Maker Faire and the growth of DIY

(Photo by Jeffrey Clark)

Gwen Moran of Entrepreneur magazine interviewed me about MAKE and Maker Faire. The article came out today (and so did the paperback edition of my book Made by Hand).

The Maker Movement is also touted as a boon to education because of the science, technology, engineering and math components necessary for many inventions. In a September 2010 speech at the New York Hall of Science, Thomas Kalil, from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, encouraged young people to become makers, saying, "After all, we wouldn't teach kids how to play football by lecturing to them about football for years and years before allowing them to play."

Recent Maker Faire events have showcased inventions with the clean lines of professionally designed prototypes instead of the "cobbled together from scrap materials" look, Frauenfelder says. Seed Studio in Shenzhen, China, is an open hardware developer that ups the invention ante into electronics and peripherals. "When I was an engineer in the mid-'80s, the software was expensive. Now, Google's SketchUp is a thousand times more powerful, and it's free," Frauenfelder says.

Maker Faire and the Growth of Do-It-Yourself

• [Paul Renault]

  Um, could I propose that we call it The Rebirth of DIY?  DIY used to be the norm.

  Listen to Mike Rowe on dirty jobs.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NwEFVUb-u0

• [penguinchris]

  Killer shirt, Mark.

• [Thorzdad]

  Agree with PaulR. DIY has been a cultural staple for, well, darn near forever. I wouldn’t exactly call it a rebirth, either, since it never really went away. Call it a gentrification, or geekification. It’s a lot like watching a bunch of kids suddenly discover why their dad had all those tools. Only difference is the kids seem to believe they have invented something new and novel.

  • [Mark_Frauenfelder]

    I don’t know anyone who thinks that way about DIY, and I’ve met hundreds, if not thousands, of  people who make stuff.

  • [Evan G.]

    It was never a “lifestyle” before. Everything has to be a lifestyle now before its worth anything. 

• [Bob Knetzger]

  Sure, “making by hand” and DIY is as old mankind…and so is “makerism” and studying and talking about a personal experience of making something.  Imagine millions of years ago a handy prehistoric Homo habilis “man” wordlessly showing another Homo habilis how he flaked a dull stone to make a useful sharp edge. 

  But the experience and feeling you have when you make something for the first time (even if it’s something that has been made before) IS new and novel to you.