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Who: Amateurs, Enthusiasts, and Professionals
Today’s makers can be hobbyists, tinkerers, artists, designers, inventors, engineers, crafters, and others. I resist saying a maker is one thing and not another. I believe the term maker resonates with so many because it’s so inclusive and interdisciplinary. For our purposes, let’s define a maker simply as someone who creates and shares projects. There are all kinds of makers. Some people make bread (full disclosure: I am one of them). Other people make airplanes. Some make sweaters. Others make robots. And some people make pumpkin-hurlers.
On the first weekend after Halloween, The World Championship Punkin Chunkin contest takes place in Millsboro, Delaware, in an enormous cornfield that’s been bare since harvest. What started as a bar bet—who could hurl a pumpkin the farthest—has developed into an arms race, featuring air cannons mounted on the beds of semitrucks and a wide range of trebuchets, catapults, and hurlers. These days a nonprofit organization hosts the event, which has become so popular that it plans to move to the Dover International Speedway, having outgrown the cornfield.
I went to see it for myself in 2006 with Bill Gurstelle, author of Backyard Ballistics. The weekend was cold and clear. Large air cannons and trebuchets with patriotic team names such as Old Glory, Second Amendment, and Yankee Siege lined themselves up along the firing line, with over a hundred machines in a row, many of them flying American flags. One team was named Bad Hair Day, an all-woman crew in leathers. The teams vary in size, as does their equipment, and they compete in different classes. Most are family and friends from the same town, and the event has become a ritual encampment. There is a lot of standing around waiting for something to happen, trying to stay warm, and naturally, there is a lot of beer. Meanwhile, kids from the different camps are running free and playing. Then, for a brief period, everyone gets serious. Each person on the team moves into position; someone shouts “ready,” and someone yells: “Fire in the hole!” A small explosion of sorts occurs that blasts the pumpkin into the air and gets the crowd screaming.
In the event’s early years they used leftover pumpkins. Today the Punkin Chunkin challengers use eight- to ten-pound white pumpkins grown specially for this purpose. They are a bit harder than a jack-o’-lantern and more like a gourd. When one of them explodes in midair, it is said to have “pied.” Even on a clear day, it is quite difficult to see the pumpkin in air—it is just a tiny white speck that vanishes quickly against the autumn sky. Assuming the pumpkin didn’t “pie,” there’s a flurry of activity at its landing spot out in the field, as a half-dozen four-wheelers circle the spot to measure how far it got. The pumpkins generally travel 1,000 to 3,500 feet, and a few exceed 5,000 feet.
One of my favorite competitors was a centrifugal hurler named “Bad to the Bone” from nearby Milton, Delaware. The hurler is mounted on a tower that sits on the bed of a truck. When it starts, the arms begin spinning slowly, round and round. As it picks up speed, the arms begin to blur together. Finally, channeling the energy of the arms spinning at top speed, with the truck and tower shaking and wobbling, the pumpkin is hurled into the air. It is exhilarating to see, although I made sure I was standing safely back.
The machines were impressive, but frankly, once I had seen one lineup in action, I became more interested in the people who built them. The Great Emancipator is an enormous air cannon painted bright red. Its team is dressed all in red, like a NASCAR crew with insignias on ball caps and over the breast pockets of their shirts. The team’s leader is John Buchele, a tall man with a full beard from Jeffersonton, Virginia. I asked him casually how much Great Emancipator had cost him to build. He shrugged. “Over $70,000.”
I wondered where he got the money to do this, yet I knew it wasn’t about the money. This was a way to spend time together with the family, and have a sense of purpose and accomplishment. John and his team were very proud to be competing, and it was as much as about beating their own previous score as it was about beating anyone else.
I asked another man who had an air cannon mounted on a very large semitruck where he kept his machine when he wasn’t at the competition. He replied without hesitating, “It’s parked in my front yard.” I wondered if he was married.
