One of the most profound experiences any of us can have is to act on an idea, turn it into something real, and share it. It can be called the act of creation or invention, inspired by our experiences and our imagination and informed by our knowledge and skills. The process of realizing an idea and making it tangible is what defines a maker.
Our own experience as a creator, a maker, a producer can change the world in small but significant ways, and we may not realize it at the time. It can also profoundly change how we think about ourselves, and that kind of change may be the most profound. We develop a sense that our ideas matter, that they can impact us and the world around us. The impact may simply be that we get a person to laugh with us, but that counts for a lot.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the creative state of mind in which we “want to pursue whatever (we) are doing for its own sake” as “flow.”1 Being in that state is an optimal experience; it makes us happy. That’s why the process of making is its own reward, and that’s why it is so personal.
As makers, we enjoy repeatedly experiencing this creative process. By taking our own ideas seriously, sharing them with others, and developing them, we give our life meaning and purpose. We have a sense of being in control and having the freedom to choose what to do, and to do things without fear of failure or judgment. We gain confidence.
Engaging in this process develops the maker mindset. When I talk about the maker mindset, I mean all the intangibles that come as a result of the very tangible experiences of making. Makers acquire this mindset through the practice of making. It’s not necessarily intentionally sought out on its own—it develops with experience.
What are the qualities of the maker mindset? Makers are active, engaged, playful, and resourceful. They have a well-developed sense of curiosity and wonder. Makers are self-directed learners, able to figure out one way or another how to learn what they need to know. They learn to use tools and technology to create new things. They are willing to take risks, trying to do something that others have not done or creating something that they have not seen before. They are persistent, overcoming frustration, and resilient, trying again when they experience failure. Makers are resourceful, developing the ability to make do with what is available or exploring alternatives that might be cheaper or better for the environment. Makers are good at improvising: they are able to do things that have no instructions. Makers are generally open and generous, willing to share their work and their expertise, often helping others in the recognition that they have benefited themselves from such help. Makers believe in their own individual agency to act and create change in their own lives and their community.
I meet makers who have widely different interests or live in very different places and work under different conditions, yet they share the same mindset. Having this mindset in common allows makers to connect easily with each other as though they had known each other for a long time. This mindset opens doors to new opportunities for personal and social development.
Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychology professor, wrote a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Dweck’s twenty years of research show that “the view that you adopt for yourself affects the way you lead your life.”2 It seems obvious, but how aware is each of us of the mindset that we have and whether, in any meaningful sense, we adopted it? Can you remember the moment when you adopted your mindset? I suspect many of us think that our mindset was something we had from birth, just like our appearance and personality. Dweck implies that a mindset is trained: while genes undoubtedly play a role, they are only a starting point. We can think of a mindset as something that “you can cultivate through your efforts.”3 We aren’t stamped at birth with a mindset; yet what we believe about ourselves changes how we live our life.
Dweck distinguishes between fixed and growth mindsets. A fixed mindset reflects the belief that one’s capabilities have already been determined, and developing new abilities is not possible. A growth mindset reflects the belief that one’s capabilities can be developed, improved, and expanded. When asked to try something new outside his or her comfort zone, a person with a fixed mindset is more likely to decline, thinking that there’s only downside and nothing to be gained. People with a growth mindset are more likely to embrace the opportunity readily, without thinking about whether or not they will be successful. People with these different mindsets exhibit different attitudes toward risk and potential failure.
Dweck points out that many people who excel academically in school have a fixed mindset, which limits them to exploring only the areas for which they believe they have an aptitude. Said another way, they stick to doing what they’ve been told they are good at. Particularly in the past, a fixed mindset, through its very limitations and predictability, was often a path to success. However, it’s a not a path that leads to creativity or innovation. A growth mindset supports the belief that we can develop and change, especially by learning new things.
In a world that grows more interconnected and interdisciplinary every day, a growth is a fundamental advantage for us to adapt to change, if not become an agent of change. Moreover, a growth mindset predisposes us to believing that our own actions matter and that we can change the world instead of accepting the status quo.
The maker mindset is an expression of the growth mindset that is evident in a maker’s willingness to learn new tools and methods as well as experiment without certainty of success. Because of this mindset, makers are optimistic about what they can do. I see it and feel it present in makers at a Maker Faire—and it comes from people who are fully engaged, doing something they love to do, and believing that what they do is worth sharing.
