While making can and does take place almost anywhere—on the kitchen table, in the yard, in the basement—the serious tinkerer, hobbyist, or crafter has always needed a dedicated space: a “room of one’s own,” in author Virginia Woolf’s words. Men traditionally took over garages or, as the English and Aussies like to call them, sheds: usually a rough, unfinished, messy space that was both a workshop and a haven apart from family and office. Women traditionally had craft rooms or project rooms in the home. These spaces had a dual purpose: to set aside a place for special projects, and to organize the materials and tools needed for those projects.
Carl Bass, the CEO of Autodesk, is one of those fortunate people who has his own dedicated workshop, neither at his office nor at his home. It is certainly not modest or humble, even though there is something of those qualities in Carl himself. A mathematician by training, Carl has always worked with machines to pursue his own interests, which range from practical to artistic. He is probably one of the few CEOs who could call himself a maker. On a tour of his workshop in Berkeley, California, he showed me a collection of baseball bats that he had made for his son’s Little League team. He took out a blank and started making another one, rather effortlessly, peeling away the wood in strips.
“What I’m finding interesting is the mix between traditional tools and more computer-controlled tools,” he told me, moving from a 1950s-era drab-green lathe to a tall, all-white, five-axis Thermwood CNC router that towered over him. He referred to this industrial machine as a “beast.” It is not the kind of machine you normally find in someone’s hobby workshop, and Carl’s workshop is not something that’s available to most people. In cities, space itself is expensive, let alone acquiring all the equipment. Instead of private workshops like this one, the Maker Movement is seeing the rise of community spaces that support the sharing of tools in a common space. The workshop and its tools are being democratized: made more accessible for more people.
These community spaces go by a number of names, including hackerspaces; fabrication laboratories, aka fab labs; and TechShops, with makerspace a generic and inclusive term that I use for all of them, whether they are nonprofit or for-profit and based in schools, libraries, universities, or corporate campuses. In the end, what it is called doesn’t matter. The purpose of the space and the community of makers that comes together there are what’s important.
Travis Good, a former AOL executive and trained as an engineer, visited more than one hundred of these spaces in the United States over two to three years starting in 2011. Travis likes to go on road trips, so he would get in his car and visit as many spaces as he could in a particular region. “I was fascinated by these spaces, who was building them, and how they worked,” he told me. He described the genesis of many such spaces as a group of people meeting each other, and “someone would say, ‘We should get a space where we can make stuff.’” If the group moved forward, they had to accomplish a number of tasks, which Travis said included everything from finding an affordable space and negotiating a lease, getting permits, ordering equipment and supplies, and most importantly, finding other people in the community to appreciate the need for the space. Most of the peculiar features of any space are simply due to circumstance: “Hack Manhattan could only afford a small room in New York City, but Dayton Diode could cheaply lease a large space.” The leadership of spaces seems to vary, including, according to Travis, “dictator, democracy, or anarchy.” However, Travis was struck more by similarities than differences.
I was most happy to see the emergence of consistency among successful makerspaces. Facilities tended to have clean and dirty labs as well as distinct areas for learning, working, and socializing. They had a governance structure that survived the blows of change while still serving their communities. Membership tended to be tiered, recognizing that some can pay more while others need a break. Education was a consistent theme that played out in classes, in projects, and in group builds. Most did outreach, raised funds, hosted events, and welcomed new makers readily into their community.
In this chapter, we will look a variety of makerspaces. There are five different types of organizations:
• organic local spaces started by a small founding team
• community spaces that create an organization, usually a nonprofit
• for-profit membership spaces organized as a business to provide access to tools and training
• collaborative development labs funded by institutions such as colleges or companies
• museums, schools, and libraries that intentionally create public spaces for making
There are many benefits to having a social atmosphere where you can find someone who can share the expertise you want, where you can be inspired by the projects and processes of others, and where you can make new friends. Meeting other people who share your interests is key not only to your satisfaction but also your development as a maker. It signifies the shift I previously described, from the lone tinkerer who worked alone in a shed to the social tinkerer who thrives in a space shared by others. If the mythical garage involved in the start of Ford, Hewlett-Packard, or Apple is any indication, the makerspace will be the new place where future inventions are incubated.
Makerspaces play an important role in expanding who has the opportunity to become a maker by expanding access to the tools and expertise required to make things. I have called them the “on-ramp” to the Maker Movement, attracting new people by providing training and creating a supportive environment where more people can learn to do something that they might have thought was too hard for them.
Makerspaces also are a “commons” that can play a key role in a greater economic transformation. As economic adviser Jeremy Rifkin describes in his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society, the twenty-first century is seeing networks mostly replacing markets, social capital being more important than financial capital, and the ownership of goods becoming less important than access to those goods. “Millions of prosumers are freely collaborating in social commons, creating new IT and software, new forms of entertainment, new learning tools, new media outlets, new green energies, [and] new 3-D-printed manufactured products,”1 he writes, describing the “collaborative commons.”
Of course, we’ve seen community-based spaces providing access to resources as far back as guild halls, and then in the form of libraries, playgrounds, and community centers; a makerspace is just the latest iteration of the commons.
Hackerspaces started out as informal, small, predominantly male clubs that appeal to the hard-core geek, focused more on computing than making. Even so, many hackerspaces would not be happy with that definition as they have changed, adding tools for making and opening up to the broader community.