Then I talked to Steve Seigars of Yankee Siege from Greenfield, New Hampshire, leader of a nine-person team, most of whom were also named Seigars. Yankee Siege is a huge trebuchet made of iron. It weighs over fifty thousand pounds and stands sixty-one feet tall, not counting its throwing arm. Each of its four wheels are ten feet in diameter. It is amazing to stand next to Yankee Siege. It made me feel small. Yankee Siege won its class the year I was there, with a throw of 1,476 feet. The previous year it had won with a world-record throw of 1,702 feet. By 2013 they had surpassed the half-mile mark of 2,835 feet with a new machine, Yankee Siege II.
I had two questions for Steve Seigars. My first was, “Did you start off building small trebuchets before building one this large out of iron?” His answer was that Yankee Siege was the first one they built. They had never done this before. He and his family, who call themselves the Yankee Farmers, originally built the trebuchet as an attraction for their pumpkin farm.
My second question was, “What do you do for a living?” Steve replied that he was a dentist. I could not help but laugh. I said to him that he would probably not be remembered for his work as a dentist, but as the creator of the Yankee Siege.
Punkin Chunkin was a lot of fun, even more so for the participants. That’s the whole point of competitions, hobbyists clubs, and associations, what I might call preexisting maker communities.
Another great example of this kind of community is the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA). On several occasions I have visited the Oshkosh air show, AirVenture, held every summer in Wisconsin, which attracts more than one hundred thousand people. Oshkosh is a fly-in event, where pilots and their families arrive in their own planes and land at the adjacent airfield. They taxi to their campsites on a large field and set up tents under the wings of their planes.
EAA was formed after World War II, initially to lobby for the right to fly for recreational pilots, many of whom had flown in the war and were having trouble getting insurance to fly their own planes. Because of the difficulty in obtaining insurance, small airplane manufacturers went out of business. The EAA was able to get a federal law passed that said if you build at least fifty-one percent of your plane, then you can fly it.
One year Bill Gurstelle and I went to Oshkosh together. We met a pilot named Arnie Zimmerman who flew a two-seat open-cockpit airplane known by the name of its design: Breezy. It is the most minimalist idea of an airplane, closer to the Wright Brothers plane and a bicycle than to anything else at the air show. You can see how everything works because it has no exterior shell. The pilot sits in nothing sturdier than a deck chair with a cushion, positioned completely forward, a seatbelt the only thing keeping the pilot in the seat. The pilot has to wear goggles to keep the wind and bugs out of his or her eyes. Designed as a “family fun airplane,” the Breezy design was developed by amateur aviators in the 1960s. The plans cost about $100 and the total bill of materials comes to about $15,000.
Arnie explained that he flew the plane up from Texas, dodging storm clouds as much as he could and setting down when he couldn’t. He told us that commercial pilots like to fly the Breezy because they can really feel that they are flying. Arnie is the most casual sort of fellow, guffawing at the dangers of flying out in the open, and reminding me of Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. It was clear he loved flying, and while talking to us, he was itching to get the plane back up in the air. If we wanted to keep talking to him, one of us would have to go up with him. I stepped back as Bill climbed into the seat behind the pilot and buckled in.
Bill later wrote of the experience: “At first terrified, I eventually got used to the feeling and the freedom. There’s nothing between the flyer and the sky but a set of goggles. For a view and fresh air, the open cockpit that makes the Breezy so breezy—no door, no windshield—cannot be surpassed.”
Because so many of its members build their planes, Oshkosh features a number of companies that sell kit planes. A kit plane can be as little as a set of instructions or a design for building a particular model plane. In that case, the builder needs to fabricate all the parts and assemble the plane from these instructions. A kit plane can also supply prefab components, which still require a lot of work to put together. Many of these kit-plane makers have a hangar facility where you go to build the plane, which, of course, typically doesn’t fit in a garage. I met a father and daughter who had been going back and forth from their home in California to a facility in Texas in order to build their own plane. Eventually, once it was finished, they flew it home.
