How people make things is changing for a number of reasons—mostly because the tools of production have become more accessible and affordable. This includes cheap electronic components; standardized microprocessor boards that connect and control things such as sensors and LEDs; and digital fabrication tools that combine software with hardware, creating the object on a computer and then sending the instructions for building the object to a machine such as a 3-D printer or a laser cutter. These tools and technologies—some of which are described in this chapter—are driving the Maker Movement.
Tools that were once available only in industrial settings, R&D labs, or university departments can now be found in many of the community makerspaces I described in the previous chapter. Small desktop-size digital fabrication tools can replace the large equipment used in factories, and what was unimaginable not long ago—making one of a thing—is now feasible. “The tools of making have never been cheaper, easier, or more powerful,” Mark Hatch of TechShop likes to say. This democratization of technology means that more people can afford to get access to tools, learn to use them, and surprise us by making things that would never have come out of the industrial world.
The word technology comes to us from the Greek root tekhne, meaning “craft,” “skill,” “art,” or “technique.” Fire is usually considered the first technology that humans used: a tool itself for heating and cooking, which was then used for making other tools. We can consider cooking a technology too: a set of tools and techniques that transform raw materials into cooked food. The same is true of sewing. The Singer sewing machine was the first “domestic” machine. Technology involves learning new skills but also imagining new applications. The power of a new technology resides not just in what it does but how it makes us think. As Marshall McLuhan said, “We shape our tools and our tools shape us.”1
Makers find parts and materials from a variety of sources. Take duct tape: I’m frequently amazed by the variety and ingenuity of the creations, such as wallets, hats, and dresses in a duct-tape fashion show, not to mention the bridges, boats, and hammocks that people have built with the stuff. When school administrators claim they don’t have the funds for a makerspace, I like to tell them that origami—using recycled newspaper, even—is a great activity for young makers.
I first heard the word obtainium when touring the San Francisco workshop of Mark Pauline, the founder and director of Survival Research Labs. Mark and a team of contributors build large machines that come to life as part of ritual performances. When I asked where he gets the parts, Mark told me with a wink that they use “obtainium,” loosely defined as abandoned, recycled, unused pieces of equipment. An artist might call them found materials.
Many of the makers I know are scavengers. They visit salvage yards, flea markets, and garage sales and spend time on Craigslist and eBay looking for materials. It’s part of the appeal of making to hunt down the right part or find something that you didn’t expect to find and wonder what you might do with it. Marque Cornblatt, the robot maker and drone racer, started with assemblages of stuff he found on the streets of New York City or dumpster diving. When he moved to the Bay Area, he found a different set of things in the trash, especially around Silicon Valley, where the material he found was more high-tech. That was when Marque started making more sophisticated mechanical and kinetic pieces.
In Louisville, Kentucky, Mayor Greg Fischer wants his city to be a leader in reducing, recycling, and reusing materials that otherwise end up in landfills. The city’s electronics recycling center is a place where you drop off old computers, cell phones, and printers. It’s a place where makers might go if they have ideas about how to use such equipment and its components. For instance, old printers are a good source for servomotors, useful for robotics projects. The town dump can hold unexpected treasures. Many makers take pride in being resourceful, finding things that other people no longer use or value.
At Maker Faire Tokyo, a Japanese maker asked me a question that was troubling him: “How do you make things in America? You don’t have Akihabara.” In Akihabara, there are large and small stores selling cheap electronics and new and used gadgets, but what makes Akihabara special is that you can also find all the components that are used inside those gadgets. You have to navigate a warren of cramped stalls, each one specializing in a single component, such as capacitors, inductors, or switches, loose and sorted in boxes by color, size, and type. Each stall is like an educational catalog of what exists that you might use. It’s a fun, if jarring, place to visit, which I have done several times in conjunction with Maker Faire Tokyo. Each time I’ve seen something I didn’t know existed.
Then there’s Huaqiangbei, the electronics market in Shenzhen, China, reputedly the largest in the world. It’s featured on the Shenzhen Map for Makers. In a city known for its factories and local supply chain, the SEG (Shenzhen Electronics Shopping) Market in Huaqiangbei is its heart. I got a tour from Bunnie Huang, an American living in Singapore who is a frequent visitor to Huaqiangbei. Bunnie is a hacker-hero, a MIT PhD who wrote Hacking the Xbox, developed the Chumby as a hacker-friendly consumer device, and works on projects like Safecast and the open-source laptop. To follow Bunnie through the many levels of multiple stores in Huaqiangbei is like being led by an expert hunter on a trail through the jungle. He knows where things are, who the people are, how to get in, and how to get out, all while avoiding the crowds. What is in focus for him is a blur to me: copycat cell phones, power supplies, test equipment. Bunnie comes here to source parts for many clients, but he is also looking for parts for his own projects. Here is the SEG Market in Bunnie’s own words:
As I first step foot into the building, I am assaulted by a whirlwind of electronic components. Tapes and reels of resistors and capacitors, ICs of every type, inductors, relays, pogo pin test points, voltmeters, trays of memories, all crammed into tiny six- by three-foot booths with a storekeeper poking away at a laptop, sometimes playing go, sometimes counting parts. Some booths are true mom-and-pop shops, with mothers tending to babies and kids playing in the aisles.
And it’s not like, oh, you can get ten of these LEDs or a couple of these relays like you do in Akihabara. No, no. These booths specialize, and if you see something you like, you can usually buy several tubes, trays or reels of it: you can go into production the next day. Over there, a woman sorting stacks of 1 GB mini-SD cards like poker chips; here, a man putting sticks of 1 GB Kingston memory into retail packages; next to him, a girl counting resistors.2
Bunnie and I stopped at one booth where a woman in a green dress was actively soldering on a workbench. She stopped her work to talk to us, as Bunnie opened a bag of LEDs and tested several of them before eventually asking about the price. I left with several bulk packs of color LEDs, LED lighting strips, plus a cheap but powerful cell-phone charger. Each transaction was negotiated by Bunnie. He can get the best price and find the broadest selection in this market, and he knows that these transactions only happen in person.
In the United States, there’s no real equivalent to Akihabara or Huaqiangbei, certainly no district that I know of in any city. Most people think of Radio Shack as a place to get cheap electronic components, and yet they moved away from that business to sell phones and remote-controlled toys. They stopped being that kind of place until the Maker Movement made them rethink what they were doing. For the holiday season in 2014, Radio Shack ran a wacky ad campaign featuring Weird Al Yankovic singing and standing in front of a store wall with Make-branded kits. Unfortunately, it was too late in the game, and unable to reduce its debts, Radio Shack declared bankruptcy in 2015.