However, a number of hackerspaces that I’ve visited still seem like clubs. A small group runs the space, and they have might have a dozen members, with people bringing in tools and resources from home to share with the group. Some feel like an eccentric’s garage full of scavenged treasure, waiting for someone to whip it into shape. Some are good about collecting members’ dues, but others are dependent on last-minute pleas for the generosity of everyone involved to make rent. They tend to serve the needs of their founders or core members without having staff to manage the facility.
Just one of hundreds of possible examples, HeatSync Labs occupies a small storefront on Main Street in Mesa, Arizona. It opened in 2009, claiming to be the first such space in Arizona. HeatSync Labs describes itself as a “grassroots co-op of volunteers.” The space is longer than it is wide, with worktables down the center and workbenches on the sides. Since they are on Main Street, people will wander in, curious to know what goes on there.
HeatSync Labs hosts study groups and meetings for young makers and crafters, among several examples of community outreach. Its members teach classes and host demo nights where they show off their projects. A recent show-and-tell was on the subject of model rocketry.
While HeatSync Labs encourages membership, the space is open for free to anyone. Like most hackerspaces, it is most active on nights and weekends. Each member of HeatSync Labs has access to a storage box to use to put things away, but as anyone who’s ever had a roommate knows, some people are just not good at picking up after themselves. A makerspace can begin to look pretty cluttered if everyone leaves projects out in a shared workspace.
To keep the clutter under control, HeatSync has a system of issuing “parking violations” to members who leave their projects out on a workbench and don’t clean up after themselves. One can apply for a “parking permit” to a leave a project and its materials on a table overnight. I learned that the ticketing system had actually been developed at Twin Cities Maker’s Hack Factory in Minneapolis by Christopher Odegard, another example of how good ideas are propagated in the maker community.
On a visit to HeatSync Labs, I caught up with two young teenage makers, Schuyler St. Leger and Joey Hudy. I had met both through Maker Faire. Schuyler is known for having given one of the best-ever introductory talks on 3-D printing, which I had seen on YouTube. He’s smart and inquisitive, and can speak on any technical subject as though he has memorized the Wikipedia entry. Joey is a young maker icon, having been invited to the White House to represent Maker Faire. Joey demonstrated his orange marshmallow cannon to President Obama, firing a marshmallow across the room, generating an astonished look on the president’s face.
Jim St. Leger, Schuyler’s dad and an engineer at Intel, said HeatSync was a very engaging community for his son, and even though everyone was eight to twelve years older than him, they considered him a peer. “I can recall whiteboard sessions with Jasper Nance, currently an engineer at Orbital Sciences, where she would answer endless streams of questions from Schuyler,” said Jim. “She would end up teaching him all sorts of engineering and physics equations, math equations and concepts, and so much more.” Jim recalls that Joey Hudy learned to do his first printed circuit board at HeatSync Labs with help from its founder, Jake Rosenthal.
HeatSync Labs is only one of many different collaborative working spaces in the Phoenix area. At least seven other community makerspaces exist, including one for teens at the public library. TechShop in Chandler is a fully equipped fifteen-thousand-square-foot space developed in partnership with Arizona State University (whose students can use the facility for free). Also in Chandler is Local Motors, a company that produces and sells kits for off-road vehicles and has a facility for building them. The number of collaborative community spaces in many major cities is growing. Interestingly, new spaces don’t seem to be regarded as competitive with existing spaces.
When I first walked into Artisan’s Asylum, I was greeted by a person behind a reception desk. I walked into an open sitting area with old couches and comfortable chairs where members were hanging out with each other. From that vantage point, I could see the machine shop, the electronics workbenches, and the woodworking areas. I could also see several rows of stalls, an important feature of the space that I learned were rented out to local artisans. I was surprised by how large and open the space was, and I thought it must be the largest if not the best community makerspace in the country.
Artisan’s Asylum is located in Somerville, Massachusetts, in a working-class neighborhood that borders Cambridge. With support from the city, Artisan’s Asylum took on a forty-thousand-square-foot space, formerly the Ames Envelope factory, which closed in the 1980s. Half of its membership lives within a mile’s radius.
Founder Gui Cavalcanti graduated from Olin College in robotics, an engineering college in Needham, Massachusetts. He worked for a while for a defense contractor doing robotics but was driven by his desire to have access to the kind of facilities he had at college, the “always-open workshops and tight-knit creative community.” Molly Rubenstein came on to manage the space and become executive director, which eventually became a paid position. Molly had a background in the arts and in nonprofit management. Both Gui and Molly shared the goal of developing a community space, and they had complementary skill sets: Gui focused on organizing the shop layout and equipment, while Molly built the nonprofit organization.
Gui’s first attempt at a makerspace failed, but he applied what he learned from that experience to Artisan’s Asylum. The main lesson was that it’s hard to make ends meet without ongoing support from the community. Artisan’s Asylum was started with a $40,000 budget for opening the space and outfitting it. Most of the tools were used, either donated by members or acquired for the cost of removing them from a former worksite. By not having the money to buy everything that was needed, Gui involved the community in the creation of the space, which resulted in its membership being even more invested. Artisan’s Asylum looks unfinished, and undoubtedly that is intentional because its members are in the constant process of changing it and adapting it. It may never be done.