Is there something special about making and using our hands that might support the development of this kind of mindset? Kelly Lambert, a professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College who runs a behavioral neuroscience lab, began exploring hands-on activities as way of relieving the symptoms of depression. Lambert wrote about her research in the book, Lifting Depression. She sent me a copy after seeing me on CNN.
Her interest in depression began following her mother’s death with her own sadness and depression. After weeks of feeling that none of her “efforts made any difference in the world,” she found relief in vacuuming her house, something she normally did not like to do. The physical work made her feel better. “Each time I saw tangible evidence of the dirt and grime I’d physically removed from my house, I felt my efforts were valuable.” It gave her a sense of control over her environment. That experience led Lambert to explore the neuroscience behind depression in her lab, as well as the correlation between hands-on work and how we feel about ourselves.
What I’ve discovered is that there’s a critical link between the symptoms of depression and key areas of the brain involved with motivation, pleasure, movement, and thought. Because these brain areas communicate back and forth, they are considered a circuit, one of many in our brains. In fact, the rich interactions along this particular brain circuit, which I called the effort-driven rewards circuit, provide us with surprising insights into how depression is both activated and alleviated.4
I love that she calls it a circuit, something makers can understand. When all the parts are linked together properly, there’s a flow of energy through this circuit. We feel engaged by our actions, alive in our minds, and interact easily with others. Our brain is giving us positive feedback that is a result of our effort. When the circuit is disengaged, we feel blue, as though it wouldn’t matter what we do. Lambert writes:
What revs up the crucial effort-driven rewards circuit, the fuel, is generated by doing certain types of physical activities, especially ones that involve your hands. It’s important that these actions produce a result you can see, feel, and touch, such as knitting a sweater or tending a garden. Such actions and their associated thoughts, plans, and ultimate results change the physiology and chemical makeup of the effort-driven rewards circuit in an energized way. I call the emotional sense of well-being that results effort-driven rewards.5
Lambert can’t emphasize enough how central the hands are to this circuit. “Our hands are so important that moving them activates larger areas of the brain’s central cortex than moving much larger parts of our bodies, such as our back or even our legs.” Our hands are uniquely connected to our brain, and hand movements are “the most effective way to kick-start the circuit in to gear.” This runs counter to our usual separation of manual and mental labor, of physical and mental, of hand and mind. What if the phrase “hands-on” were to be associated in our minds with a heightened mental state? We know of people who talk with their hands, but makers are people who think and communicate with their hands.
The harder the work, the more rewarding it is. It is a fine line: if it too easy, there is little reward. Yet if it is too difficult, we will just give up. Experiments that Lambert did in her lab with rats led her to the conclusion that persistence can be learned. It may be that the sustained effort is what matters, not simply exertion. Prolonged efforts to make things are deep experiences that not only activate our brain, but change it, initiating growth, creating new connections. Actions that we see as meaningful “likely stimulates neurogenesis—the production of new brain cells,”6 writes Lambert. We are changing our minds as we change the physical world around us.
The symptoms that Lambert associates with depression—loss of meaning, loss of pleasure, sluggishness, poor concentration, slow motor responses—might be considered the opposite of the maker mindset: purpose, joy, engagement, focus and flow, and resilience. The maker mindset could be the product of repeatedly engaging the effort-driven rewards circuit with activities that use our hands as well as our brain. If you enjoy making, you’ll do more of it—your brain tells you it wants more. Our bodies and our minds like to play well together.
Lambert thinks that the rise of depression in our culture could be tied to “effortless-driven rewards,” a consumer culture that provides rewards with greater and greater convenience so that there’s little physical or mental work associated with getting them. It’s what fast food is: the “reward” is a bunch of calories that cost us little money and little time or effort. We take less pleasure in the food than we might have had we spent the time preparing it. Lambert cites additional research that shows that if the effort-driven rewards circuit is disrupted, instead of giving full effort for maximum reward, we can learn to settle for a smaller reward that requires less effort. We become complacent.
In my view, the effort-driven rewards circuit gives us a model for understanding how making in itself produces the kind of physical and mental well-being that we find in the maker mindset—why making makes us feel good.