The answer I gave to the Japanese maker who asked me about Akihabara was that American makers buy components online from websites like Digi-Key and McMaster-Carr. He shook his head, as if to say that it’s not the same as Akihabara. Online sites for electronic parts, and even their phone-book-thick print catalogs, can be as intimidating as visiting the electronic markets in Asia. They were developed with a professional audience in mind, one trained in sourcing parts. You have to know exactly what you want, and the number of choices can be overwhelming for a first-time maker venturing out to look for LEDs or sensors.
A group of maker-friendly and beginner-friendly online stores such as SparkFun and Adafruit have provided a valuable service, somewhat like Bunnie himself, by knowing which components are most likely needed for maker projects. If you are looking for an accelerometer, Digi-Key will have hundreds of them, while SparkFun might offer a half-dozen and provide documentation on how you might use them in a project. Adafruit goes a little farther, designing and developing more of their own components, which reflect the engineering acumen of founder Limor Fried.
The availability of components influences how makers think about what they can build. Yet being able to find parts is one thing; finding them available for cheap is another. That’s why some clever makers also look at new consumer electronics devices, because they introduce new technology into the market at a relatively low price. A collection of new devices, including the Wii Remote, the GoPro camera, and the Microsoft Kinect, have caught the attention of makers who have different ideas than the average consumer about how to use them.
Sometimes, as in the case of Microsoft Kinect, the manufacturer takes issue with those who open up the device or hack them to get access to new sensors and other parts inside. The Microsoft Kinect, which came out for the Xbox game platform, is a remarkable set of cameras and sensors that can detect motion and allow interaction with a game console without using a keyboard or hand-held game control. Makers immediately could see other uses for the Kinect that were never conceived of by the game designers at Microsoft.
When Microsoft released the Kinect in the fall of 2010, Limor Fried of Adafruit announced a $3,000 reward for the first person to create an open-source driver for the Kinect. The software interface would allow applications not tied to Microsoft to access Kinect and control it. Hector Martin, a Spanish hacker also known as Marcan, bought a Kinect in the store, and three hours later had hacked it, posting a minute-long video demonstrating the feat: a computer running Linux interacting with the Kinect. Martin won the bounty offered by Adafruit, and his code eventually became part of an open-source project called OpenKinect. A website was soon launched called Kinecthacks.net.
Microsoft reacted strongly to the invitation to hack Kinect and even denied that the hack happened. Then, as they began seeing the wide variety of applications appearing because of the hack, Microsoft changed course and said that they had designed the Kinect to be hacked. Makers discover uses that manufacturers haven’t designed for, which the manufacturer can see as a legal issue, or the start of an innovation ecosystem.
Hacking the Kinect unleashed all kinds of applications that have been created over the years since. I mentioned Phoenix Perry’s Nightmare Kitty, which used the Kinect along with a machine learning library, to challenge kids to move and avoid the falling kitties. One favorite was a medical application that allowed a patient at home to monitor their own range of motion by raising their arms up and down in front of the Kinect. Willow Garage, a Google-backed robotics company, rewired its telepresence robot to use a cheap Kinect as its vision system in place of a very expensive custom camera system. A number of makers have used it to do full-body scans of people, which they can send to a 3-D printer to create personalized figurines.
The Kinect is an example of a device that becomes a component, and moreover, a component around which a community develops. It becomes a standard, which is to say, a well-known way to do a wide variety of projects. Makers benefit from using standards over custom solutions because they ultimately save time (and headaches). You don’t have to figure out things yourself, and even if there are problems—and there usually are—you can rely on the fact that others are encountering those problems and also trying solve them.
Inspired by the open-source movement in software, makers began to apply open source to hardware, eventually creating the open-source hardware license. While an open-source software license describes what to do with source code so that anyone can copy or modify the program, an open-source hardware license describes a hardware design that allows anyone else to replicate the design. It might include schematics, a bill-of-materials for all the parts, software source code and other design files, and documentation. The intent as described in the Open Source Hardware Definition is that the hardware design “is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design.”3 Open-source hardware grew out of using the Internet to share the plans for a project so that others could build it if they wanted.
Limor Fried began to learn about electronics as well as open-source software at MIT while she was getting her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Like many MIT grads I’ve met, she comes across as completely self-taught, which is all the more credit to MIT. With her distinctively punk pink hair and bottom-lip piercing, Limor is a pioneering developer of open-source hardware products. She has a remarkable presence, especially when giving a public talk. She’s her own deeply geeky person and her charisma can really surprise you. Listening to her, one feels she can do absolutely anything she sets her mind to—and she’s proven that she can.
With personal projects that she created, Limor began sharing schematics and other files online, often going by “LadyAda,” an homage to Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first program to be executed by a machine. One of her first projects was called Spoke POV, a custom circuit board with LEDs that created an image using a persistence-of-vision device placed on a spinning bike wheel. Limor had not thought much about licensing or patents or copyrights. She put up her files under a noncommercial license, meaning that others could copy and use the designs for any reason except to create a commercial product. “It doesn’t matter if you put up something with a noncommercial license,” said Limor, “because someone probably will come along and make a derivative [work] anyway, and it will be closed source, and he might be your ex-boyfriend.” That actually happened to her. The noncommercial license “really backfired” for her.
Limor’s next project, which she did to learn microcontrollers, was the Minty MP3 player built inside an Altoids mint tin. “Building MP3 players was the hot new thing” in 2003–2004. She could find lots of examples of these DIY MP3 players online, and it inspired her to want to make her own. “Because people had started to put up files, and said that they didn’t know what license it would be under, they concluded the files were free for you to use in any way you wanted.” She relied on these designs to build her own—a derivative work.
“Because this project was based on the generous donations by all these people of code and examples,” she decided she should give back. She made her own files free for others to use. And they did, including those who took the designs and manufactured a product for sale. “I was a little upset at first, because I didn’t even consider that possibility,” Limor said. “But it turns out that it worked out anyway, because then Apple came out with the iPod.”
At that point she had learned enough about electronics that she decided to build a cell-phone jammer for her thesis project. A cell-phone jammer sends out a signal that disables a cell-phone’s reception. Because it is illegal to manufacture, sell, or use a cell-phone jammer, Limor considered the project simply an exercise to demonstrate that one could be built. She figured she had arrived at a design that no one else would rip off.
