Entrepreneur.com: Mark Frauenfelder noticed them everywhere he went: bleary-eyed souls peering up over their laptops and monitors, craving something more tactile than a keyboard, plus a measure of control over their surroundings. And then it began: They started making things, things that didn't necessarily have anything to do with 1s or 0s. From handcrafted furniture to bespoke clothing to homemade robots, the Maker Movement took hold in California's geek-heavy communities in the early 2000s and has since grown into an international phenomenon. We asked Frauenfelder, founder of BoingBoing.net and editor-in-chief of Make magazine, to weigh in on the impact and reach of DIY.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Maker Faire and the Growth of Do-It-Yourself
Entrepreneur.com: Mark Frauenfelder noticed them everywhere he went: bleary-eyed souls peering up over their laptops and monitors, craving something more tactile than a keyboard, plus a measure of control over their surroundings. And then it began: They started making things, things that didn't necessarily have anything to do with 1s or 0s. From handcrafted furniture to bespoke clothing to homemade robots, the Maker Movement took hold in California's geek-heavy communities in the early 2000s and has since grown into an international phenomenon. We asked Frauenfelder, founder of BoingBoing.net and editor-in-chief of Make magazine, to weigh in on the impact and reach of DIY.
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6 comments:
I feel that the tone of this article is very short sighted. Yes, DIY gatherings may have become very sheik in the last 5 years but DIY on a whole has been in a horrible decline in the last 10,000 years. DIY is now a hobby that computer programmers do in their garages on the weekend. DIY not too long ago was a way of life. I pay the Jiffy Lube $41.00 to change the oil on my car. My dad would never consider doing such a thing. Recent developments like the Arduino have “opened a whole new world of DIY programming” well. I know a whole group of people who were building computers in their basements long before Apple released the iMac. DIY is like having good gas mileage, some of us have been doing it for years but now companies have found a way to make it popular and profitable.
I think the DIY movement is very important to keep alive. Adopting a DIY mindset in everything we do would be a great thing for more people in America to do. Why just call someone in to fix something simple when you can take a little bit of time to learn how to do so yourself and save money doing so at the same time? I love listening to my grandfather talk about a time when everything was built better and lasted longer when it was handmade or you made it yourself. We need to keep the DIY mindset alive and continue learning how things work and not just relying on mass-produced products all the time.
There's no doubting that DIY and Maker culture is becoming very trendy. And I'm not surprised to see in the first paragraph of the article that certain people are trying to put a price tag on Maker culture. With Maker faires and hacker spacers sprouting like weeds in cities accross America is there some money to be made?
I don't think there is. What was that article a few weeks ago about how the bohemnian class that was going to change commerce with internet culture no longer exists? A little bit of that applies here. The biggest difference is that DIY culture is a counter-culture. If you can do something yourself, do it! If you can fix your own stuff, fix it. If you can make your own technologic luxuries, make them. Consumers power is an ecnomic power, they choose what product or service they want to pay for. In theory, they have leverage to chance the markets. Maker and DIY culture increase that lever by given individuals another choice of goods. Before it was a choice between A or B. Now the individual can choose C, do it yourself and save your money. An investment in yourself is a good investment.
What I'd be curious to see is how that option C competes with A and B. Take Birdbrain Labs for instance and the Holiday Spectacular light shows. The product is built on homegrown technology. Sure homegrown technology can't compete with big techno giants like Apple, but it introduces another choice in the market, a choice from below. If there's any economic lessons to be learned, observed from DIY culture it will be here.
The DIY movement almost feels to me like our version of the 60's back to the land movement. Where people decided to farm for themselves and do things on a very basic level to combat all of the industry and be connected to the things you own. DIY is doing that too but now it is much more functional it uses all the innovations that we have created but on a personal level so that you are connected to you work. Also this article is wrong. DIY started with punks in the 80's, just saying! They did everything for themselves because they didn't want to sell out.
The DIY mentality is an old fashioned sense of thinking and working. I always feel a sense of DIY is a great attitude to have when working on any project or trying to tackle something. The mentality has declined and is continuing to decline, but the way in which we think of doing it yourself has progressed to fit our time. The innovation of DIY is what you really need to take out of it. The skill and ingenuity that comes out of DIY and the pride people take is what we need to come out with today. If we can't have the good old fashioned DIY, the way in which we adapt it is good enough for today, as long as you have that mentality. At least that how I feel we can compromise.
I think Zoe has a strong point here. The way I see it the Maker movement is actually intimately tied to the occupy movement, and I hope that becomes more apparent to more people as each develops. The objective of the occupy movement is to wrestle the power from the greedy corporate interests, which is very difficult as long as we're dependent on them for most of our goods. One good remedy for this is the open source movement which has taken hold and made a real impact in some fields. A more globally feasible approach though is to make things we need for ourselves whenever possible. To my mind that is the core of the Maker movement, that we don't have to depend on corporations to innovate and create, but can do that for ourselves.
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