Building your own plane might be the ultimate DIY project. For many builders, the project might go on for several years, and there is even a market for selling half-finished planes. My brother-in-law, Rich Carlson, was one of those builders who had built the frame and done all the sheet-metal work in his barn but eventually sold the kit and its plans to another person who hoped to finish them.
I met Sebastien Heintz, president of the Zenith Aircraft Company, located in Mexico, Missouri, and one of the companies that sells kit planes. His father produced the original design for the Zenith planes, which has been revised over the years. Sebastien organized the “One Week Wonder” project at Oshkosh, where a team of people set out to build an entire airplane from one of the Zenith kits in one week. “We’re doing this,” he said, “to promote and to increase participation in kit aircraft building, and to demonstrate that building an entire airplane can be done by nearly anyone.”
DEDICATED AMATEURS
Like many of the makers I meet, the participants at Punkin Chunkin and Oshkosh are dedicated amateurs, and proud of it. They form a community of interest, which really is a widely distributed group of people that share the same enthusiasm or passion.
The Latin root of the word amateur is amare, to love. Amateurs love what they do. For many, being an amateur is a kind of freedom to play without concern for making a living at it. Making can be seen as a hobby, a sideline, a pursuit outside the workplace. It’s done on your own time. Saying you are an amateur doesn’t necessarily mean that you are a novice, however. Amateurs can be highly skilled and committed, and the lines do blur between amateurs and professionals. Saying that you are an amateur speaks more to your goals than anything else.
Most of us are happy being amateurs and have no desire to become professionals. I like to grow and cook my own food. Cooking is something I’ve gotten good at, and in which I take pride. I have no desire to be a gourmet chef and work in a restaurant, yet I think as a cook I can appreciate what a chef does even more. I am content being a good cook who can create satisfying meals for friends and family. It’s something I can share with others as I choose. Each of us is free to participate on our own terms.
I think of it as a pyramid of participation. At the base of the pyramid are the amateurs and at the top are the professionals. If we look at music as an example, we find at the base of the pyramid those who are learning to play an instrument as well as those who have played their whole life. Everybody has to start there, but many stay there. At the top of the pyramid are professionals, those who make a living playing music. Even there, only a few are superstars who command large audiences, compensation, and media attention. In the middle, in between the purely amateur and the professional, are those musicians who have gigs a couple of times a month or get paid to teach music.
Athletics fits the same structure, with a relatively small number of paid professional athletes on top and a much larger number of those who participate just because it is fun.
A pyramid implies a hierarchy, and in fact, our culture tends to overvalue the professional and undervalue the amateur. Amateurs can be seen as second-rate, objects of derision. “We use a variety of terms—many derogatory, none satisfactory—to describe what people do with their serious leisure time: nerds, geeks, anoraks, enthusiasts, hackers, men in their sheds,”1 writes Charles Leadbeater, a British political adviser and author. For most of the last century, only professionals were taken seriously, and if we wanted to be taken seriously, we were advised to become professionals. In his 2004 essay “The Pro-Am Revolution,” Leadbeater describes the rise of a new social hybrid he calls the pro-am, for professional-amateur: “Their activities are not adequately captured by the traditional definitions of work and leisure, professional and amateur, consumption and production.”2 The pro-am is in the middle of the pyramid.
We can use the pyramid of participation to bring attention to the large number of amateurs while noticing that there are professional and pro-am makers as well. Usually we think there’s a natural progression from the bottom to the top. However, today the pyramid is expanding across its middle, as the bottom and the top meet: amateurs find more ways to get paid for something they love to do, and professionals find ways to do things they love to do as part of their job. Whether you call yourself a professional or amateur doesn’t matter, nor do titles or credentials. What matters is what you do, and allowing that to speak for itself.
Alessandro Ranellucci is the Italian developer of the open-source Slic3r program, which is used to prepare design files for 3-D printers. He started developing the program in his spare time, and no one was paying him. He just saw the need for Slic3r and set off to write the code himself and give it away. At Maker Faire Rome, where he was an organizer of an area for makerspaces, Alessandro told me that Italian makers are seeking new alternatives for work that is meaningful to them. In a country where many say that the political and economic systems are broken, you wouldn’t know that from meeting Italian makers who are filled with energy and enthusiasm. Alessandro said that some makers got involved because they didn’t have jobs while others were quitting jobs, even taking less money to do something they loved. “Makers are choosing quality of life,” he said.
