The Makers
crowdsourcing creation
“Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China”
Rethinking the geography of design, production, and consumption
The Makers, crowdsourcing creation
There are only a few words inscribed on the back of the luminescent tablets we hold in our hands: “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China”. A few words that prompt us to think about the distance between the ecosystems of design (in Cupertino and the surrounding area), production (China), and consumption (Appleland). However, new players are disrupting this geography. They are releasing the professional tools of design and production to the great joy of a much wider audience.
Who are the Makers?
The Makers are tinkerers: they make 3D printers zig and zag, they micro-solder electronic wearables, assemble robots to digitize books, and a lot more. They deserve our attention in a climate where delocalization and automation are the norm. If the practice of tinkering is long established (we’d feel the need to reference the oldest job in the world if the expression was not already taken), its increasing presence is starting to be noticed.
These ordinary tinkerers are transforming objects and subverting their intended usage. The term “objects” here implies a very large spectrum: small GPS-enabled tactile screens installed in place of the old car radios, the custom-made construction of a playground tree for house cats, or an indoors garden for butterflies, the automatization of a sprinkling system, a radio-controlled airplane, a laser keyboard projected on a block of Plexiglas in order to take notes on the best ideas that always come to us when taking a shower.
The term “hacker” is also used to designate these tinkerers, but many hope to distance themselves from it because of the negative connotation associated with those perceived as pirates of the Internet.
What are they doing?
The Makers possess transformational skills: they know how to code, sew, weld, dismantle, reassemble, drill, polish, and play. As we might expect, men are over-represented in this subculture as well as those who work in the technological sphere (programmers, engineers). All would like to add a playful, creative, and often artistic dimension to their daily life. This community collaborates in adventures that aim to improve our collective living space, both in a practical as well as esthetic sense.
The elaboration of a community of know-how
Cooperation is at the heart of the movement. In fact, in the interviews, the Makers immediately explain that their know-how is elaborated collectively, and that they want to make it accessible to the largest number possible. Projects and their documentations are created following the open-source mentality, where the entire community participates in writing the documentation with the “wiki” model.
Articulating the individual contribution to the collective work
There are common courtesy rules that coordinate individual contributions for a collective project: the original creator of the project, whether it is software or hardware, must always be mentioned. Each person who modifies the original product must precisely explain the nature of their contribution: their work is identified as an individual’s input for all others to see. It is also prohibited to change the type of license characteristic of the object: an “open-source” object must remain open and cannot be “closed”. It must remain the property of the community.
The emergence of a Maker movement, in which the collective effort surpasses the sum of small tinkerings that compose it, was facilitated by the places that allow these communities to exist. These places can be both virtual or physical. On the virtual side, we find discussion forums on the Internet, “wikis”. The physical places are where the Makers gather, “hackerspaces”, open places free for the public where all sorts of tools are offered to build objects: 3D printers, precise milling machines, laser die cutters, drill presses, etc.
What goes on in a hackerspace?
A few examples: you can sit on a pivoting chair in front of a small extension that resembles the head of a vacuum, but in reality is a 3D scanner. The image is transmitted to a software that then gives instructions to a printer for the production of your portrait in the manner of a roman bust.
Some people come in to program Raspberry Pi computers that are the size of two credit cards and install a navigation interface to make a small custom GPS. Others work on fabrics and print customized T-shirts to create clothing that are half-fashion half-art piece.
Since 2006, the Makers have their own trade shows — the Maker Faires They are large grounds for games and demonstrations where “DIY” (Do It Yourself) enthusiasts congregate. The first Maker Faire took place in Silicon Valley in San Mateo in 2006, and since then, they have flourished all over the globe. The activities of fiddlers coexist with political reflections, re-thinking learning methods in schools, streamlining humanitarian aid or even ways to create new forms of energy.
Where is the business in all this?
When the passion of innovation coexists with value creation, venture capitalists, business angels, and business plans are never too far, specially in Silicon Valley. If it is undoubtedly the uninterested spirit of sharing and of community that motivates most Makers, some projects are developed with the ambition of commercial success.
Crowdsourcing (the practice of obtaining ideas or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people) is the perfect catalyst for this expansion. Whether it is to obtain initial financing, with crowdsourcing platforms like Kickstarter, or for the development of common ideas (peer production, open source, user-generated content), the new web interfaces allow for the efficient collaboration of scattered individuals and the implementation of commercial projects.
The firm Makerbot is an example of successful commercialization. The business sells its kits to the public so that we can all build our own 3D printer, the same way we build a Billy shelf from Ikea. The projects are developed under an open-source license: all the instructions for assembly and for choosing the appropriate materials are available for free. Makerbot simplifies the process by regrouping all the materials and instructions in one package. The printers continue to improve thanks to the input from users who contribute to the updates. To boost the commercialization of the kits, the venture-capital firm The Foundry Group invested ten million dollars in the project in 2011.
The hybridization of profit and open-source
The coexistence between open-source projects, which are built and improved by many contributors, and the search for profit sometimes provokes tension, as when Makerbot announced in 2012 that it would keep private the information needed to build the printer model “Replicator 2”.
Nevertheless, this space of collaboration between open-source and commercialization is a motor of innovation that deserves all our attention, inviting us to think about the notion of “open” intellectual property, to renew our economic models and to better consider the role of the collaborative Web in the construction of knowledge.
By providing all of the tools necessary to build prototypes to the public, the hackerspaces contribute to the decentralization and democratization of conception and innovation processes, which are no longer reserved for “professionals”.
A proliferation of production sites
The change in designing processes, more and more delocalized and scattered, is supported by the democratization of production lines. Chinese factories are accepting an increasing number of made-to-order items for those who wish to commercialize their prototype. This expansion of access to production is taking place even close to us. The production workshop TechShop, which is providing public access to industrial quality tools of production, and is considering to follow the model of Kinko’s and could open a number of production workshops accessible to the public at large.
In conclusion
Not all homes have 3D printers that lounge in a living room corner. However, the mechanisms that produced this Maker culture are for us an occasion to deepen our consideration of the following points:
- The innovations brought by returning to the object and to the world;
- The renewal of learning methods and the diffusion of know-hows;
- The generalization of the pleasure of creation.