Years later, however, I was on an Amtrak train from New York to Boston with a maker who is an associate of Limor. After listening for too long to a loud person on a cell phone, the maker pulled out a homemade cell-phone jammer, hidden inside a cigarette box. The maker pushed a button and instantly ended the cell-phone conversation several rows ahead of us. I could see the person with the phone look quizzically at it, unaware of what had happened. I immediately had a vision of an arms race escalating between cell-phone users and cell-phone jammer users. Being party to the prank was a guilty pleasure.
After graduating from MIT, Limor started her own open-source business in 2006. “It doesn’t seem to make any sense to do open-source hardware,” she said. “If you do something good, it will probably be stolen from you. If you do something bad, you’ll be made fun of.” Yet she decided from the moment she founded Adafruit Industries that she would share her design files and code for each product she created. She didn’t think it would hurt her sales, and part of her didn’t care if it did. She believed in doing it and accepted the risks. That conviction, forged from her own experience, is what makes her such a pioneer in the Maker Movement.
Limor was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012 by Entrepreneur magazine, and she was the first woman engineer on the cover of Wired, although missing in her cover photo were her pink hair and lip ring. They had her in the familiar pose of Rosie the Riveter instead.
Limor now designs, engineers, manufactures, and documents her own products. She created a factory in Manhattan with pick-and-place machines, and she manufactures the Arduino board in the United States, in addition to her own product lines. She has built a thriving company, Adafruit Industries, that tripled and doubled to reach $40 million in sales in 2015, using an open-source hardware model and no venture capital or other outside funding. What worked for Limor was not just designing great products, but her insistence on openness, sharing, and community.
Open-source hardware is more than a license. It is an understanding, a kind of informal handshake among members of a community. It is an agreement that can have a legal meaning but also implies an unwritten code about how to use the work of others and share back your own work. Phil Torrone, who left his editorial position at Make: to work with Limor and become her partner, wrote about the “unspoken” rules of open-source hardware: “What does the open-source maker want?” he asks. “Just to be credited properly.” He waggles a finger at those who use “open” as a marketing pitch but don’t actually share their designs. If you say your product is open-source, don’t require an NDA to get the source code or create other hoops for people to jump through. Also, if you use open-source code and designs, add value to them. Don’t just give them a different home with a new name. Finally, he warns those who just want to clone to “go do something else.”
These rules for participating in the open-source hardware community are not arbitrary. They exist as ways of demonstrating good faith in the community, valuing its work, recognizing the reciprocal benefit of learning from one another’s expertise, and contributing back something of one’s own. It’s about playing well with others, whether for fun or profit.
Another way of looking at it is how a group of musicians might learn songs from each other and play them in addition to each person creating their own music. That can be done freely, requiring some kind of acknowledgment that you are playing someone else’s music, even as you adapt it. However, if you were to record that music for purposes of selling it on an album, you should not only credit the source but find a way to agree on a royalty for using that music. In music, it’s required, and there are organizations that enable and enforce the payment of royalties. The Open Source Hardware Association doesn’t have the resources to enable standardized transactions for royalty payments or the ability to enforce them. Strictly speaking, the license doesn’t require it. Yet understanding the difference between personal use and commercial use is important to maintain the open-source hardware ecosystem.
Applying open source to physical products is an important breakthrough, not just for electronics. Marcin Jakubowski’s Open Source Ecology project in Missouri promises an open-source tractor and other industrial equipment. There are open-source clocks and watches. Opendesk provides open-source furniture designs. WikiHouse is an open-source platform for building designs. OSVehicle is developing an open-source hardware platform for electric cars.
The spread of open-source hardware is related to the increasing use of software to generate physical goods, as well as code embedded in those products. Open-source software and hardware combined ensure that we have the freedom to understand how things are made, replicate them if we choose, or just modify them if we wish.
A typical maker project consists of a bunch of parts and a brain to control them. That brain is a small microcontroller, a computer on a single electronic board the size of a credit card, with pins that can be wired to the outside world for input or output. It’s often referred to as a “board.” Microcontrollers in and of themselves are not new; specialized ones are embedded in all kinds of devices, like cars, implantable medical devices, televisions, and kitchen appliances. Each microcontroller might have its own unique design and programming. Microcontrollers have been widely used in industrial applications, most of which are proprietary. Now, a growing number of microcontrollers including Arduino, Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, and Propeller represent the next wave of a personal computing revolution. Used by hobbyists who are starting small, this new hardware comes from unexpected places, designed by people with a real sense of purpose.
Arduino is Italian. It happened to be the name of a bar frequented by art students from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea near Milan. In 2005, an associate professor at the Institute, Massimo Banzi, offered the name of that bar for a simple new microcontroller aimed at artists and other nontechnical users. With the introduction of Arduino, makers had a cheap, open-source microcontroller that was easy enough for nontechnical people to use. Arduino became a standard “brain” for millions of projects, and a large community grew up around it.
In March 2012, I spent several days with Massimo, first at a Maker’s Conference in Rome and then in and around Turin, where the Arduino is made. Massimo is not an engineer, and that’s what makes the story of Arduino so fascinating. Most microcontrollers are designed by engineers for engineers. Not Arduino. It was specifically designed for designers taking courses in interaction design, which he explained to me:
Interaction design is the design of any interactive experience. It can be the interface of an object, say a device with three buttons. That interface can yield an unsatisfying experience, or those same three buttons can create a really positive experience. Everything is an experience, an interaction between you and something, and that experience can be designed.… In my case, interaction design tends to be about technology. A lot of the experiences that you have today are enabled by objects that contain electronics and sensors. Technology enables the communication between you and the device, or you and a service. The interaction designer must be a designer but must also understand technology enough to know what kind of experience you can create with a certain tool.
Yet Massimo was struggling with teaching electronics to his design students. “When I explained what electrons were, for instance, Ohm’s law, they didn’t understand. Then I realized that that’s not how I had learned. The way I learned was experimenting. When something didn’t work, I would go back and try to understand why it worked. So that theory became useful to me, and it matched reality. Then I started to teach like that and make everything much more hands-on.”
What Massimo wanted with Arduino was a cheap and uncomplicated way to control sensors, lights, sounds, motors, and other elements of what could be a museum exhibit, a performance, or an article of clothing.
The students usually don’t have a background in technology. They don’t know how to program or to do electronics, and we only gave them two to four weeks to create physical computing projects. At that time, the tools you’d find in the market were mostly designed for engineers, with a lot of options, lots of jumpers, and lots of connectors. Students found them too complex and couldn’t figure them out properly.… So the idea was to make a board with the minimum number of parts with a cheap price tag. I wanted them to cost $20 for a board: the price of a pizza dinner. So a student could afford to skip a pizza dinner and spend the money on a board.