Gui and Molly recognized that in a city with high rents and small apartments, artisans lacked dedicated space, and many had to pursue their craft on nights and weekends. So Artisan’s Asylum is like a village of makers, crafters, and artisans. There’s a density of creative and technical talent that tends to attract more people to join. Bringing all these people together creates opportunities to learn from one other. Many of them teach workshops to the community. Gui said, “the original goal of the space was to democratize the act of making something from scratch.”
Artisan’s Asylum is a model makerspace, based on the scope of the space, its membership base, and the overall sense of community it fosters. Gui and Molly also began documenting their model and sharing it with others. I worked with them to organize a workshop called “How to Make a Makerspace” in 2013 that offered information on working with real-estate developers, city administrators, insurance brokers, and even lawyers. The event sold out, with several hundred people coming to learn about how to start a makerspace in their city or town. Gui gave them a packet of materials that he used, including a very detailed spreadsheet that explained their budget. Artisan’s Asylum represents a collaborative model for a well-managed makerspace that is an asset to its community, and others want to copy it. Even though Gui and Molly moved on to other endeavors in 2015, Artisan’s Asylum has continued to thrive.
Located in an industrial park, Dallas Makerspace developed out of a robotics hobbyist club that met monthly. My guide when I visited was Doug Paradis. With his son, he had been involved in the original robotics club. An engineer who had retired in 2009 from Texas Instruments, Doug developed the Tiny Wanderer robotics kit for use in schools. I visited the makerspace for the second time in 2013, and since my first visit in 2011, they had doubled the amount of space they had, and memberships had grown from 80 to 240.
I visited on a weekday night, and the place was busy. As I looked down the main corridor, I saw multiple rooms on each side, one for electronics, one for crafts, and another with couches for hanging out. Another room was a lab for synthetic biology projects: Doug showed me how they were growing a tissue culture to make a very thin fabric that one of the makers would use to sew into a dress. At the end of the hall we opened the door to a roughly finished space: part woodworking room, part auto garage. The CNC machines on one side of the room were silent, as were the welders on the other side. In the middle was a black motorcycle with a whiteboard propped against it that named its owner and his project: “Honda ST1100 Electric Conversion.” Taped to the board was an electrical diagram.
Doug introduced me to Michael Eber, one of the most active and enthusiastic members. Eber suffers from medical conditions that cause discoloration of his skin and swelling, yet his spirit is undiminished. Some of his projects, like an interface for Arduino to your cell phone, are commercial. Others are more whimsical, like the vending machine he acquired and connected to the Internet so that members could order components for projects online and get them immediately through the vending machine. Instead of candy and chips, the Dallas Makerspace’s vending machine serves breadboards, Arduinos, packs of small electronic components, wire, and batteries.
Michael wasn’t the only person tinkering with vending machines. Another member had designed a game interface for a vending machine. It had a video display and four colorful buttons. When I approached the machine, it prompted me to take a quiz. If I answered the question right, it asked if I wanted to cash out or continue to play. The more questions you get right, the better the prize you get—unless you get it wrong, and then you lose whatever you gained.
Doug Paradis also introduced me to a nineteen-year-old woman named Kirsten who was there with her parents. After high school, Kirsten turned pro as a tennis player but had lost her ranking after a car accident. During her recovery, she checked out the makerspace, and now she was learning to make robots, with Doug as her mentor. Someone remarked that Kirsten was the best solderer in the place, and she smiled bashfully. I learned that she had been hired to work part-time building custom circuit boards for another member’s commercial project.
It is always great to see a makerspace with women members. I asked several women I met there what makerspaces could do to welcome women and increase their involvement in making. One was Stacy Devino, an engineer who, with her husband, created a modular programmable LED display system called LEDgoes, which successfully raised more than $17,000 on Kickstarter. Stacy said what she wished for was not that anybody do anything for women specifically, but that people would just stop turning women away from engineering. She personally had the experience of counselors, family friends, and professors offer advice that she might prefer something other than engineering. They assumed that they knew what was best for her because she was a woman, Stacy said, even though they hardly knew her.
Three makerspaces opened their doors in 2013 and 2014 with the mission to serve only women or those who identify as female: Seattle Attic in Seattle; Flux in Portland, Oregon; and Double Union in San Francisco.
Georgia Guthrie, executive director of The Hacktory in Philadelphia, established a goal of inclusivity when she came on. The Hacktory has reached a fifty-fifty gender balance among volunteers and organizers. Georgia wrote in an article on the Make: website that men might assume that the lack of women in makerspaces is due to a lack of interest among women in making things, but that’s not right. Many women have had negative experiences around technology, with people underestimating their ability or even being dismissive. “When a woman walks through your door,” she asks, “is the general assumption that she must be a beginner or that she’s tagging along with someone else? Such assumptions may be based in real experiences, but to address this problem, lay these experiences aside.”2
Georgia believes that each space should evaluate the biases in the organization and among its members, and then decide what it can do to make everyone feel at ease and completely able to explore any activities they like. It’s clear that we need to work on making makerspaces more welcoming and inclusive, especially to women, people of color, and people with disabilities.
Fab labs, short for fabrication laboratories, originated at MIT, the brainchild of physicist and professor Neil Gershenfeld, after he realized how little experience students had with physical machines—with atoms as opposed to bits. He created a legendary class, “How to Make Almost Anything,” open to anyone at MIT. The class filled up quickly each semester with students from a variety of fields—architecture, design, art, and engineering—anxious to learn about the range of machines and tools.