If we characterize the Maker Movement as driven by amateurs, it’s because makers will attempt to do things just to challenge themselves and take experiments about as far they can go, without asking anyone’s permission or expecting a professional’s compensation for their efforts. This is a kind of freedom that many professionals never experience for themselves, where permission and funding are often a prerequisite for action.
I believe in the power of the amateur to do something professionals won’t or can’t do, or plainly, just haven’t done. I believe the novice can see things that the experts miss, and do things that the business-minded don’t properly value. I also believe that ordinary people can develop uncommon insights and act on them because they have not been taught the “right” way to see things. It is a crazy and idealistic but ultimately democratic idea to believe that we can all contribute, and that art and innovation come from unexpected people and places. This is exactly what history shows is possible.
AMATEUR SCIENTISTS
The history of astronomy through the ages has proven the value of amateurs. William Herschel is famous for discovering the planet Uranus. Yet back in the mid-eighteenth century, had someone asked the young William Herschel about his profession, he would have answered that he was a musician. Herschel grew up in Hannover, Germany, and by the age of fourteen, he had developed a fascination with musical notation and the theory of harmony, and learned to play the oboe, violin, harpsichord, and guitar. At eighteen, his parents had him smuggled out of Germany, which was at war with France, and he ended up in London, where he did not speak the language, but earned a modest living by teaching music lessons and working as a church organist. Yet today we don’t know William Herschel as a musician, because in February 1766, at age twenty-seven, he began keeping a journal of what he did at night. Night after night, all night long, Herschel stayed up gazing at the stars and recording his astronomical observations.
Herschel managed to acquire a small collection of both refractor and reflector telescopes. The refractor telescope, created by Galileo, was good for observing the moon and the known planets, but it was inadequate for looking much deeper into space. Newton had come up with a different type of telescope, known as a reflector, that contained a large mirror for gathering light, which enhanced one’s ability to see dim objects that were far away. Herschel realized that he could improve the reflector telescope by using an even larger mirror made out of metal rather than glass. Because he could not afford to have one made for him, he decided that he would make it himself.
According to Richard Holmes in his book The Age of Wonder, Herschel by 1774 had “created an instrument of unparalleled light-gathering power and clarity.”3 He was the first to be able to see that the polestar or North Star was not one but two stars. Holmes writes: “By this means, Herschel began to build up an extraordinary, instinctive familiarity with the patterning of the night sky, which gradually enabled him to ‘sight-read’ it as a musician reads a score.”4 Herschel’s significance, according to Holmes, is that he “began to conceive of deep space. He began to imagine a telescope which might plunge deep down into the sky and explore it like a great unplumbed ocean of stars.”5 One cool spring night in Bath, England, Herschel discovered that an object in the night sky had moved. It had been catalogued as a star, but Herschel’s telescope allowed him to investigate further. At first he thought it might be a comet and notified the Royal Society, but later he asserted that it was the seventh planet, what would become known to us as Uranus. This professional musician and amateur astronomer made a discovery that fundamentally changed our understanding of our universe.
Forrest Mims, a well-known amateur scientist who wrote much-loved tutorial guides on electronics for Radio Shack, reiterated in Make: what he had written in Science in 1999: that some people think that amateurs can no longer contribute to modern science. He disputed the so-called “end of amateur science,” saying, “Yes, modern science uses considerably more sophisticated methods and instruments than in the past. But so do we amateurs.” He cited the ongoing discovery by amateurs of new dinosaur fossils, new species of plants, and new comets and asteroids. Forrest added that today’s makers have “the technical skills and resources to devise scientific tools and instruments far more advanced than anything my generation of amateur scientists designed.”6 In addition, these amateurs are connected more easily to others, including professionals, and they can learn from each other and share their work.
