Maker Culture - UPDATED

We are in the middle of a manufacturing revolution. For those involved in this revolution, and those who watch culture along the fringes, this is old news. Mainstream America and policy makers, however, seem to be completely unaware of the revolution taking place.

Logo created by Conal for the Ryerson and Western Online Journalism students 11-part series on maker culture

As long as this manufacturing revolution stays on the fringes it will have little economic impact. If we can harness it, support it, incubate it, we have the possibility of generating an economic boom akin to the Internet economy of the 1990s.

But, just as it was difficult to determine the future of the “information superhighway” in 1993, it’s difficult to see where this manufacturing revolution might lead us. CompuServe and AOL still looked like pretty good ideas in the early Internet years. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia were unimaginable (or at least unimagined).

If the desktop computer drove the rise of the Internet, what will drive the rise of independent/boutique/small batch manufacturing? The 3D printer is as good a place to start as any.

3D PRINTING

At this early stage it’s difficult to tell if the 3D printer is the virtual reality gloves or the cell phone of this dawning age.

3D printer from the Evil Mad Scientist 3D Printer Project

To hear the technophiles tell the story we’ll soon be using 3D printers to print out everything from dinner to human organs. It’s the first step to realizing Star Trek’s replicator.

While there are lots of options for hobbyists, from Fab@Home to RepRap, 3D printers are still too hinky for the Wal-Mart crowd, and it won’t really be mainstream until middle-class families can pick up an inexpensive model at their favorite big box store.

Regardless, the desktop 3D printer is in some ways the holy grail of the current maker culture. If everyone has a desktop manufacturing contraption, then we will see an economic boon that parallels the desktop computing revolution. Companies will pop up to provide materials, support, software, and to fill the hundreds of little nooks and crannies that have yet to be considered.

A Fab@Home fabber

So, who are these people so eager for a homebrew manufacturing revolution? Before I can answer that I think it might help to provide a little history about the United States and its manufacturing enthusiasts.

MAKER PAST

The United States has a long history of gadget enthusiasm. Shortly after the Revolutionary War, and well into the nineteenth century, the mechanical arts, aka the useful arts, played an important role in the psychic geography of the nation. The useful arts were so salient to the founding generation that they included them in the Constitution in Article 1, Section 8. Among the many responsibilities of Congress is -

“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;”

The useful arts in this context specifically meant invention; think Benjamin Franklin and his bifocals or Franklin stove, or Whitney and his cotton gin. Invention at the time was largely an individual endeavor. Annual agricultural fairs devoted a lot of time and space to the mechanical arts, showing off improvements and inventions to improve the farmer’s lot. In 1812 Harvard established a chair for the Application of the Sciences to the Useful Arts, where Jacob Bigelow re-introduced the word “technology” to the English language to describe this new area of research.

By the end of the nineteenth century some of the most famous men in America were gadgeteers. Howe and Singer and their sewing machines, Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, and especially Edison and his hundreds of inventions, captured the popular imagination.

The independent gadgeteer as a heroic icon started to vanish after Ford and the Wright brothers. The first World War revolutionized technological development, and Ford’s factory system pushed corporate interest away from the private inventor to in-house inventions that could fit neatly into new manufacturing systems.

By the 1930s the independent inventor was seen as sort of a crank. At best, inventions were something to occupy engineers during time off from their real jobs. The homebrew creator received gentle ribbing from Rube Goldberg, and the stereotype of the eccentric basement inventor was born; a man too attached to the romantic era of invention past, working in his basement creating flubber, intermittent windshield wipers, or perpetual motion machines that never quite worked.

After WWII invention became firmly locked into the labs of the military-industrial complex. The mechanical arts became a quaint part of history, and the maker culture was diminished to the world of hobbyists with their clubs, magazines, conventions, and the rest of the accoutrements of geekdom.

The residue of this 19th century culture of the useful and mechanical art persisted through the 20th century in science fairs and shop class. But even the venerable shop class has come under fire over the last quarter century, and been dropped by more and more schools. (See Shop Class as Soulcraft for a terrific meditation on the importance of learning to work with your hands.)

MAKER PRESENT

The origins of the current maker culture can be traced back to the computer homebrew clubs of the 1970s that built their own computers, their sibling activities of building robots and rockets, as well as the do-it-yourself (DIY) mentality of Whole Earth Catalog and punk rock.

It was this DIY culture that spawned Jobs and Wozniak and their revolutionary Apple computer. But the subsequent innovation and creation wasn’t in making new objects, it was in creating new software, a sort of new literature for the engineering set. The return of garage inventors became instead the rise of garage software programmers.

Maker enthusiasts remained, but they remained on the fringes. Survival Research Laboratories, formed by Mark Pauline in the late 1970s, made wild, dangerous robots, but was always seen as a type of outsider kinesthetic art. Rocket-building enthusiasts finally saw their time arrive in the mid-1990s with the implementation of the X Prize, which offered big money to someone who could homebrew a rocket that reached orbit. And, building your own computer became a rite of passage for a special brand of teenage computer nerds.

Survival Research Laboratories robot

Now, a decade into the 21st century, we’re starting to see a new interest in invention and the useful arts. Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing and Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media launched Make magazine (and its sibling Craft magazine) in 2005 to cater to what they saw as a growing interest in the useful arts.

Cory Doctorow elaborated on this maker culture in his recent novel Makers (2009). (My review of Makers can be found here.)

Tech conferences are an important part in spreading tech culture, and O’Reilly has drawn from this culture to create the Maker Faires.

“Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things. So much to see, you will need 2 days to see it all!”

Maker Faires have been held in San Francisco, Austin, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Rhode Island. Upcoming Faires are scheduled to take place in San Francisco, Detroit, Queens, and Nairobi, Kenya. Wikipedia reports that the first Faire in San Francisco in 2008 –

“… included a human-sized mousetrap, kinetic squid sculpture, bicycle-powered music stage, a solar-powered chariot pulled by an Arnold Schwarzenegger robot, and over 500 booths from different makers. There were approximately 65,000 people in attendance.”

The huge turnouts for the Faires are not the only signs that Frauenfelder and O’Reilly’s reading of the zeitgeist was correct. The rapid success of the arts and crafts site Etsy, “your place to buy and sell all things handmade,” is also evidence that there is a sizable maker culture out there creating stuff.

Etsy allows independent artists and craftspeople to sell their wares to interested buyers. Like Make magazine it was also launched in 2005. By now Etsy is approaching $20 million in sales each month, solely on tens of thousands of craftspeople selling to hundreds of thousands of buyers.

MAKER FUTURE

So, what is the future of this nascent popular culture?

One interesting possibility is the rise of the Arduino circuit board (coincidentally, the Arduino circuit board, like Make and Etsy, also launched in 2005).

In Wired Clive Thompson describes the Arduino.

“What’s really remarkable, though, is Arduino’s business model: The team has created a company based on giving everything away. On its Web site, it posts all its trade secrets for anyone to take—all the schematics, design files, and software for the Arduino board. Download them and you can manufacture an Arduino yourself; there are no patents. You can send the plans off to a Chinese factory, mass-produce the circuit boards, and sell them yourself — pocketing the profit without paying Banzi a penny in royalties. He won’t sue you. Actually, he’s sort of hoping you’ll do it.

That’s because the Arduino board is a piece of open source hardware, free for anyone to use, modify, or sell.”

This open source circuit board can be used to cheaply install “brains” into art and craft objects, potentially upping the possibility for creating truly novel and desirable objects.

And, that’s what this movement is still waiting for; the maker culture version of the killer app.

$20 million a month generated by Etsy is a lot of money, but it’s peanuts compared to Microsoft, or Apple, or Ebay, or Google. Will there be a killer object that compels everyone to want to participate in the current maker culture? Will the suite of designs become so obviously desirable that non-hobbyists will start buying 3D printers?

Desktop 3D printers currently sell for around $5,000 to $15,000 (or (if they ever come back in stock) get a MakerBot for under a grand). High demand can drive the price down, but it’s still not clear what the quality of the built objects might be. If you’re Jay Leno, and you have the money to spend, you can buy a high-end 3D printer that produces parts for your rare car collection.

A popular home appliance 3D printer will need be able to work with a cheap, easy-to-use goop. (Perhaps we’ll see a new domain for the ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup industry to launch themselves into.) It didn’t take much for American consumers to accept planned obsolescence or a culture of fashion that made it necessary to purchase new items annually, so cheap knock-offs from your home printer might not be that much of a problem. Another possibility is that this might be a boon to the plastics industry. However, a petroleum-based goop that serves as the three-dimensional ink might make high-quality, solid objects, but might not appeal to an audience that is primed to lean to the green.

If home appliance 3D printers never take off perhaps start-ups like Shapeways, which allows you to use their printers for your design, will find their niche.

Manufacturing plants in China are already ready to embrace the small-batch manufacturing culture, a sort of larger-scale version of the Shapeways manufacturing for the independent designer. This why you can get your own face on a bobble-head, or get action figures made of all your co-workers.

On a larger scale, start-ups like Local Motors are using factories in China to do their small-batch manufacturing. Local Motors designs and manufactures limited editions of automobiles. (Here’s an earlier post on Local Motors. Picture below is the forthcoming Miami model.) (I learned about Local Motor’s in Chris Anderson’s “In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits.”)

MAKER CULTURE IN TAMPA?

Which raises the question, where’s the maker culture in Tampa?

There are “17,000 manufacturers in the state with a 400,000 workforce,” according to this report at Bradenton.com last summer. And places like the Florida Advanced Technological Education Center at Hillsborough Community College are working to train workers for those manufacturers, but that’s not really in the spirit of the creative independence of the maker culture.

We hear over and over that we are an information economy, we are a service economy. Our era of manufacturing has passed on to China, India, the maquiladoras, and anywhere else where labor can be had for a pittance. But, the future of manufacturing is not engraved in stone. With the right sort of support, incubation, and creative energy, we can bring manufacturing back home, recreated in profound and unexpected ways.

RECOMMENDED READING

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Makers by Cory Doctorow

Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop–from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication

Craft magazine

MAKE: Technology on Your Time

The Handmade Marketplace: How to Sell Your Crafts Locally, Globally, and On-Line

Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World

MakerCulture: Taking Things into Our Own Hands

Instructables

“In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits” by Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine.

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UPDATE: Joseph Flaherty spoke at “at Ignite Boston 7 on how custom manufacturing technology is going to change the way we build.” He posted his talk and included his slides.

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Here is another speculative food printer.

“Food Creation consists of a food printer that would accept various edible ingredients and then combine and ‘print’ them in the desired shape and consistency, in much the same way as stereo lithographic printers create 3-D representations of product concepts.

“For example carrot could be served as foam or parmesan cheese as a strand of spaghetti! So if the kids don’t want to eat broccoli or brussels sprouts, how about shaping them as candy or ice-cream?”