The popularity of that class led to the permanent creation of the first fab lab as part of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT’s Media Lab. The program is a reflection of MIT, which Neil once described to me as a “safe place for strange people.” Occupying an entire floor, it is many makers’ wildest dream come true: access to all the machines you could dream of, without much supervision. I can imagine that its lack of structure would be overwhelming for some, yet it seems to be seen as freedom by most at MIT. The motto of fab lab is “Learn, Make, Share.”
In Neil’s incredible vision, humans will be able to build self-replicating machines: machines that can not only build other machines but build new versions of themselves. By extension, he wanted to build labs that would build themselves. While the vision of self-replication hasn’t materialized yet, fab labs have nonetheless been widely replicated. Having a network of labs all over the world that can make anything is a powerful idea.
The fab lab model established the standard for a shared workshop and mirrored what Neil’s students could access at MIT: CNC machines, milling machines, drill presses, 3-D printers, laser cutters, and water jets. By standardizing the list of hardware and software in all fab labs, a maker can design in one location, prototype in another, and iterate in yet another, able to count on the availability of certain tools and machines.
In the first issue of Make:, Neil laid out his vision, which was also the subject of his 2005 book, Fab:
The idea that inspires us is that the next revolution is going to be the personalization of manufacturing: using accessible digital technology and machine tools to program the physical world we live in, just as we today program the bits in worlds of information.… By personal fabrication, I mean a desktop machine that can create three-dimensional structures as well as logic, sensing, actuation, and display.3
For that article and several times since then, I visited the Center for Bits and Atoms at the MIT Media Lab, an academic R&D center that has been at the forefront of research for digital fabrication. Neil has his own kind of DIY mentality. He seems determined to build everything himself (or with grad students), because the things he envisions or desires don’t exist, or what already exists is completely inadequate. A rapid thinker and a tireless leader, Neil is the engine behind the Fab Lab Network, spreading these spaces around the developed and developing world.
The closest fab lab to MIT is across the Charles River in South Boston. When I visited the South Boston Fab Lab, which is run by Mel King, a civil-rights leader in Boston, a group of teenagers were using a screen printer to make T-shirts. All around them were high-tech machines, but what captured their interest was using a screen printer to apply ink on a design of their own creation on a cotton T-shirt. I asked Mel about it. He told me, “When those kids go out in their neighborhood, wearing their T-shirts, and someone asks where they bought it, they can say, ‘I made it myself.’” I smiled in appreciation.
Today, there are over six hundred fab labs around the world and in a variety of different settings, such as a school of architecture (Barcelona), a science museum (Chicago), a community college (Lorraine, Ohio), and a public storefront (Tulsa, Oklahoma). Neil believes that one day the best and brightest students won’t have to come to MIT, at least physically. Via fab labs, with access to a common set of tools and processes, students will be able to share knowledge and designs, and learn and collaborate across international borders.
FacLab was the second official fab lab in France, started by Laurent Ricard and Emmanuelle Roux at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, north of Paris in Gennevilliers. When I visited the space, in a new building with stark white walls, it had been open fifteen months. Still, there was plenty of evidence of work in progress. Laurent, who gave me a tour, apologized for the mess. He needn’t have done so—it was tidier than most makerspaces I visit.
I saw a student using a high-end laser cutter for an architecture project. A class on using the laser cutter was held later by the local guru, a teenager named Ilyes. On a newly arrived ShopBot desktop model, someone had cut a beautiful piece and left it unattended, so I couldn’t ask questions about it. In a textiles room, I saw a fascinating project in process, recreating a historical costume using modern tools. There were several models of 3-D printers, an older MakerBot and an Ultimaker among them. I also met a maker named Julien Desprez working on the design of his own 3-D printer, which goes by the name DOOD, for “digital object on demand.” He’s since run a successful crowd-funding campaign on KissKissBankBank, a European alternative to Kickstarter, and is excited about making and selling his DOODs.
FacLab is open to anyone. The only thing asked of people who use FacLab is that they document and share what they do. I really connected to their vision: to promote the growth and development of individuals, and to encourage self-directed learning, experimentation, and sharing.
“It is not a technical place; it is a social place,” Laurent told me, admitting as well that he was disappointed with people’s reluctance to come in and try things out if they were unaffiliated with the university. “People have a hard time believing that this facility is open to them, that anyone can come in and use it without paying anything. It’s an open bar, and they can’t believe it. Or they might suspect we have a hidden agenda.” Nonetheless, FacLab has people who drive a considerable distance to come to use the facility.
We had a brief conversation about terms: I wanted to know if people identified with the English words maker or if there was a French equivalent. Laurent mentioned bricoleur. But bricolage, sometimes also used in English, has connotations of folk art or pastiche: “construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available.” We also talked about bidouille, which is more like tinkering and hacking but is usually used in reference to children’s activities.
In a conversation I had in Paris at a tiny makerspace called Le Petit Fablab (not part of MIT’s network, and not open to the public, but where a company called Nod-A decided to share the fabrication equipment they use in their business with selected inventors), a researcher named Véronique Ronin commented that “fab lab is the fashionable term for spaces dedicated to making” in Europe. It is preferred over hackerspace or makerspace, even when it is unaffiliated with the MIT network.
Paris has had two Maker Faires, and the word faire in French is the verb “to make.” In February, Jean-Louis Missika, deputy mayor of Paris, announced a plan for Paris to become a “Cité des Makers.” It appears the word maker is becoming a part of the French language.