Amateurs should be a key part of any healthy ecosystem. We can’t have professional sports players without amateur sports. We can’t have professional musicians without amateur musicians. We can’t have professional makers without a broad base of amateurs who are doing this because they love it. To choose to do something for love, as an amateur does, to make something for no reason other than that we enjoy the process and to experience for ourselves the act of creation, is a powerful exercise of our freedom and a laudable demonstration of the human spirit.
I think of making, and even innovation, as a kind of sport, and my goal is to get as many people to play as possible. Amateurs play alongside professionals. Everyone requires the opportunity to play and needs practice to get good. If we get lots of people playing, we will have a better chance of discovering who has special talent, and even those of us who are less talented will benefit from being active and involved. I’m interested in untapped sources of innovation, untapped pools of talent. Many people have, for any number of reasons, never discovered their talent themselves, let alone have others discover it in them. With the Maker Movement as a framework for collaboration, making can be a team sport. Nobody has to go it alone.
SOCIAL CREATURES
Enthusiasm is the energy that amateurs burn. It keeps them up late at night, working on the weekends, staring at a problem much longer than most people until a solution is finally found, or iterating on an idea so many more times beyond what seems normal.
Though he uses the word “obsession,” Kevin Kelly, contributing editor of Wired magazine, is talking about the force of enthusiasm when he said,
Obsession is a tremendous force; real creativity comes when you’re wasting time and when you’re fooling around without a goal. That’s often where real exploration and learning and new things come from. Even as a society we can have temporary obsessions with something that we will work through, and that’s one way in which a society can explore an idea.7
Enthusiasts do what they do not just to please themselves, but also, importantly, to connect to others. Once you show interest in a hobby and begin talking about it, you’ll find others who share the same interest. It’s amazing serendipity. As we identify ourselves by our passion for our chosen activities and hobbies, we identify others, many of whom are better or further along in developing their interest. We join groups online and offline; we post photos of our projects; we develop Twitter followers. We not only share finished products with pride; increasingly, we are also sharing work in progress (or even a frustrating lack of progress).
One reason for this is obvious: we need help. To learn and improve, we need access to mentors or to people who just know more or can do more; these may be experts or peers. If I need to understand why the plastic filament in the 3-D printer isn’t sticking to the print bed, I’m going to reach out to a person who can help me. Makers are usually generous with their time and they’re willing to help, often because they recognize that others have helped them along the way.
Before the Internet, our opportunities to discover and develop a new skill were limited by our ability to find someone we knew who could explain it—in person. If you had a father who kept a workshop in the garage, you would have been exposed to tools and picked up on what he was able to do. The Internet is changing our ability to learn to make by improving access to other people who can help us. It doesn’t matter where they live. We can learn from them by reading a blog or watching a video that explains how to do what they do.
Another important reason we seek out fellow enthusiasts is to stoke our own enthusiasm. To move from an idea to a project requires energy. If I have an idea, I am going to invest a lot of my own personal energy to pursue it. At first I have to find this energy in myself. Ideally, to be sustainable, my idea needs to generate energy, not just consume it. We often get this energy returned to us through interactions that our projects initiate. When someone shows that they enjoy my project—for example they share that they find it useful or amusing—they are giving me something back, and that can provide me with the motivation and energy to keep working. The currency of exchange is enthusiasm, something hard to define, but we know when we feel it.
In his book Making Is Connecting, British sociologist David Gauntlett writes:
People often spend time creating things because they want to feel alive in the world, as participants rather than viewers, to be active and recognized within a community of interesting people. It is common that they wish to make their existence, their interests, and their personality more visible in the contexts that are significant to them, and they want this to be noticed.… There is also a desire to connect and communicate with others, and—especially online—to be an active participant in dialogues and communities.8
A big part of the DIY mindset is to seek out other enthusiasts who are doing similar things and to connect with them. Some people actually use the terms DIT, for “do it together,” or DIWO, for “do it with others.” Most makers don’t conform to the cultural stereotype of the lone tinkerer who believes or fears that no one else shared his or her interest. They are social tinkerers, working in groups and in shared spaces. When we share what we are doing, we deepen our connection to our community, offline and online, physical and virtual.
