This article was taken from the June 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
The desire to make things with our hands is deeply rooted, writes Chris Anderson. But during the past century, the era of mass production, our tinkering in workshops and garages and kitchens was a solitary hobby rather than a true economic force. That is changing. The world of do-it-yourself has gone digital, and like everything else that goes digital, it's been transformed.
This is what we now call the maker movement, a term coined by Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Media. In 2005 the technology publisher bet on it by launching not just Make magazine, a quarterly journal about DIY projects, but also, in 2006, a series of Maker Faires that became the first showcases for the movement. The exact definition of "makers" is a bit imprecise, but you can think of them as the web generation creating physical things rather than just pixels on screens. To use the terminology of the MIT Media Lab, they're treating atoms like bits using the powerful tools of the software and information industries to revolutionise the way we make tangible objects.
There are three underlying forces at work in this transformation of tinkering. The first is the emergence of digital tools for design and manufacturing. Industrial equipment has been computerised for decades, but now those machines have landed on the desktop. (Similarly, the mainframe existed for decades before the humble but widespread PC changed the world.) "Desktop manufacturing" tools include the 3D printer, the laser cutter, the 3D scanner, and CAD (computer aided design) software. All these formerly expensive and complex industrial tools are now available in personal size, and with prices to match.
The second factor is collaboration. As the tools of creation became digital, so did the designs, which are just files that can be easily shared online. Makers can tap into open source practices and the other social forces that have emerged over the past two decades. Fuelled by crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, makers can even use their network to raise money. The old model of toiling alone in your basement is giving way to a global movement of people working together online. The workshops of the world are now connected.
The third element is the rise of the factory for hire. Inventing something isn't enough; you've got to get it to market too, ideally in quantity. This means mass production, and traditionally that's been reserved for people who own a factory or can afford to commission the services of one. That used to involve months or years of negotiations, flights to China and writing big cheques.
But today factories are increasingly accessible on the web, open to orders of any size from anyone, at any scale. Thanks to digital production and design, factories in China are flexible enough to take orders online, by credit card, as small as a few dozen or as large as a few million. Other companies, such as Shapeways and Ponoko, offer digital fabrication as a service, so anyone can effectively rent time on high end industrial 3D printers or computer-controlled milling machines.
Put all this together and you have a bottom up transformation of manufacturing that follows the democratised arcs of computing and communications. It's still early days. To continue the PC analogy, desktop manufacturing is about where desktop publishing was in 1984, with the Mac and first consumer laser printers but the potential is immense.
Manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in the world.
Since the first industrial revolution, the power to make things at scale has belonged to those who own the means of production, which has meant big factories, big companies, and the mass market goods they were built for. But the same was true for mass media in the 20th century, and we've seen what the internet and its long tail of content has done to that. Now imagine a long tail of things: physical goods created with the web's digital innovation model.
That's the maker movement.
Chris Anderson is US Wired's "senior maker" and was Editor in Chief of the magazine from 2001 to 2013. He wrote Makers: The New Industrial Revolution
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