There are Fab Cafés in a number of cities. The first opened in Tokyo in 2012 as a place where you could use 3-D printers and other technologies while you enjoyed a coffee or tea. You didn’t have to be a member; you could just pay for the time using the machine. Like any café, it was a social space.
Cecilia Tham opened the second official Fab Café in Barcelona. Tall and intense, Cecilia is a confluence of Asia, America, and Europe. She was born in Hong Kong, lived in Macao as a child, and then moved with her parents to Atlanta. She went to college in Boston (Harvard, she admitted when pressed). There she met her partner, an architect from Barcelona, where they moved in 2006 and soon had a child. She struggled, she told me, trying to figure out what she should do. On his home turf, her partner was able to get a job, but she wasn’t. “He bought me a sewing machine, and I almost killed him,” she said. “But I started using it,” she admitted, emphasizing, “I mean, every day.”
Good things started to happen. “Every time I made something, my self-esteem grew a bit. I had turned an idea into a physical thing. For the first time in my life, I did something on my own—not my parents, not the government.” Then she built a shutter-release remote for a photographer friend, and started to think she could make anything. It was a maker epiphany.
On a trip to Tokyo, Cecilia walked into the Fab Café and realized she wanted one. “If I had that need, I thought that others would too. So I built it.” She found a storefront in Barcelona and began to design it. She added a coworking space, called Makers of Barcelona (MOB). She also created a consulting service called MEAT—Make Extremely Awesome Things.
It took a while for the Fab Café to work in Barcelona. After the first year she broke even, but she believes the café is sustainable. It serves one audience that she didn’t expect: retirees. “They come in and drink coffee, and aren’t actually fabricating anything,” she tells me. “But it’s a place where they can come and learn about technology. They’ve asked me for workshops.” Cecilia is proud that she made this happen, on her own terms and on her own.
TechShop is a chain of commercial makerspaces, the first of which opened in an industrial park in Menlo Park, California, in October 2006. When he showed up in a vintage military transport vehicle at the first Maker Faire in April 2006, hoping to gain interest and support for the idea, founder Jim Newton pitched it to me as “like a gym where you get a membership to use the equipment.” His dream was to have unlimited access to the tools of a machine shop, plus new tools for digital fabrication such as laser cutters and 3-D printers, perhaps $2 million worth of equipment, for a relatively modest membership fee that hovers around $100 per month.
Currently TechShop has more than ten locations in the United States, three of them in the San Francisco Bay Area, and others in Los Angeles; St. Louis; Austin; Arlington, Virginia; Dearborn, Michigan; Pittsburgh; and Chandler, Arizona. They recently opened the first TechShop in Europe in Paris and will soon open a location in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. More are on the way.
TechShop’s downtown San Francisco location on Howard Street is the full realization of what a TechShop can be. Its three-story layout is clean and open, with plenty of windows, a large central workspace, and separate rooms for electronics, 3-D printing, woodworking, and metalworking. It can be busy at almost any time, day or night: they recently announced twenty-four-hour access seven days a week.
What happens at a TechShop is probably true of most makerspaces. On the one hand, there is a group of makers who show up with a pretty clear idea of what they want to do. Often their project has some practical or commercial application, and they need reliable access to a workspace and tools to make it real. However, the majority of people who show up at TechShop want to belong but don’t have a project or a purpose. They want to learn how to use the tools, and maybe that will help them come up with a project.
TechShop has a good record of attracting people who already have ideas about what they want to build and just need tools and access. Having to pay to use a TechShop usually means its members are more serious about why they go, and many of them are trying to create a new product or launch a company. Yet I find just as important the story of David Lang, who wrote the book Zero to Maker, in his experience walking into a TechShop, knowing little about it beforehand, and deciding that making was something he wanted to learn to do. He wanted to leave behind a job in a cubicle, develop a whole new set of capabilities, and explore new opportunities. David eventually met Eric Stackpole, and the two of them founded a company called OpenROV to build underwater robots.
Mark Hatch joined Jim Newton to lead TechShop after working at Kinko’s corporate office, seeing a similarity between the chains: roomfuls of copier machines and roomfuls of fabrication machines. A fast-talker with spiked white hair and a good sense of humor, Mark said that he is focused on raising capital to open sixty to a hundred TechShop locations by 2020, with five hundred members per location. This is quite a goal: it’s hard work to run one space effectively, but it’s even more difficult running them in different geographic locations. A large, well-known for-profit makerspace in Brooklyn called Third Ward declared bankruptcy after overinvesting in expansion. This is the challenge that TechShop is trying to meet, and it’s not easy.
They have managed to find partners who fund development and have a built-in potential-user base. In Chandler, it was Arizona State University, which offered space and underwriting of memberships for students. In Dearborn, it was Ford Motor Company, which also offered space and underwriting of memberships for its employees. In Paris, it was Leroy Merlin, a DIY home improvement chain, which offered space adjacent to one of its stores.
I attended the opening ceremony for the Paris location. The 215,000-square-foot shop, called TechShop Ateliers Leroy Merlin, is located in Ivry-sur-Seine. It has more than 150 machines over two floors, even more than in the flagship San Francisco TechShop. It’s an impressive array of tools and workspaces.