CRAFTERS
In 2003, Leah Kramer in Boston created Craftster.org, a community site for “hipster crafters.” Irreverent, edgy, dissatisfied with the notion of crafting as sentimental and crafters as stodgy, Kramer created an online community for crafters to meet each other and share their projects. The site’s tagline, “No tea cozies without irony,” is an expression of Craftster’s subversive attitude toward traditional craft.
“I got bit hard by the crafting and DIY bug as a child, and it stayed with me throughout the years,” said Leah. “As I entered my twenties, I got really bored of all the usual humdrum patterns and ideas you’d find in books and magazines at the time. I was really itching to make things that specifically expressed my own style, interests, and sense of humor. I remember I’d get excited when I’d see a cute little shop selling crafts only to walk in and be disheartened by the overwhelming smell of cinnamon and the sight of teddy bears dressed in handmade lace-trimmed aprons.”
In 2001 a new holiday craft fair, the Bazaar Bizarre, had debuted in Boston, organized by a group of friends who were artists, musicians, and crafters. The first version took place at a VFW hall with a dozen craft vendors. “The things people were making were totally in the spirit of what I wanted to be doing with my crafty yearnings. Hand-knit puppets shaped like 1980s video-game characters, totally off-color cross-stitched towels.” Leah joined the organizing team. The event expanded every year to include more vendors and take place in other cities.
That was offline. Online, there were a few communities in the early 2000s where Leah and other like-minded crafters could meet. “I loved visiting those sites, but it was really hard to share pictures, organize the craft ideas, and search for ideas.” So when she started Craftster, she thought of it as “a place to share hip crafty ideas.” Leah explained,
Craftster was not only going to be a community I’d love to be a part of myself but also had this unique spin on things. The outside world seemed to think that the idea of young hip people who were subverting crafts with humor, irony, pop-culture themes was unique and new and worth talking about and writing about in various media outlets. That really helped Craftster succeed.
Leah had majored in computer science in college in the 1990s, but she had been interested in computers from childhood, fondly remembering her Apple IIe. She actually wrote computer programs to help her design new patterns for an intricate geometrical bead weaving that she liked. She recalls participating in Usenet newsgroups about her favorite bands and about crafting. “It’s funny to think about the differences between then and now. If you wanted to share pictures of craft ideas and patterns with people, you had to print out pictures at the Fotomat and mail them via snail mail.” She thought of the Craftster community as people who were itching to be creative in ways other than, or in addition to, what was already socially acceptable, like music (for example, being in a band) and writing and art (for example, creating your own zines). And at the same time they relished throwing people for a loop by doing the unexpected: crafting, something only grandmas did. These people felt empowered by taking crafting back and making it their own. And then, as the Internet grew in popularity and ease of use, these people got together and shared with each other what they were making and drew more and more people in.
She found people just like herself. “I enjoy having an idea and then building it out of practically nothing with my own two hands and brain. Sewing something out of nothing but fabric and thread has a similar feeling for me as making a computer program out of nothing but code.
“Craftster was definitely a side project I did just for fun. I had no idea where it was going to go and just wanted see what it would lead to. I wasn’t even a Web programmer.” Her side project grew and grew. At its peak, Craftster had 1.25 million unique visitors per month and 10 million page views per month. It became a valuable property. Kramer sold Craftster in 2010.
Suddenly there was a “new wave of craft” in America. In addition to websites like Craftster, craft was celebrated in Debbie Stoller’s BUST magazine, as well as local groups like New York’s Stitch ’n Bitch. Crafters in different cities organized their own brand of craft fair, from the Bazaar Bizarre to the Renegade Craft Fair, Craftin’ Outlaws, Urban Craft Uprising, Shop ’n Mosh, Craft Mafias, and Reform School. Whereas handicrafts were once seen mostly as the domain of empty nesters, young adults under the age of thirty-five now dominate the $29 billion crafting industry.
