Yesterday morning, I returned from two full days of
Maker Faire '09 in California. I saw more things than I can hold in mind all at once and there will be posts in the future about plenty of those. This is the post where I'm going to try to channel Margaret Mead and explain what I saw in San Mateo and give my best explanation of what I think it's all about.
Maker Faire is thrown annually by
Make magazine and is billed as "The World's Largest DIY Festival"; 2009 is its fourth year. The event lasts two days from morning till evening and takes place in three large halls and the grounds of the San Mateo County fairground. It draws participants from all over the country, but retains a Bay Area feel both in its debts to high-tech computing and its tinges of flamboyant counterculture (a lot of Makers go to Burning Man and a lot of Burners read Make). People of all ages attend the Faire but it is definitely family-friendly, with multiple lawn games for children and a stage for rotating kid-friendly musical acts.
Waiting for the shuttle to the Faire at the hotel, I started checking out my fellow Faire-goers. To my right stood two guys in their 50s, with gray beards and casual, jeans-and-fleece outfits. One of them said he was a physics teacher. They both made things and were coming to the Faire for inspiration. The vibe on the shuttle bus was comradely. Seeing me fumbling with a notebook and pen, on top of a camera and iPhone, the physics teacher suggested that I might use a digital voice recorder instead. He whipped out his model and then the other guy did the same, which led to a three-way conversation about the merits of using a recorder to take notes. It was my first encounter with a personality type that came to seem pretty typical for the Faire: friendly, helpful, solution-oriented and technophilic.
At the fairgrounds I picked up my press credential and was trying to take my first picture of the day when journalistic disaster struck. My point-and-shoot digital camera went out of focus, then began to make a grinding sound. The lens was stuck in its 'outie' position and pressing the shutter button didn't changeanything. My camera was finished.
Bill Gurstelle, demonstrating an ancient pressure-driven method for starting fires.
The disaster, at least, gave me a way to meet people. In the Maker Shed I ran into Bill Gerstelle, a Make editor and the author of Absinthe and Flamethrowers: Ruminations and Projects on the Art of Living Dangerously, whom I recognized from the shuttle bus. He showed my camera to another Maker who listened to the grinding noise and confirmed my worst suspicions: I needed a new camera. Walking agitatedly out of the Maker Shed, I made eye contact with another stranger and instantly found myself relating my problem. "My daughter has a GPS!," he said. "Come with me!"
That is how I found myself standing under a small canopy with Ralph Gardner, creator of iCan, a competitive can crushing game. Ralph alternated thinking out loud about my camera problem with animatedly explaining the rules of play. iCan is a handsome wooden device with a turned handle and metal locking mechanism ("I milled it myself!" said Ralph, in response to my question about where he'd had the metal parts made). Players set a can on the wooden stand and then bear down on it from above with the mallet; there is a strategy, Ralph said, demonstrating it, and players are judged on the features of the resulting crushed can: how tall the crushed can is, how uniformly it's been squished, and especially, on the number of "stratifications" in the metal. Ralph gave me a booklet with topographical diagrams of a variety of possible can scenarios and fouls. "He's had like seven cups of coffee already today," said his daughter, who looked on with what I think was a teenage mix of love and bemusement. She trustingly lent me her GPS and I set off with it, out of the fairgrounds, down a San Mateo street with lots of cars and few pedestrians, to the shopping mall where I eventually found a Sears.
Ralph Gardner (right), and fairgoer (leaning on iCan device)
By the time I returned around 11am, Maker Faire was in full swing. The Expo Hall houses the Make booths, mostly feats of technology—the R2D2 Builders' Club, kinetic sculpture, the
CandyFab 3-D printer that renders CAD designs in icing, the MIT underwater robotics program—that kind of thing. There's also an area of Craft booths. The middle building or Maker Shed has the main lecture stage and an area where fairgoers can examine and purchase robotics and electronics kits and try their hand at soldering. A third building houses the
Bazaar Bizarre, where crafters sell their wares and the
Swap-o-Rama-Rama, a combination clothing swap/on-the-spot alterations center. The fourth building, sponsored by the Bay Area do-it-yourself workshop
TechShop, is mainly an expo of 21st-century shop technologies: lots of 3D printing, CNC cutting technology, woodworking and even a live demonstration of plasma cutting, in which a high powered electric charge sent through a mechanical arm cuts patterns through metal.
But wait! There's more! The outdoor space between the buildings holds, well, everything else. A slow-moving vehicle in the shape of a robotic giraffe thirty feet high with lava lamps for ears; a small fleet of psychedelic vehicles of other kinds, including the famous muffin cars; the giant game of mousetrap, beloved by children; a complete array of carnival-food vendors; the
Neverwas Haul, a steampunk Victorian house on wheels manned by a team of steampunk-goggle-selling, er, steampunks; the Golden Mean, a fanciful old-fashioned jalopy in the shape of a fire-breathing snail, also beloved of children. Trippy ambient music from
Lightning Temple, full of blips and glitches, emanates from a giant Tesla coil in the middle of the yard.