“All these machines will be more accessible to more people,” Stéphane Calmes said proudly, giving us a tour. He’s the project lead for Leroy Merlin. He stood in front of a large-format UV LED printer made by Roland. Leroy Merlin customers might buy materials at their store, he pointed out, and customize them using the tools in TechShop. Stéphane showed an example of a door that was covered in a colorful custom print produced on the Roland printer. “This is something you couldn’t do at home yourself.” Another example was a small table bought at Leroy Merlin that had a print of the lunar landscape on its surface.
Stéphane walked us through the metal shop and then the woodshop, which featured traditional tools but also a ShopBot CNC cutter, locked inside a cage, as required by French law. He showed us the water jet, “the most spectacular and most expensive” machine they have. He explained that this TechShop has new safety innovations such as a set of sensors mounted on poles that can detect if anyone is standing near the water jet, and if so, not allow the machine to operate. There is even a bike shop.
Mark Hatch addressed the audience gathered for the opening. “The cost of tools has dropped ninety percent,” he announced. Making them available for the cost of TechShop membership drops the end-user cost by an equivalent amount, he added. “TechShop is providing access to these tools of the new industrial revolution for the creative class. And now Leroy Merlin has brought the tools of this revolution to Paris.” Leroy Merlin is working on two additional TechShops: one in Lille, where their corporate headquarters are, and Grenoble, in the French Alps. There are plans to build five TechShops in France.
TechShop has the potential to energize a maker community, attracting new makers and giving them the opportunity to experiment and innovate. Yet the for-profit model for makerspaces has been a challenge, not just for TechShop but for others like it who depend on members who pay to play.
FirstBuild is an open makerspace created by GE’s Appliance division in Louisville, Kentucky. It is an unusual experiment: a corporate-funded makerspace open to the public but focusing on innovation in appliances. This makes FirstBuild the first vertical makerspace.
On a visit, I met with Kevin Nolan of GE, who developed the space, which opened in July 2014. The location is on the edge of the University of Louisville campus and several miles away from the GE’s large Appliance Park. The facility has a public area that can be used for meetings or to display some of the work that goes on there. The work area is divided into two spaces: one for small-scale work like electronics, and the other area where the more dangerous equipment is housed. They also have a set of offices made from shipping containers. The entire space was built in six months. It is clean and well-organized, and yet not particularly corporate.
One of the GE team members, Tim, built a Raspberry Pi jukebox and speakers for the space, and Kevin commented that he had no idea how many different interests his employees had. The idea behind FirstBuild was to open up access to GE Appliances so that makers could innovate on top of them as a platform. Generally speaking, makers are not going to develop a new appliance and bring it to market. However, they might be able to modify existing appliances in useful ways. One example was adding a camera inside the refrigerator that could take a picture of what is in the fridge and send it to you, so you know what ingredients you have or what you need to buy.
Kevin explained the business case behind FirstBuild. He said that a company like GE, which recently sold the appliances division to a Chinese company called Haier, has to allocate a certain percentage of its profits to R&D—let’s say four to six percent. The Appliance Division has an R&D budget, and its goal is to bring twelve products to market each year. He thinks FirstBuild can contribute four of those new projects a year and break even. The cost of the entire setup was not that expensive. There are eight people on staff, four of whom are skilled machinists that can help makers. Kevin believes he will be able to get new ideas and develop new projects that they would not have produced internally.
The FirstBuild space is open to the public for free, although you do have to become a member and sign a few forms. You can work on anything in the space, but it is clearly designed to encourage members to develop and test projects related to kitchen appliances—they have a professional kitchen there, too. FirstBuild worked with Local Motors to create an online platform for submitting ideas. Local Motors is the first car company to cocreate vehicles online with a virtual community of designers, fabricators, engineers, and enthusiasts from around the world, using open-source principles.
I liked that the initial submission was required to be tweet-like: short and sweet. As ideas get voted up, they can become a project, and GE can decide to fund the project, at which point GE will also help with manufacturing. Kevin said that his small team is having to reinvent small-scale manufacturing processes that had vanished from a large company. One of his motivations is to find new ways to keep the factory workers at Appliance Park employed. He said that they hope to develop new products like a start-up and be able to bring successful products to scale. One of the innovations to come out of FirstBuild is the Opal Nugget Ice Maker,4 which raised $2.7 million on Indiegogo.
A big hurdle that Kevin overcame was getting GE lawyers to change their stance on the intellectual property that came out of FirstBuild. It was a pretty remarkable change. Members of FirstBuild retain the rights to what they develop with GE, and GE gets the right to use the invention if they pay a royalty. The maker can take the work elsewhere and even sell the rights if GE doesn’t do anything with it.
Probably the first true collaboration between a company and a maker community, FirstBuild is also working with the University of Louisville’s engineering students, who are on site in an adjacent area, as well as with LVL1, a makerspace in Louisville. LVL1 was started in 2009 by two teachers from Kentucky Country Day School who learned about makerspaces at a Maker Faire and decided to start one of their own. LVL1 is the opposite of FirstBuild—scruffy and disorderly, with little attention paid to what goes where or what is left behind. It looks like everything was donated, dragged in, and dropped where it is now. Yet they have about eighty members and are not worried about their ability to pay rent.
According to Ted Smith, chief innovation officer for the City of Louisville, when Kevin Nolan and his team started developing the idea for FirstBuild, they were going to locate it in either Connecticut or Arizona. Smith helped GE organize a hackathon to see if they could prove that there was enough talent in Louisville. At the event, which he said started slowly, several the LVL1 members began asking questions of the GE team, and something clicked. The GE team realized that they had talent in their own backyard.