In 2007 we launched Craft magazine as a companion to Make: with the tagline “transforming traditional craft.” I saw Craft as a way to reconsider craft as a set of technologies and infuse it with new technologies, and as a new form of self-expression. The editor-in-chief was Carla Sinclair, who was married to Make: editor Mark Frauenfelder and an early partner in Boing Boing. She wrote:
This DIY renaissance embraces crafts while pushing them beyond traditional boundaries, either through technology, irony, irreverence, and creative recycling, or by using innovating materials and processes.… The new craft movement encourages people to make things themselves rather than buy what thousands of others already own. It provides new venues for crafters to show and sell their wares, and it offers original, unusual, alternative, and better-made goods to consumers who choose not to fall in step with mainstream commerce.9
Projects in the first issue included making a stitched robot doll, a silver thread- and microprocessor-based programmable LED tank top, knit slouch boots, a minimalist “catnip castle,” and an ant-farm room divider. Craft celebrated unconventional, unexpected, and unusual techniques, materials, and tools.
MEETING MAKERS AT A MAKER FAIRE
Because I enjoyed getting to know the makers I had met through the magazine, I began to think that they would enjoy meeting each other and talking shop. So in 2006 I came up with the idea for Maker Faire, and the first event took place in the San Francisco Bay Area. Cofounders Sherry Huss, Louise Glasgow, and I conceived of the Maker Faire as a reinvention of the county fair. The original county fairs, rooted in the agricultural economy, brought people from remote farms together to share their work—pigs and pies, as they say. “With these trading fairs came a cross-fertilizing of different cultures, and an imperative for joy and festivity,” notes the National Fairground Archive on the history of the emergence of the county fair in England.11 In short, fairs were a mix of exhibits, lectures, and a marketplace. They were a celebration of a way of life and its labors.
County fairs are still around, and I enjoy going to them and seeing the farm animals, the homemade jams, canned pickles, and tomatoes. However, many county fairs are in decline and frankly have gone stale, depending on aging rock bands and carnival rides to attract a crowd. Not many of us see ourselves as part of an agricultural economy anymore, despite growing interest in farmers markets, urban chicken co-ops, and backyard gardens. Instead, Maker Faire reflects our modern culture and economy. It is a hybrid of a science fair, a craft fair, an art fair, and a county fair. Maker Faire is an exhibition more than a competition. It’s a people’s World’s Fair that is open to everyone who wants to show their creativity and technical prowess.
What Maker Faire does is bring together groups of people who don’t otherwise get together—distinct subcultures, with different interests and different names. All of these groups exist side by side in our towns and communities, but they often see themselves as separate and not related to each other. Maker Faire helps them discover in each other the same kind of passion and sense of purpose.
Makers bring projects that range broadly across technology and science, craft and art. It blurs the lines between disciplines and interests. Mashing creative and technical work together makes it special. It’s messy and noisy and thrilling. For one weekend each year, it is like the world’s most creative, most agile, most innovative city. Unlike any other city, it is one that reflects our collective imagination and future potential. Its citizens are curious and adventurous—they love to learn and come to play. They are eager to move around, knowing that a surprise awaits them around every corner. Even if they stand in place, the wonders will find them, as so many are mobile: there are small speeding robots, spider robots that crawl, art cars that putter about, bicycles linked together like sled dogs, motorized Adirondack chairs moving alongside customized wheelchairs, and electric-powered cupcakes weaving in and out of the crowd.
The essence of Maker Faire is “show-and-tell”: a context for makers to have conversations about what they do with other people, most of whom are strangers. The interactions are magical. We get to ask questions of makers such as: “Where did you get that idea?,” “How did you get started?,” “How do you find the materials you used?,” “What was hard about the process?,” and “Could I build it?” Our curiosity is amply rewarded.