A master’s student advised by Massimo, Hernando Barragán developed the Wiring project for his thesis, and his work led to Arduino. Others helped with designing the board and the interactive development environment (IDE) for programming the board. The core Arduino team consisted of five people: Massimo; Tom Igoe, who wrote the book on physical computing and taught at NYU’s ITP program, which has goals similar to Ivrea; David Cuartielles, a Spaniard, who was teaching interactive technologies at Malmö University in Sweden and first got involved to design the Motor Shield; David Mellis, at MIT’s Media Lab, whose focus was developing the IDE; and Gianluca Martino, an Italian, who was responsible for manufacturing the board in Turin.
Massimo explained, “The whole idea of being a maker involves concepts of collaboration, community, and working with other people. It’s very hard to be a maker and be by yourself locked in a room or even in a lab. It’s really something that involves a lot of collaborations at different levels. Arduino boards are a mash-up of open technologies wrapped up in a unified user experience.”
On my visit, we started one day at the fab lab in Turin, then we hopped in Massimo’s Fiat and drove into the countryside, which reminded me of where I live in Sebastopol, California, except that it is surrounded by the Alps. This Piedmont area is where the early personal computer maker, Olivetti, once thrived. The factories that make Arduino, and the people behind them, are industrial descendants of Olivetti. They set up shop on their own after Olivetti closed its doors. This is why the region has the machinery for making printed circuit boards.
Seeing the manufacturing process first-hand, I was struck by how much the process that creates a printed circuit board is like a printing press. The board starts out as a copper-clad laminate sheet that goes through a variety of different processes, involving CNC machines for drilling holes, photochemicals, silk screening, and hot ovens. At the end, there’s a stack of blank circuit boards in the characteristic Arduino blue, the signature look of Arduino, in which Massimo takes great pride. The boards go to another factory where pick-and-place machines choose components that are fed on reels and then are placed onto the board by a robotic hand. The boards then require additional tasks, some of which involve soldering by hand. Finally, all the boards go through extensive testing. The finished boards are then packaged in boxes and sent to a warehouse, where they are eventually shipped out in bulk.
The Italian owners of the factories take great pride in what they do and the fact that they do it in Italy, seemingly against all odds. They can boast that not only do they make the boards in Italy, but the machines that make the boards are also Italian.
The first run produced two hundred preassembled boards, fifty of which were bought by Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. Another fifty went to Sweden, and the remaining hundred sold out quickly. “From then on, we had people asking us for boards. When I started to see what people were doing, I knew that Arduino was making a difference,” said Massimo.
He believes that the Arduino reflects a minimalistic design philosophy:
Good design is about using the minimal amount of stuff that you need. If something is visually simple, it encourages people to use it. If you look at the stuff that engineers design, they tend to be large printed circuit boards with lots of buttons, switches, and lights on the board. If I’m a beginner and I look at this thing, I see thirty buttons, jumpers, switches, different configurable items. Our brain in a completely subconscious way starts to multiply all the options together. It might conclude that this thing in front of my face has three billion combinations, which is way too many to comprehend.
This why the Arduino is incredibly streamlined, including the very minimum number of parts that you can use. We removed every jumper because each one has the potential to confuse people who are trying to learn. That’s a design choice. Certain people believe in complex devices with lots of features. Others believe in simple things.
From these origins, the enthusiastic interdisciplinary mix of engineers thinking like artists and artists thinking like engineers, working together and learning from each other, Arduino has become a tinkering platform for all kinds of people. It began with modest ambitions. It’s not the most powerful microcontroller. Its virtues are being cheap—around $35—easy to use, and open, meaning you can freely share hardware designs and code, and you can use it with any OS. Each of these virtues is important, but being cheap is first.
Cheap means you can try out Arduino with little investment. You don’t have to know in advance whether it will do what you want, or even know exactly what you want. You can experiment and find out without risking a lot of money. An Arduino board is cheap enough that you wouldn’t feel bad breaking it, burning it up, or leaving it behind embedded in a project. You wouldn’t do that with an iPhone or a PC, but you can do it with Arduino.
Arduino shares its design files for the board layout as well as its parts list so that anyone else could replicate it under a Creative Commons share-alike license. It allows others, even companies, to create their own boards using the same design or to modify it. However, the Arduino team trademarked the name Arduino. This means that anyone can clone the Arduino, but they can’t call it Arduino. Massimo distinguishes between clones and counterfeits, the latter being boards that appear to be Arduino boards using the name and logo but are not actually authorized by the team.
Massimo’s five-member team agreed to jointly own the trademark, which was the basis for a business growing the Arduino ecosystem. In 2015, Gianluca Martino broke from the group, claiming he owned trademark rights to Arduino in Italy and the United States, and sold those rights to investors. It has turned into a legal battle that is still not resolved, and unfortunately it has caused confusion in the community about what Arduino means. Massimo has begun releasing boards under the Genuino name in countries like the United States where the ownership of the Arduino trademark is in dispute.
There are three kinds of personal fabrication machines that are almost always found in fab labs and makerspaces: laser cutters, CNC cutters, and 3-D printers. These digitally driven machines provide new ways to make things but also encourage new people to become makers. Manufacturing gets personal when you can do it on the desktop, not just in a factory.
I’ve heard makers say that 3-D printers get people to come to a makerspace, but it’s the laser cutter that keeps them coming back. A laser cutter is a 2-D cutting machine that uses a laser to cut through materials, typically wood but also cardboard and textiles. The laser actually burns through the material, just as you can use a magnifying glass to direct the rays of the sun to burn a piece of paper. The focused laser beam is digitally controlled to follow a path for cutting or engraving. Anything that you can draw as a 2-D image or pattern on a computer can be sent to the laser cutter. Relative to 3-D printers and CNC machines, laser cutters are much easier to learn and use productively—that’s why people come back. The only real drawback to laser cutters has been their price.
Dan Shapiro thought he could build a laser cutter that was considerably cheaper but just as capable as more expensive machines. Dan is as high-energy as the lasers in his machine, and he lights up instantly when talking about Glowforge. “This is a device I have been craving for years,” he said. “It has all kinds of superpowers—the brain lives in the cloud; it has a bunch of on-board sensors, and a CO2 laser—all in a desktop form factor.” The target price for Glowforge is about $4,000, while other laser cutters range from four to ten times that price. When Dan offered a presale price of fifty percent off, he raised over $20 million, demonstrating huge demand for this kind of machine.