Venkat Venkatakrishnan, one of the key people behind FirstBuild, told me about the thirty-six-hour mega-hackathon in April 2015. They had two hundred participants who organized themselves into thirty-two teams. Venkat said that forty percent of the people were from GE’s Appliance division: employees who were showing up on their own time because they were interested. That’s amazing.
The winner of the mega-hackathon was a project named House Roast. Two guys from GE had an idea about roasting coffee at home in a standard convection oven. One of them knew software while the other knew GE’s wall ovens inside out. During the hackathon, they recruited two other team members based on their skill sets. All of them were driven by their own passion for coffee. Together the team hacked a GE convection oven to roast coffee, controlling the temperature with a custom roasting profile that was programmed into an Arduino. The team won the prize of $5,000.
The House Roast project proved the idea worked, but hacking an oven wasn’t something everybody could do or wanted to do. So they launched an online challenge for a home coffee roasting kit that you could build and stick inside the oven and control the temperature with your smartphone. They got thirty-one entries.
The winner of the challenge was Stephane Arthur Kiss, a twenty-nine-year-old mechanical engineer from Ottawa, Canada, who was inspired by his popcorn maker to figure out a better way to roast coffee at home. Second place went to two engineering interns at GE, Hunter Stephenson and Steven Morse, ages twenty-one and twenty-two, who work at GE Appliances but worked on their designs at FirstBuild. Third place went to Chia-Chen Lee, thirty-two, an industrial designer living in Rochester, New York, who came up with a magnetic levitating spinning drum to tumble the beans to roast them.
FirstBuild engineers will look at how to refine these designs and see if they can be manufactured as a product. The makers can choose to continue working on their project with GE or not. In this respect, the FirstBuild challenges function more like a design competition, and the award plus recognition is the goal of the challenge.
However, for GE, this process uncovered innovative ideas for a market niche that GE had never looked at. Venkat didn’t realize that it was possible to roast coffee beans at home, and his colleagues hadn’t realized how much passion there was for coffee-making. More engineers at FirstBuild began looking at solving other related problems, such as reducing the time it takes to make cold-brew coffee.
I can imagine that cities will have many different makerspaces that create a local ecosystem for makers, integrating hobbyists, businesses, and institutions such as universities.
In addition to fab labs, there are a growing number of universities that have developed makerspaces that are accessible to students in departments such as mechanical engineering. Some are open to any student on campus, and some are even open to the community. In fact, universities have long had machine shops and art studios—the latter usually being closer to a makerspace in spirit than the former. But they had limited access, especially the machine shop, which was staffed by machinists often hired to do things for the faculty. Few of these spaces had the mandate to let students use the tools themselves.
At the Georgia Institute of Technology, the largest engineering school in the United States, the Invention Studio is a campus-wide makerspace open twenty-four hours to any faculty, student, or staff member and project, not just those in classes. The Invention Studio has $500,000 of equipment in three thousand square feet. One of the most innovative aspects of the space is the student-run Makers Club. Seventy students are members of the club, which provides support and training for the community of users. “We keep the space open and the machines running,” said one student. It also gets students invested as stakeholders in the space and creates camaraderie. The Makers Club is currently sponsoring a grant program, offering $250 for student projects. What’s especially positive about the program is that it is open to any student project in any major: “We love multidisciplinary projects.”
Craig Forest, assistant professor of bioengineering, has been the faculty sponsor for the Invention Studio. He originally saw the makerspace as a high-end prototyping facility for students working on Capstone Design Expo projects, but it is becoming much more than that. There are now over five hundred users per month. Students don’t just show up to work on class projects; they also work on their own personal projects. They also enjoy hanging out in the space. It has become their space, not just a space owned and operated by the school. When I visited, a janitor from campus was using the waterjet to create a metal frame for a drone he was building. It’s a model that other universities should study and replicate.
At Southern Methodist University, the Innovation Gymnasium is in the basement of the engineering building. It is an open, flexible space, with twenty-four-hour access, and it is open to any student regardless of their department. The director at the time of my visit, Greg Needel, told me that he thinks of it as a “third place” on campus, apart from the dorm room and the classroom. It is also the other “nine-to-five” space, meaning 9 p.m. to 5 a.m., because students are typically there very late.
Greg has created a picture wall, taking Polaroid photos of the two-hundred-some students who use the space. He wanted to make it easier for students to find others who used the space based on their interests and their projects. This relates to what I see as a greater need in the community, the need for maker portfolios. There is a need to know what other people are doing, and what kind of work is in progress. This fosters collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking.
At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Think[box], a workshop for collaboration and innovation, is a seven-story, fifty-thousand-square-foot makerspace available to students and faculty but also open to the public for free. It received $10 million in funding from alumnus and adjunct professor Larry Sears and his wife, Sally Zlotnick Sears. Larry founded an electronics company called Hexagram that automated remote meter-reading for utility companies.
Ian Charnas has been the driving force behind Think[box], which got started in a four-thousand-square-foot basement space. He is a graduate of Case and explained that he just hung around wanting to do this until they made it his job. He gave me a tour of the new facility before it was even entirely built. While Think[box] is affiliated with the Case School of Engineering, Ian explained that Think[box] is not just an engineering space but will have a broad focus that includes art and fashion, and they hope to work closely with nearby institutions such as the Cleveland Institute of Art.