If I had to give a prescription for the maker mindset, I might say: “Be more playful.” It really doesn’t matter what you choose to make or how good you are at doing it. What matters most is jumping in and enjoying the experience. This is the practice. The more it feels like play, the more you’ll enjoy it.
With Make: magazine, I had an insight that adults needed to play and rediscover hobbies and passion projects. I saw that makers liked to play, whether they used that word to describe it or not. Perhaps it was enough to realize that the problem at hand had their full attention and everything else fell away. Makers didn’t consider what they were doing to be work, and they didn’t necessarily know where it might lead them.
Perhaps the most important thing for adults is that play can be entirely under your own control. You do what you want to do. There are no committees that have to decide, no hierarchy to navigate for approval, no external conditions placed on your own interests. Control is in your own hands.
I like to call what makers do “experimental play,” as John Dewey, the educational philosopher, uses the term, meaning that we are testing what we understand and what we can do. Experimental play creates a context for us where it is safe to try things: the stakes are low, judgments are withheld, and there’s no prescribed goal or outcome.
Yet my sense from seeing so many tech enthusiasts at play is that it has an additional benefit. Experimental play created the conditions for innovation. That is, the immersion in a set of problems or a set of tools gives rise to new insights that can lead to unexpected solutions and unplanned products. Innovation can emerge from our own set of experiences. If makers did not play with drawbots and broken 3-D printers, they would not have immersed themselves sufficiently to have new ideas about how they could be improved. Through play, makers can see what’s missing, what doesn’t work as it should, what was poorly designed and needs to be completely rethought. A maker might make the assertion: “I can do better.”
In his book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, psychiatrist Stuart Brown declares “Play lies at the core of creativity and innovation.”7 Brown tells the story of how Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) realized that, although they were hiring the best and brightest college graduates, they were the wrong kind of people to create the solutions they needed. Something had changed in the people who came to work there:
The JPL managers went back to look at their own retiring engineers and … found that in their youth, their older, problem-solving employees had taken apart clocks to see how they worked, or made soapbox derby racers, or built hi-fi stereos, or fixed appliances. The young engineering school graduates who had also done these things, who had played with their hands, were adept at the kinds of problem-solving that management sought. Those who hadn’t, generally were not. From that point on, JPL made questions about applicants “youthful projects and play” a standard part of job interviews.8
We might say that JPL realized it was looking for a mindset, and this mindset seemed to develop not in school but through “youthful projects and play.” Just having a degree doesn’t guarantee that you have the right mindset.
Brown, like Lambert, makes the case that play reshapes our brain. “Play is nature’s greatest tool for creating new neural networks and for reconciling cognitive difficulties. The abilities to make new patterns, find the unusual among the common, and spark curiosity and alert observation are all fostered.”9 Both Lambert and Brown, as psychologists, might look at the therapeutic value of play for adults, Brown emphasizes that play is essential for our well-being.
Some people will argue that they don’t have the time to play or make. It’s an argument Brown has heard as well. We’re too busy working to play. Yet, creating time for play is also essential to balance our work lives with our own interests. Brown writes that “the opposite of play is not work—the opposite of play is depression.” We need both work and play. Brown notes that they are “mutually supportive,” with play providing “a sense of discovery and liveliness,”10 and work providing us with a sense of purpose and that we are needed by others. In fact, Brown also admits that play and work can merge for us. Often when we are doing our very best work, we feel like we are playing.
In dealing with adults who struggle to have a sense of play, Brown asks them to develop a play history. He asks them to think back to their childhood and recall periods of play, what they were doing, where it took place, and how it made them feel. To adapt the idea from Brown, I think we might also consider composing our own “make history”: recalling experiences of building, creating, designing something from scratch, reflecting on what we were doing and how it made us feel. This can help us recall the very personal connection between making and play, and the satisfaction of creating something new. Rediscover something you enjoyed as a child, a hobby or passion that can be rekindled.
“Now you do it,” said Mister Jalopy to me. It was my turn, and I was a bit hesitant to take it.
Mister Jalopy, a former music industry executive in Los Angeles who now owns a variety store and various laundromats, was giving several of us a welding demonstration. He considers himself a “mediocre welder,” yet he is a “jack-of-all-trades” and seems to able to do anything, just nothing particularly well, he would say. Mister Jalopy explained the welding equipment, a MIG welder, and demonstrated how to put on the helmet, with its auto-darkening mask, along with leathers and thick gloves. He looked really cool. He explained the difference between a good weld and a bad one, and said he had his own record of doing both. Then he said we should each try it ourselves. He warned us: the first time you do it, you might find it hard to lay down a bead. First, he showed us himself. Then he turned to me and said: “Now you do it.”