A former Microsoft employee still living in Seattle, Dan sees the desktop laser cutter, or 3-D laser printer, as he likes to call it, as a creative tool with many more uses than 3-D printers. He sees crafters using it for leather or textiles. It’s possible to draw on fabric and have the machine detect the pattern and follow it for engraving or cutting. This is because Glowforge does a 2-D and 3-D scan of the material and can recognize a drawing. The same design could be applied to paper, wood, or cardboard.
There have been several different attempts to develop an open-source laser cutter. One was called Lasersaur, a large-scale laser cutter from Addie Wagenknecht and Stefan Hechenberger of Nortd Labs in New York City. Another was the Risha project, a portable laser cutter designed by Moushira Elamrawy from Alexandria, Egypt. Dan was able to garner more resources to design and build his machine. “The open-source projects use off-the-shelf components such as lasers and a power supply,” he said while at Glowforge, they have designed many of their own components. Dan has been able to hire engineers with a lot of experience to help keep the price point low but also design for safety. “Glowforge is as safe as a DVD player,” said Dan, who adds that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has to approve any device with a laser, and “no laser light can escape the device.” It’s almost like a kitchen appliance. When you open the top of the laser cutter, the laser stops immediately. It’s perfect for school and library makerspaces.
Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, said he is really impressed by Glowforge. “We need better machine tools, machines that are smarter,” he said, adding that machines need to have a feedback loop and be able to “close the loop.” He means that machines should be able to recognize a problem when it happens and begin trying to solve it for you. For instance, a 3-D printer doesn’t know that a print job is failing, and it keeps on printing. A person must intervene and stop the print job. Carl thinks that today’s machine tools require that the user be an expert to solve problems, but users shouldn’t have to be experts. “We need machine learning for machines,” he said.
When I was looking through online applications for the first Maker Faire in 2006, one that caught my eye was from an Oakland couple who said they had a CNC machine in their dining room. CNC stands for computer numerically controlled. In short, it’s a type of cutting machine that is controlled by a set of computer-generated instructions rather than manually. Jeffrey McGrew and Jillian Northrup, an architect and a graphic designer, were using a ShopBot CNC machine to run a design-and-build custom furniture studio that they called Because We Can. Once they were accepted as exhibitors at Maker Faire, they wrote ShopBot asking if the company would be willing to send a CNC machine to the event. Even though ShopBot couldn’t have known much about Maker Faire, they said yes, and Jeffrey and Jillian’s booth had a full-size CNC machine in operation during our very first Maker Faire.
In 2007 I went to visit Ted Hall and his team at ShopBot in Durham, North Carolina. Ted was a professor of neuroscience at Duke University who said that his “hobby has always been wanting to build boats—backyard, plywood boats.” He paused thoughtfully and rubbed his reddish beard. “Not that I have finished any yet,” he added, with a self-deprecating laugh.
Ted set out to make a wooden boat but got so sidetracked by building the tools needed to make the boat that he never accomplished the original goal. Ted has an unfinished boat sitting in the rafters of his garage, yet he has a fifty-person company that sells several different models of CNC machine: ShopBot. The company grew out of his efforts to build a machine that could interpret instructions from a computer design model and guide a robotic tool’s cutting path. As he explained, it is not just that a CNC—sometimes called a CNC router or a CNC cutter—automates what a woodworker might do manually; it allows you to make shapes that would be very difficult to create otherwise.
It occurred to me that you could make much more attractive plywood boats using CAD [computer-aided design] software than anyone had been able to do in the past. My starting point for getting into plywood boat building was to create some software. So I created an add-in for a DOS CAD program. What it was able to do was to allow you to sculpt with plywood and not have it end up looking like a shoebox. With plywood, you would bend it and then cut it where it ended on something square, but the curve of it really wants to take a different shape.
I didn’t quite understand what he was saying until I looked more closely at boats and how they are built. The sides of a boat have to curve in order to come together as a joint at the prow. He asked me if I knew the term developable surfaces. I did not. He explained,
Developable surfaces are the form that sheet material such as plywood takes when you bend it. Most 3-D modeling programs work on the idea that you can infinitely manipulate 3-D surfaces. But you can’t form a sheet of paper into a globe. You’ve got to slice it and bend it. Those are developable surfaces. You need software to model those surfaces because it’s so difficult to do with traditional drafting techniques. Then, once you have represented the curved surface, you need to make it flat again, which will give you the lines to cut in the actual plywood. If you glue them together along those lines, then the object takes the 3-D form that you designed it for. It’s a lot of geometry.
Ted started to build his first boat, an eight-foot rowboat. He was printing out sheets from a printer, taping them to the wood, taking a saw, and cutting the outlines. “Why am I cutting this by hand?” he thought.
I went around North Carolina looking for a used, beat-up CNC machine. Back then, they cost $30,000 to $40,000 for one that I could never make work anyway. Now, what I should have done is bought one, and I would have saved myself a whole lot of misery. But instead I figured: I can make one of these. CNC machines were driven by stepper motors, and I had a lot of experience running stepper motors in my science career. One of the things we did a lot in the lab was use a stepper motor to drive an infusion pump: basically using a motor to cause a pump to inject something into a rat’s brain or its stomach.
It turned out, however, that the motor wasn’t the hard part. “What’s hard is having a mechanical system that’s rigid enough to do what you want to do and still be affordable.” A CNC requires precision to do its job by moving one location to another. Vibrations might cause the material or the cutting tool to move out of alignment. It is a harder problem than Ted imagined. After ten years working on it, he was only now feeling that ShopBot’s mechanical system “was dialed in.”
His first version was a kit. It had instructions, drawings, and a parts list. Customers would have to build the physical machine themselves, and Ted would send them the electronics for the machine. The parts were mostly available at Home Depot. “However, one of the limiting factors was that the machine required thirty patio-door wheels, and usually you can get only about twelve of those at one store,” he said. The demand wasn’t immediate, though: “I figured that if people could have their own CNC machine for a couple hundred bucks, then everyone would want one. It turns out that wasn’t true.” It was still too hard to build one of the machines by yourself, even with a kit.
Ted gradually began supplying more of the parts, but it still required a lot of assembly. “I always saw these machines as for the backyard do-it-yourself guy or for small shops.” He began advertising them through tiny ads in woodworking magazines. “We had a CNC machine that was one-tenth the cost of other machines, so professional woodworking shops were our early adopters. For five years we didn’t sell one that was used more for play, for DIY. So this market said that they’d be happy if it was a quarter of the price of the big guys, but they wanted it put it together, and they needed it to be faster and easier to use.” Ted now sees ShopBot as a low-end disrupter of much larger industrial companies who sell CNC machines.
