about to graduate needing advice up to interest in getting 10,000 mobile phone backs made in marble. Importantly, I’ve found, been in contact with and advised others to work with several of the businesses featured on Make Works.”
“The scenes up here are a bit disparate… Really, the art and music scenes are more social than the craft and manufacturing scenes”
“The scenes up here are a bit disparate and sometimes it’s a bit tricky to work across them,” he says. “Really, the art and music scenes are more social than the craft and manufacturing scenes, especially as craftspeople are often quite quiet or private people and workshops are more often than not in obscure locations around the city — or, larger manufacturing facilities are in industrial estates or deep in the country. This is where Make Works hits big. It completely bridges that social gap, and Fi and Lottie organise a good number of social events for people to meet.”
“I find their whole concept and approach increasingly important — particularly in an environment where small businesses working collaboratively are becoming the desired route to realise projects.”
Joining Make Works isn’t as easy as filling in a web form — this isn’t Etsy. Scott has to check that each maker is going to live up to the quality that she looks for in manufacturing and fabrication, but the benefits of that to both her and to the makers are worth it, she thinks. The manufacturers get professionally-shot photos and a beautiful web presence, while getting to know each individual person adds to the sense of community on the site. “For every factory, I know their name, know what they do, and I’ve probably had a cup of tea with them!” she says.
While only in Scotland at the moment, Scott is working on how and where to expand — especially as they already have a large waiting list to join, with half a dozen new people signing up every week.
“I was in Birmingham yesterday and people were asking me to do it across the whole UK,” she explains. “it’s taken this long to get just Scotland up and running, there are still gaps in processes and our waiting list is full, and now people are asking us to do it in Bristol and Birmingham and London, so we’re thinking — how could that work? There are even people in Amsterdam and Norway asking about it too!”
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