Maker Faire feels like a lot of things that are familiar: a country fair, a science fair, a basement rocketry club outing, a hippie teach-in, shop class, computer camp, Burning Man, a trade show or three. And yet, in combination, they become unfamiliar, unique. That's not to say it's all completely new. A lot of these people, I imagine, especially the older guys, seem like part of an American tradition: graybeards who have machine shops in their garages, who solder capacitors in their basements. The kinds of guys who would have read
Popular Mechanics a generation ago. We've had lone inventors and tinkerers since long before Ben Franklin hacked his wood stove. Maker Faire seems to me to be about fusing this age-old tradition of the amateur expert, making things, with a new generation of technology—instead of doing wild things with car engines, Makers are doing wild things with iPods and LEDs. It's also about adopting a certain attitude towards making. The attitude feels almost '60s-countercultural, but without the self-righteousness. Or maybe it has more to do with the late-'60s drive to self sufficiency; personal empowerment is a big theme here. In the words of Wired editor
Chris Anderson at the panel on open-source hardware, "You can't count on the consumer electronics industry to make what you want." The ethos of the Faire is fiercely individualistic yet also about cooperation and community (as opposed to bureaucracy).
There's a feeling that bending technology to one's own means is an act of rebellion, but of playful, minor rebellion, more on the order of a meaningful prank than organized political action. (Take for example my favorite kit from the Maker Shed, the TV-B-Gone, which buyers can assemble into a universal remote that turns off any TV—the annoying one in the bar, say, or the airport lounge, or the shop window—up to a distance of 50 feet.) Maker Faire also seems to have raised the profile of certain kinds of at-home tinkering. It's remarkable that so many people come out to experience the scene, both doers and watchers. Families bringing the kids down to see the action. Fans. The guy introducing a speaker on the main stage refers casually to "the Maker movement," and it doesn't sound like he's speaking hyperbole.
Two Jesuit High School roboticists
Is it a movement? I talked to Jay Isaacs, the off-campus coach of the
Jesuit High School Robotics Team from Sacramento, CA, a school group now in its seventh year whose underwater robots have competed successfully against a number of college teams. Jay tells me that
Make (the magazine) has helped pull together elements of a community that, by coming into contact with one another, have started to change into something even more vital. He says that his kids are doing things now with their robots that they wouldn't have done ten years ago, as a result of being in touch with other people through the Maker network.
And the Makers' creations are impressive. Not every item in the show is an obvious work of genius, but much of it, in terms of function and polish, is pretty mind-blowing. One of the first things I noticed upon entering the Faire was a series of signs fastened to the chain link fence in the Maker Shed, expounding on this year's theme, "Rebuilding America." The phrase comes from the text of Barack Obama's inaugural speech: "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." The Faire's colors this year are red, white and blue. I found myself, as I wandered around the grounds, wondering about politics and activism. Is this supposed to be a political movement, as the theme would suggest? Something with a direction, a politics, a purpose? Few of the exhibits were overtly related to sustainability (though one, the
Inka Sun Curve, was way cool). Most were just about what they were about: making a computer make a big wheel out of sugar, say.
The CandyFab!
In some ways, a lot of the Maker Faire projects eschewed purpose. In his talk at the Faire, "Living Dangerously," Bill Gurstelle, whom I'd talked to earlier, remarked that people always ask him, "'Why would anybody want to make a flame thrower?'" He paused for effect before adding, "'And I reply, 'If you don't already understand that, you probably never will,'" which drew chuckles from the crowd. These were the kind of people who definitely get that there is, in Gurstelle's words, "just something viscerally interesting" about making things that fly and explode. But Gurstelle's talk had a point, too. He recounted that a lot of later titans of industry and invention, including behaviorist B.F. Skinner and David Packard of Hewlett-Packard fame, were mischievous terrors as little boys; Packard actually blew one of this thumbs off while playing with TNT. Lesson: an appetite for knowledge and an appetite for mayhem may overlap considerably. Making a mess can be educational, and negotiating danger can keep a mind sharp. Flinging burning matter through the air can be fun and fun can lead to many goods as yet unknown and unforeseeable. If there's an activist mission to Maker Faire it resides in a trust that engaging people in direct exploration of their worlds will lead to good in a diffuse way. The overt focus is really on fun. Maker Faire avoids the preachy, eat-your-vegetables feeling of many "educational" events and science fairs. Here lies its genius: it makes learning fun because it's not trying to make learning fun. Learning is the means to an end, the end is making a cool thing to amuse yourself and impress your friends. Under these conditions, problem solving will be inevitable and the rebuilding of America may take care of itself—so the implicit thinking seems to go.
In the TechShop shed, I got into a conversation with Adam Mayer (left), of MakerBot Industries in Brooklyn. He was demonstrating the CupCake CNC ("The cutest rapid prototyping machine ever," according to the MakerBot website), a 3D printer that you can build yourself from a $750 kit (a bargain when you consider that traditional 3D printers can cost tens of thousands of dollars). I checked out the sliding plastic boxes that Adam was printing and was able to steal him away from his audience for long enough to ask him a question that nags me about 3D printing technology. 3D print evangelists like Adrian Bowyer of the RepRap project like to hypothesize that 3D printing will change the world. We'll all have a 3D printer in our homes, it will change manufacturing as we know it, we'll design ourselves a new widget in the morning and print it over lunch—it all begins to sound a bit heady. Does anybody really believe that?
"Well," Adam said, "It's like with computers. People used to be like, 'Why would we want one of these at home when there's a fifty-thousand-dollar one just down the road? No one knew what would happen and no one knows what will happen with these, either." Rapid prototyping could be the future, or it could wind up an interesting minor footnote to history. For now, Adam Mayer just does it because it's viscerally interesting. And if that doesn't make your heart flutter at least a little bit, Maker Faire might not be your thing.
(Tons more creative commons-licensed MF photos in my Flickr set)
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