Ted talks about the challenge of selling a computer-based woodworking tool to woodworkers who have little experience with computers. Often they had a sense of losing control, rather than gaining control. Makers tend to be the opposite: they understand computers, but they don’t know woodworking as well. ShopBots can now be found in almost every Fab Lab, TechShop, and many larger makerspaces.
Hall’s unfinished boat is still waiting for him in the barn. Meanwhile, customers like Because We Can are using ShopBots to build custom office furniture installations, such as the one with a Captain Nemo theme that they designed and built for a game development company in San Francisco. Jeffrey and Jillian eventually moved the CNC out of their living space and into a warehouse in Oakland.
It seems like magic: in 3-D printing, a digital file leads to the creation of a physical object. The essence of 3-D printing is that a computer can “slice” a 3-D image into a stack of 2-D layers, and a machine builds the object by adding one layer on another; thus 3-D printers have come to be called “additive” manufacturing, which forced CNC to be considered, awkwardly, “subtractive” manufacturing. It can be mesmerizing to watch a 3-D printer “robot” in action, but it is also tediously slow, taking anywhere from one to six hours to build objects any larger than the palm of your hand.
The first patent for 3-D printing dates to 1980s, around the same time that the laser printer was patented by Xerox PARC. Charles Hull was the inventor of a prototyping process to make three-dimensional objects out of plastic. In an interview at Maker Faire in 2013, Charles told me about the problem he was trying to solve back in those days: “It took six weeks to several months once you had a design to get a plastic part, and then typically it was wrong and you had to do it over.” He was working for a company in Southern California, and he told the owner that he thought he could build a machine to solve the problem.
“I was enthused about it, but the owner wasn’t,” he said. “He finally agreed that if I would do the work on my spare time, he’d give me a lab in the back. Which is what I did. I spent lots of evenings and weekends in this lab, making a lot of stuff that didn’t work.” Eventually, he had a working prototype of a three-axis machine that directed an ultraviolet light to harden a plastic coating, dot by dot, building up an object layer by layer.
Charles also came up with STL file format, which were the set of instructions that operated the machine. In his prototype, Charles originally wrote instructions line by line to tell the machine how to make the object, which was tedious. He understood that CAD programs could be designed to generate the STL file for a design, which could be exported for the 3-D printer.
He got the patent in 1986 and founded 3-D Systems that year. The first customers for 3-D printing were large companies: automotive, health care, and aerospace. “The early technology wasn’t very good.” However, the early beta customers provided valuable feedback and funded development so that “we quickly developed really solid equipment.”
The early printers were large, expensive, and required technical expertise to operate. So 3-D printing was confined to large manufacturers and few industrial design shops that had applications that justified the cost of the machine. There was no consumer market for 3-D printing, although Charles said it had been a hope of his. Industrial 3-D printers might be compared to mainframe computers: it took nearly twenty years for the analogous “personal computer” for 3-D printing to emerge by radically reducing its size, complexity, and cost.
The first efforts to build a 3-D printer for the rest of us was an open-source project called RepRap, short for replicating rapid prototype. The project was founded in 2005 by Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. Its goal was to design self-replicating machines, meaning machines that could build themselves. By 2007 the first version of a RepRap machine, called Darwin, was released and slowly gave birth to a hobbyist community of RepRap builders. As an open-source project, RepRap builders shared ideas and designs freely. RepRap gets credit for creating the foundation on which most consumer 3-D printers were built. The trouble with RepRap was that building a working machine was just plain hard to do, yet it did not deter the enthusiasts.
The promise of an open-source 3-D printer that was affordable and easy to build captivated the makers who tried to build RepRap models. Most didn’t really know why they wanted a 3-D printer and what they would actually do with it. They were willing to be pioneers and do the hard work so that they could have access to one and then figure out what it could do for them. That kind of spirit led to the founding of MakerBot by Zach “Hoeken” Smith, Adam Mayer, and Bre Pettis, who had met at NYC Resistor, a Brooklyn-based hackerspace. Zach had built a RepRap model and believed strongly in open source while also seeing an opportunity to create a commercial 3-D printer that was accessible to more people. He teamed up with Bre, a former middle school teacher of art who joined Make: magazine to create “Weekend Project” videos and developed a strong following. It seemed like a perfect recipe for success. Bre saw himself as Steve Jobs, the promotor, while Zach was the Steve Wozniak, the technical wizard behind the scenes. By 2010, Bre was on the cover of Make: volume 21, holding MakerBot’s first product, the CupCake 3-D printer, which was sold as a kit. MakerBot took off, and it both created and stood to capitalize on the emerging 3-D printer market; 3-D printing became red hot.
In the race to bring 3-D printing to the masses, MakerBot was the hare and Printrbot was the tortoise, and there were lots of tortoises. Brook Drumm and Printrbot could be viewed as an also-ran or a winner in the long-run. Time will tell, but he’s still going along at his own pace.
Brook grew up the son of a pastor, living on a farm in northwest Ohio near an Amish community. “I am made to take things apart, understand how they work, and put them back together,” said Brook. “I was made by God to be a maker.” He recalls that the house he grew up in was centered around the kitchen table, which was handmade by his father. The family dinners were “raucous.”
Brook, who is bald and wears the long goatee of a biblical character, has pretty strong convictions. He intended to follow in his father’s footsteps, so he went to a Bible college in Kansas and became a minister. He took a job in the Sacramento area to work for a mega-church where a classmate had also landed. Brook was in charge of the multimedia systems in the church: multimedia shows for Sunday services were a pretty big attraction. Then, unexpectedly, the church laid him off and he wasn’t sure what he would do.
As he was thinking about what he would do next, he came across the issue of Make: with Bre Pettis of MakerBot on the cover. As he looked at it, he thought Bre had just shown him that anyone could do this, that he could build a 3-D printer himself. “I saved for six months and bought a MakerBot Cupcake Kit for $799,” said Brook. He had to advance himself $200 from his credit card, which he did without telling his wife, Margie. He built the kit on his kitchen table. He taught his son, who was six, to solder.
Perhaps the most important thing Brook realized was that there were others out there just like him. He organized the first 3-D printer meetup in the small town of Roseville, California, calling it the NorCal RepRap and MakerBot Builders Group. He brought his eldest daughter along, partially so that he’d have company if no one showed up. He also wanted her there so that she could see “the start of something from nothing,” if indeed he was successful at starting something. Brook recalled that it was just the two of them for a while, and he wasn’t sure anyone was going to come. Then two people showed up and he felt relief, especially because both of them were compelling. One was a crafty old-time programmer who had worked in a language called Forth that Drumm had never heard of. The other was a transgendered woman named Stephanie who worked at Intel and knew about designing electronics.