At the outset, I didn’t know if a broader public would find Maker Faire compelling. Even in our first year, Maker Faire attendance exceeded expectations, drawing eighteen thousand people. Maker Faire Bay Area, which was our first location, is in its eleventh year and now draws over one hundred thousand people, among them about 1,500 exhibiting makers. The flagship Maker Faires are a massive maker project themselves, produced by a dedicated team that loves the event.
Sherry, Louise, and I wanted Maker Faire to be, first of all, fun. We also wanted to attract families with children, not just adults. We wanted it to be a celebration of makers and making. Here is what I remember from our first Maker Faire:
• Acme Muffineering’s electric cupcakes were developed by a Bay Area group for Burning Man. We had a baker’s dozen speeding along the grounds.
• Bazaar Bizarre set up a craft faire with about forty hipster crafters.
• Douglas Repetto, the founder of Dorkbot, had a large artbot crawling on a wall to create a colorful drawing throughout the day.
• Make Play was a room filled with bins of recycled electronics and tables with soldering irons and hand tools. It was a free-for-all that only grew more chaotic as the day progressed.
• In the same area, master hacker Bunnie Huang was demonstrating breadboarding. A breadboard is a tool for prototyping the wiring of circuits.
• Wendy Tremayne’s Swap-O-Rama-Rama was a clothing swap and remix. She organized designers and brought in sewing machines, so anyone could grab a few pieces of clothing and remake them into something personal. Scatha Allison of Jean Therapy, a designer of reconstructed denim, was there. A Fashion Show featured Swap-O-Rama-Rama models in remade designs.
• Limor Fried helped people build a Persistence of Vision (POV) toy kit, an electronic display that becomes readable as you wave it back and forth in front of your eyes.
• Lindsay Lawlor brought Russell the Electric Giraffe, a nineteen-foot-tall creature that rolled around the grounds and interacted with people.
• Steve Wozniak and a local team played Segway polo on a grassy field. Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters was also seen playing.
• A homemade dump tank was a bucket mounted on a portable basketball stand; it dropped a bucket of water on a victim if one hit the target with a thrown ball. The Electronic Frontier Foundation sponsored it.
• The dump tank was next to a homemade barbecue pool heater by John Guy of Arizona. By the end of the day, it was heating the water for the dump tank.
• Jon Sarriugarte and Kyrsten Mate from Oakland brought SS Alpha Fox, which looked like an official NASA space vehicle and shot balls of fire in the air.
• The Crucible, an Oakland space for industrial arts, brought its fire truck, which sprayed fire instead of water.
• A maker who called himself Crabfu, whom we later got to know as a game designer named I-Wei Huang, brought beautiful steam-powered robots.
• Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay, a maker couple from Sunnyvale, California, who would later start Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories as a business, brought an interactive LED table that they had built and which was designed to respond to motion. “The sensors in our table were going crazy because of the number of people,” Lenore remembers.
Without our even realizing it, a community had been born. Many of the makers met each other for the first time but would continue working together for many years. The community members were the cocreators of the event. We just gave them space, but they brought the creativity, passion, and ingenuity. Makers were the stars of the show, the talent. Their projects represent work that is still at a raw, early stage. Each exhibit represents a kind of experiment.
Above all, Maker Faire provided makers with valuable feedback. A reaction such as “Cool!” can mean a lot. The Faire also gave makers the chance to make new connections and meet interesting people they might have never met on their own.
Maker Faire is contagious. All kinds of people comment that Maker Faire has this “vibe,” a feeling that is hard to explain but easy to experience for yourself and see in the expressions on people’s faces. It’s the feeling that anything is possible, as we revel in experiencing the creativity and talent in our community. Everybody brings their best self to Maker Faire, and indeed, they are creating something together that none of us could do by ourselves. Everyone is happy; there is the sense that we all “play well together.” It makes us feel optimistic about our society and our future. That this spirit continues to flourish after more than ten years is truly incredible, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
Maker Faire has served as a catalyst for the Maker Movement, inviting more and more people to participate and to see themselves as producers, not just consumers.