One project I saw was Felipe Gomez del Campo’s plasma-assisted fuel nozzle, which “improves the way fuel burns in jet engines” and was featured at the White House Maker Faire. Other projects included a foot-powered cell-phone charger, a 3-D magnetic skull puzzle, and a rapid malaria detector kit.
Ian explained that the seven floors have been designed to accommodate different stages of development for a person or a project. The first floor is dedicated to community, a gathering place; the second floor is for ideation, with lots of whiteboards and open space for brainstorming. The third floor is for prototyping, while the fourth floor is for fabrication—don’t ask me to explain the difference. The fifth floor is an open projects space, essentially workbenches and storage. The sixth floor organizes resources for entrepreneurs, and the seventh floor serves as an incubator for small groups that form to develop a new product.
One of the students, Kailey Shara, is a super-smart young engineer who left Case to cofound Carbon Origins, one of my favorite maker start-ups. Carbon Origins is building an Arduino-compatible flight controller called Apollo, built to guide a homemade rocket and survive the inevitable crashes of test launches. She has returned to Case to complete her undergraduate education, and she was clearly delighted to see the progress with the new Think[box]. I could almost see her thinking about how much time she would be spending there.
Ian Charnas mentioned a survey in which 39.9 percent of the students indicated that Think[box] was a significant factor in their decision to attend Case Western Reserve University. I believe we will find this to be true across more colleges and universities. It will provide a clear rationale for investing in student-accessible makerspaces.
Add to that the benefits of developing an innovation ecosystem that engages the community and partners such as manufacturers, investors, and corporate research organizations. It has the potential to broaden the base of support as well as the social and economic impact of these makerspaces.
Chaihuo Maker Space was the first makerspace in Shenzhen, sponsored by Eric Pan of Seeed Studio. It is a small two-room space located in a building that had been a factory and is now a collection of retail shops and galleries in an arts-and-design district known as Oct-Loft. With lime-green walls and bookshelves, Chaihuo seems more like a drop-in social space than an industrial workshop.
In January 2015, Premier Li Keqiang, the number-two official in the Chinese government and known for leading economic reform, visited Shenzhen and stopped by Chaihuo Maker Space to meet with Eric and other makers. He must have liked what he saw because his visit set off a chain reaction. An article in China Daily said that “Li called on Chaihuo to show the nation’s growing commitment to supporting grassroots innovation and the budding Maker Movement that is producing it.”
I was told by more than one person in Shenzhen that in China, a single sentence from a powerful person can be all it takes to set things in motion. An article titled “Maker Culture to Be Encouraged in China” cited Li Keqiang’s visit and said that in March the State Council established initiatives “for fostering creativity and entrepreneurship.” The initiatives encourage investment in small and medium-size businesses. Li Ouya of the Chaihuo Maker Space was quoted in the article: “Maker culture used to be like underground water, a subculture thing here in China, with the water seeping up from the ground. But since the premier’s visit, it has grown into more like a well, with more and more different maker spaces surfacing and taking root across China.”5 At the Shenzhen Forum in April, Deputy Mayor Tang Jie of Shenzhen talked about makers fostering creativity and innovation in Shenzhen:
Currently, Shenzhen is the most active city in venture capital and private equity investment in China, so the city can support, embrace, and understand makers. Makers also should learn to share, and they need a restless, youthful spirit, to cultivate their abilities through practice, and keep creative and imaginative. Shenzhen is to be built as the city of makers.6
The local Shenzhen government organized support for Shenzhen Maker Faire in June 2015, and every school in Shenzhen will receive $50,000 to develop a makerspace. The challenge, even with such government support, is still how to build a community around these makerspaces.
What’s next for makerspaces? Whether for-profit or nonprofit, future growth depends on having more paid staff, a trend toward the professionalization of makerspaces. The 2014 Makers Nation survey reports that twenty-nine percent of the one hundred makerspaces in the survey rely only on volunteers, and fifty-four percent have one to five paid staff.7 For a makerspace to grow and serve a broad community, they must be able to perform a core set of services to support membership expansion. New people need to be welcomed when they arrive. Classes and workshops are essential to provide basic safety training as well as offer workshops for members who arrive without project ideas.
Good governance is also key. This amounts to building an organization, not just creating a space. “Good governance is resilient, consistently serves its constituency, and is predictable,” said Travis Good. It’s something that Travis and I talk a lot about, as there were few basic questions that we found ourselves asking to understand how a space works:
• Is there a board of directors, and does the leadership change over time?
• How are decisions made about growth, such as moving to a larger space or adding equipment?
• How invested are members as stakeholders in the space, such that they support it and have a voice in how it is managed?
The development of makerspaces can be compared to the rise of fitness clubs. Today’s health clubs started out years ago as bodybuilding gyms. They were designed to meet the needs of a narrow, largely male membership. They weren’t particularly friendly to newcomers or casual users. Yet something changed in our culture around physical fitness, which became acknowledged as a key aspect of health and well-being, and gyms had to become more open and accommodating if they were to grow. They had to learn to welcome women as well as men who did not see themselves as bodybuilders, attracting both serious and casual members. This is the kind of change we can expect as makerspaces grow.
For all the emphasis on equipment, what makes a makerspace are the people who run it and the community of people that it serves. There is a difference between a place that people use and a place where people feel they belong. Getting that culture right is important—creating an open, supportive culture for exploration, risk-taking, creativity, and personal development. A good makerspace can be transformative for its community.