At subsequent meetings the group grew to about sixty. “If I could attract sixty people in Roseville who are interested in 3-D printing,” said Brook, “then what about the rest of the world?” He had a fourteen-year-old boy show up who was also building a Cupcake 3-D printer. A woman who called herself a prostheticist came to a meeting because her job was to make “eyes, ears, and noses” and she thought 3-D printers might be useful for that. “At one meeting, I asked how many people wanted to build a 3-D printer for $800 and nobody raised their hand,” Brook said. “So I lowered the price to $600 and still nobody raised their hand.” He then asked how many people wanted a 3-D printer, and everybody raised their hand. “That’s when I knew that price was really important.” He began to see his opportunity.
Brook decided for a future meeting that he would order parts for ten RepRap 3-D printers and just get people building them. He put that on his credit card, again without telling his wife. He had gotten some work doing Web development, but he didn’t have money to spend freely. He bartered a trade with an auto-body shop in which he did their website and they allowed him to use a conference room once a month for his meetings, which would now involve the actual building of 3-D printers. He neglected his family, working on designs in the garage for eight months. He taught his wife how to do coding for the Web so that she could take on his development work and he could focus on 3-D printers.
“My wife didn’t want to be talking 3-D printers all the time.” She told him to move the 3-D printer, which was now running from the top of the washing machine, to the garage. She had grown tired of hearing it running all the time.
In what he calls his “aha” moment, he was sitting out in the backyard, trying to get some air and take a break from this new obsession. It was 2 a.m. He had an idea for a new design for a 3-D printer that would simplify it and possibly reduce the cost in half. The new design would open up the machine because it was no longer enclosed in a box. The bed moves back and forth on bars; it was no longer stationary.
The next day, Brook went to a Lowe’s Home Improvement store. “I didn’t have money to spend,” he recalls. “I was looking in the reject bin and I found a four-by-four post, a piece of wood you’d use for a fence post. It cost me $2.” He brought it home and drilled two holes for a Y-axis and two more for a Z-axis. It was enough for him to know that his new design would be stable. He ordered additional parts, and soon had a prototype. He brought it to the 3-D printer group in Roseville. “When they first looked at it, they said it wouldn’t work, but then they tried it, and it did work.” He convinced six people in the group to help him build ten more of his design. Stephanie, the Intel engineer, looked at his electronics and said that she could do something a lot better, and did.
Given that he had a working prototype, Brook decided to raise money on Kickstarter, launching a campaign in November 2011. In the campaign he promised “to simply do my best to make the most incredible little 3-D printer ever.” He said it’s a 3-D printer that a kid could put together. His goal was to raise $50,000 to build and deliver fifty machines. In eleven hours, he met that goal. His campaign exceeded his expectations, raising $831,000 in one month. He was thrilled that people trusted him.
However, it was not all good news. First, Kickstarter took its cut and so he got $750,000 in his bank account. Next he learned that because he was not incorporated, the amount he raised would be taxed as income. He would have to write a check for $333,000 in several months to the IRS. “I will always remember that number because it was such a shocker,” he said. He also now had to deliver over 1,100 Printrbots, far exceeding the number fifty that he had felt comfortable that he could do.
Brook wrote to his backers that he now had to move production out of his garage and into a rented warehouse. It was in the brick-walled basement of an old train stop, beneath an Old Towne Pizza. The first thing he did in the space was build a table with a few people he recruited from the group to work with him. The table would be the central feature of the office, just as his father’s kitchen table was the center of his home.
As he worked on producing the first batch of machines, he created videos to show their progress to his Kickstarter backers, but this didn’t satisfy many people, who were expecting immediate delivery of a machine. Malicious rumors were spread that Brook had skipped town with the money and now was in Mexico. “I thought I was thick-skinned, but the whole experience made me thin-skinned,” he said. Margie bore the brunt of it, trying to help answer questions. “It crushed her,” said Brook. “People can be so mean.” Printrbot began shipping units to its Kickstarter backers in August 2012. “Nine months. Not too bad compared to some other Kickstarters.”
Many people he had met through the meetup group came to work for him, as well as two sons of the pastor who had let him go from the Sacramento church. One of the group’s best and brightest, Karl, an HP scientist and engineer, was making the “hot ends” or extruders for Printrbot. “He’s probably made more hot ends than anyone, over sixty thousand.” Brook has never visited the place where Karl makes the hot ends, but he knows that Karl has a workshop on his farm where he raises bees and llamas.
Brook opened a Printrbot store and began taking orders. He sold $200,000 worth of printers in the first month. Then PayPal decided that Printrbot must be defrauding customers, and they seized his funds. Brook needed the money to build the machines and pay his employees. For months, he argued with PayPal. One person there became his nemesis. “I put up a web cam just to show him what we were doing.” It took months, but eventually he got the money.
Brook stayed in the basement space for a year before moving to a warehouse near the municipal airport in Lincoln, California. It is flat and barren country, hot in the summer. On a Friday afternoon when I visited in 2013, there were six people working there, including Brook. It is a rough space. There is no air-conditioning for summer, no heating for winter. Yet it is a full-fledged manufacturing facility with three large laser cutters doing most of the work. They have one person running those jobs, another one assembling and testing, and a third doing shipping. I met Caleb, a seventeen-year-old who does a lot of the development and programming. Brook and Caleb share a small office where it is quiet.
Brook has not raised any venture capital. He has funded his own development out of cash flow. He remains a leader at offering a reliable product with reasonable performance at a low price, about one-quarter the price of a MakerBot. Once he visited a Sand Hill venture capitalist to whom I introduced him, just to explore the possibility. In a large conference room, the VC began the meeting: “Tell me, Mr. Drumm, what is your superpower?” Put off by the question, Drumm didn’t really have an answer. At the end of their meeting, the VC said: “I know what your superpowers are, Brook. First, you are good at identifying talent and getting good people. Second, you are obsessed with product design.” Brook got something out of the meeting, and it wasn’t financing, but he was happy to get back to his humble warehouse.
In 2014, MakerBot was acquired for $604 million.4 I asked Brook what he thought about MakerBot’s acquisition. He said he found it both scary and motivating. He sees it as an opportunity for him. Brook has fully embraced open source and the community in the same ways that MakerBot once did. He said he’s learning from Bre and MakerBot about what to do and not to do. Brook met Bre once, at Maker Faire New York. Bre said to him, “Hey, I saw your printer.” And then added: “One thing, though, you aren’t charging enough for it.” Brook said he was really nervous, but wished he had said in return, “I think you’re charging too much.”
