Like a vision from the heavens, two words flashed into Noah Weinstein's brain when he woke up one morning in late April. The former food-prep worker and builder of custom speakers got dressed, went to work and rushed over to his company's resident taxidermist, Christy Canida, proclaiming his idea "the best thing ever."
Canida and Weinstein created the Mouse Mouse in one afternoon, combining a frozen, dead mouse (the kind with ears, fur and a tail) with a travel-sized computer mouse (the kind with a track ball and a cable). The two employees of Instructables.com posted photos of the project to their website, where it quickly grew into a deliciously disgusting symbol of "maker culture" – an international community of imaginative tinkerers who, yes, like to make stuff.
"You look around – all of the local restaurants are being replaced by chains, all of the local clothing stores have been replaced by chains. Everything has been commodified," says Canida, 30, an MIT-trained biologist who serves as community and marketing manager for Instructables.com. "The one thing that is truly unique is something you make yourself."
The Mouse Mouse is merely the most eye-catching of more than 63,000 do-it-yourself projects detailed on Instructables. Others include a working flashlight housed in a Tic-Tac container, a mango-and-sticky-rice recipe that comes out shaped like sushi and directions for hacking a Coke machine. Along with Make magazine, organizer of the Maker Faire this weekend near San Francisco, Instructables is one hub of this loosely defined community, filled with slumming computer engineers, amateur home decorators, cooks, knitters, artists, electricians, mechanics and taxidermists. All they have in common is a need to share their contraptions with the world and to post detailed homemade instructions for others to copy.
"I really like the word 'make,' simply because it's very permissive – people that garden and people that cook are all making things," says Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of the 2-year-old Make, which has a paid quarterly circulation of 90,000 and has doubled its website traffic to about 4 million pageviews a month. "The tent has been big and a lot of people have come in. I'm surprised and delighted to discover them all there."
What's new about maker culture isn't the making of stuff. The Heathkit Company sold build-your-own airplanes, television sets and ham radios to electronic hobbyists for much of the 20th century. Popular Mechanics magazine started in the '50s, encouraging readers to scavenge for vacuum tubes and circuit boards to build their own electronic gadgets. That's not to mention the cookbook and home-decorating industries, the entire career of Martha Stewart, This Old House and reality home-improvement shows. Maker culture adds an emphasis on open source and a screw-the-man irreverence borrowed from punk rock.
"It has a nice, subversive edge to it, which is, 'You don't have to take everything on face value. Maybe you can make it better,'" says Lee Zlotoff, who writes a regular Make column called "MacGyver" that challenges readers to solve problems like how to retrieve your keys from the bottom of a 15-foot crevice in the desert. Says Zlotoff, "The notion that citizens are at the mercy of their government or their electronics – maybe it needs some revision."
This new culture encompasses some very complicated home projects involving lots of soldering – Make recently profiled the inventor of a 5-foot, radio-controlled submarine. And one of Instructables' founders, Eric J. Wilhelm (who happens to be Mouse Mouse creator Christy Canida's husband), is famous for the traditional Polynesian ice canoe.
But maker culture also skews simple. Christiane Rossmann, a 21-year-old guitarist and songwriter who lives near Frankfurt, Germany, had some extra time and a bedroom painted in White Stripes colors – red, white and black. She reupholstered a round, modern office chair to match the colors. "I just fell in love with the idea of making your own stuff – like shirts," she says.
Alessandro Lambardi of Genova, Italy, a 44-year-old physicist, disemboweled his computer scanner to make a framed, purple-glowing, ultraviolet lamp. "The keyword in Make magazine's definition is 'sharing': Makers like to share and to show how they do their toys," he says in an e-mail.
There's also a spectacle aspect to maker culture. Two of the main events at the Maker Faire – expected to draw 40,000 attendees, more than double the number of last year's debut – include Power-Tool Drag Racing and a clown-from-hell carnival dubbed Cyclecide.
A large portion of the attendees will never pick up a single soldering iron. "A lot of people buy travel magazines but they go to, relatively speaking, very few places. There's a fantasy component," says Make's Dougherty. "Someone told me he grew up with Popular Electronics and used to read it in bed: 'I never made too many projects but I really came away with how things work.'"
(Wired will be at the Maker Faire, at booths 130a and 130b, with contributors to our Geekdad blog on hand. Chris Anderson will show his unmanned aerial vehicle, Steve Jurvetson and Erik Charlton have rockets in hand and Brad Justus will show off a Lego star destroyer.)
It is unclear whether anyone has picked up the Mouse Mouse torch, even after reading the detailed instructions on Instructables. "I thought it was a bit inappropriate," says Rossmann, the German reupholsterer. To squeamish makers and animal-rights activists alike, Canida is philosophical. "If I were doing this with a live animal, that would be different," she says. "I don't have a reverence for carcasses."
But generally Canida focuses on the more positive side of the Mouse Mouse – it indulges her love of taxidermy and her training in biology and animal dissection. Plus, it provides great gross-out humor. "The funny thing is, everyone who reads this presumes I'm a teenage boy," Canida says. "I think the reasoning goes, 'Who else would be interested in this but a teenage boy?' I can't say that I spend most of my time thinking about the ethics."
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