He’s had the lowest-price product on the market and feels that his product quality was high. Over four years, he has grown to $8.5 million in revenue. While a small operation, he and his team are doing quite a lot, and they’re very innovative. Mostly recently, Brook released a new kind of CNC machine that he calls Crawlbot.
Brook is representative of a set of small-scale makers of 3-D printers, like Diego Porqueras of Bukobot in Pasadena, California, or Rick Pollack of MakerGear outside Cleveland. Like them, he is at a crucial point in time when he must make key decisions about how to grow and compete. Brook has conviction that he should stay focused on what he can do.
Most objects created on a personal 3-D printer are made of plastic. At the industrial level, however, there are a wide range of materials available, including metals. An artist could perfect a prototype sculpture using plastic in her own studio, then send out the model to a service such as Shapeways that could print it in solid gold.
A prototyping revolution that is making rapid development and iteration possible for all kinds of products is being led by 3-D printing. Physical prototypes can be tested in the physical world and handed over to other people to inspect. Rapid iteration means that you can improve a design before committing to its manufacture. Not only is prototyping cheaper, but also more people are able to afford to do it. We are just beginning to find out what these new capabilities mean, for applications that range from toys to medicine, musical instruments to houses.
It’s not just the tools that are revolutionizing the process of making. Today, makers have access to online platforms like Instructables, which I described in chapter 3, as well as Thingiverse and YouTube, all of which offer blueprints, designs, or step-by-step instructions for how to do and make all kinds of things. On top of that, makers everywhere have access to a set of resources for finding investments and funding, on the one hand, and for selling their finished product on the other.
In many cities, particularly around the holidays, craft fairs and maker’s markets have sprung up, taking their cue from farmers' markets. A farmers' market serves a local community of food producers and a broader community of people whose interest in fresh local food helps to support those producers. The producer can have a direct relationship with customers, who value the personal interaction. The lesson of farmers' markets is that they have become an informal gathering place for the community.
In Milwaukee, there is a Maker Market on the first Sunday of the month in a parking lot next to a coffee shop. Its website says: “These Sundays have come to support a rotating cast of talented artists, crafters, makers, and designers from Milwaukee and beyond, selling everything you can imagine two hands being able to create—from soy candles and small batch, hand-mixed beauty products to one-of-a-kind clothing and jewelry.”
Then there’s Etsy, which was launched the same year as Make: magazine as an online platform for selling handmade goods. It has all the features of a craft fair, except that anybody from anywhere can visit. A buyer can feel that the transaction is taking place directly with the producer, and that items that are in limited supply are seen as more valuable.
Rob Kalin and a team of two or three people designed and built the site. I met Rob in 2003 while the site was in development. He saw an opportunity to create a market for handmade goods that you would never find at Walmart or Amazon. Investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures (USV) said that Rob once told him, “I’m an artist. Making websites is my medium right now.”5 Wilson and USV were among the original investors in Etsy. Rob was intense and idealistic about Etsy and its community. He was the right person to get it started. He was first CEO, then chief creative officer, then left the company, came back as CEO, but was eventually fired.
Executive coach Pam Klainer tells the story of Rob giving a talk on entrepreneurship at a New York business school:
He was introduced by an exceptionally dry and dull professor who read an exceptionally dry and dull definition of entrepreneurship. Rob took the microphone, waved his hands in the air, and said something like, “No, no, it isn’t that. It’s having a passion for an idea and making it into something you could never have imagined when you started.”6
For buyers, Etsy is an endless row of boutique shops where one-of-a-kind craft and creativity shine; for sellers, it is an easy-to-use platform to list inventory, take sales, calculate taxes, and streamline other tasks related to entrepreneurship—with a built-in audience of millions. Through Etsy, makers can reach a market that might not be available locally.
Two-thirds of Etsy sellers are women who use their shop to supplement their income. Many are starting a business on the side, and it is work they can do from home. Making one’s first sale can be a magical moment. An Etsy store can provide powerful feedback and encouragement. The lessons of entrepreneurship and running a business can be learned with a rather low level of investment. For some, the success they have on Etsy can lead to opportunities elsewhere, which might involve setting up physical storefronts or licensing products to manufacturers.
Etsy’s blog editor Michelle Traub said about the community:
The key to success on Etsy is telling your story. Nineteen million shoppers from around the world come to this marketplace, inspired by a fundamental desire for objects with meaning. Our community has turned away from anonymity to have a conversation at the farmers market, discover the history of a vintage find, or buy directly from a maker.7
For years, Etsy required that its sellers produce their goods by hand, or sell used second-hand items they curated. This policy fit the production methods used by most crafters, but makers who used a variety of machines to make things couldn’t use Etsy to sell. Also, once a seller became popular on Etsy, it could be difficult for her to keep up with demand making everything by hand. In 2013, Etsy changed their policy to allow sellers to produce goods made by machines in a factory. Located in Brooklyn, New York, Etsy went public in 2015 with a valuation of $1.8 billion. At that time, they had fifty million members and its platform facilitated $1.93 billion in transactions.
In many ways, Kickstarter, which is known as the top crowd-funding site, is also a marketplace, although its language shifts from sellers and buyers to creators and backers. On Kickstarter, makers can share their product idea and seek backers to fund it before actually having built the product. Kickstarter requires them to show a working prototype, as some way of ensuring that the person’s idea is real. Kickstarter is, in effect, a form of pre-selling, which means taking orders before you have the product. Kickstarter has resisted this idea, and its founders wrote a blog post in 2012 titled “Kickstarter Is Not a Store.” Other crowd-funding sites like Indiegogo and Crowd Supply have proven to be viable alternatives as well.
Kickstarter works surprisingly well for makers, allowing them to test out whether there is a market for a new product. It’s an effective way to launch a new product before it is actually available for sale. Of the makers who exhibited at the 2014 Maker Faire Bay Area, 123 of them had used Kickstarter and collectively raised over $23 million. That includes makers like Lisa Qiu Fetterman, creator of the Nomiku sous-vide cooker, who were able to use Kickstarter not just to get funds for the development of a product but also help to create a market for it.
Taken together, all of these innovations create a vibrant ecosystem in which the way things are made has fundamentally changed. With access to this ecosystem, anyone can take an idea and prototype it, get feedback on it online from a global community of experts, then tweak it and prototype it again, over the space of a week or a month.