Something in my head said I wasn’t ready. I wanted to see others doing it first. I was reluctant to just try it. Mister Jalopy insisted that it was my turn. He handed me the helmet and then I put on the gloves. My heart was racing, and I knew I had to hold the tip of the welder steady. I focused on the tip of the welder, where it was melting the metal, trying to create a continuous line.
“Good,” said Mister Jalopy when I was done. I didn’t necessarily do a good job, but I had done it. It didn’t make me a good welder, but it did demystify welding for me. I had learned to do something that I had never done before, and I was secretly proud of myself, just for trying.
We’ve all experienced it, this moment of truth, when it is our turn to try to do something we haven’t done before. Any number of people could tell us how to do it, but it isn’t until we actually do it that we feel we’ve learned how to do it. It is like first learning to drive a car. We watched other people do it, and then were shown how to do it by a parent or friend. We probably studied a driver’s handbook. But when it was our turn to sit behind the wheel, we actually had to do it. We were responsible for the outcome—we were in control. No matter how much we had rehearsed the procedure in our mind, there was a question about what would happen when we actually did it. This moment can be filled with apprehension and self-examination. What if I don’t do it right? We know what to do, but doing it is another matter. It gives us pause, like standing on a high diving board and looking down at the water. However, this moment of truth demands that we take the leap.
It’s the same experience in learning to use a drill press, a sewing machine, or a band saw. Someone who knows the machine shows us how to use it: how to turn it on, how to prepare the job, and how to follow a process to get something done. Then this person looks at us and says: “Now it’s your turn.” No amount of observing, reading, or thinking quite prepares us for this moment. We don’t really believe what we know until we do it ourselves the first time, and then again. No one is very good at the beginning, but through repeated practice, we get better. This is how we develop agency, the sense of having control.
Makers may not necessarily have formal training or follow the conventions of those who do it professionally. Makers are interdisciplinary, moving across the boundaries of fields, even as amateurs. To paraphrase what Shunryu Suzuki wrote about the beginner’s mind in Zen: In the maker’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.11 Makers are comfortable participating as nonexperts.
Designer Charles Eames said that anyone could become a designer with persistence and time: “Start with a single idea, do 100 iterations of that idea, choose one of those instances, and then iterate 100 times again.”12 His point was that anyone willing to do the work of iterating over an idea would learn everything they need to know about what they were doing and become good at doing it. Iteration is the cycle of repeatedly changing a process or experiment, until better results are yielded or until mastery has been achieved.
Students often learn a formalized design or engineering process, yet I believe it can interfere with them learning from their own experience. Initially, experimenting and improvising—finding one’s own way into and through process—will seem messy, especially if it involves learning to master new techniques or tools. However, by gaining expertise through practice and repetition, we begin to gain a sense of our own personal process, which is valuable when new questions and challenges come along.
We don’t have to get things right from the start. Rapid prototyping means that we can iterate more often, taking advantage of technology that can make it easier and cheaper to build prototypes. Technology can decrease the time between iterations while also increasing the number of iterations overall. We can take a rough idea and build a rough prototype, then iterate—the more the better.
“It’s all about iterations,” Massimo Banzi told me as we talked about how he helped students learn interactive design:
You start with sketches and prototypes. Then you have different fidelities. You might start with cardboard, as an example of a low-fidelity prototype. When you stuff some electronics in there, the prototype starts to behave like the thing you want to design and so this becomes a high-fidelity prototype.
These iterations allow you to try the prototype with people. Since I believe that interaction design is about trying things with people, the more you want to make your product perfect, the more you need to be able to play with the product. This means that the shorter each iteration, the more experiments you can do. The tools that we use are chosen because of their ability to shorten the loop.
Massimo and his team developed Arduino to enable rapid prototyping of projects. This describes an experientially driven design process that I think many makers follow to develop a project. It’s very different than what is taught in many design and engineering schools. The formal process is often taught in a way that a large amount of time is spent planning, developing specifications, and doing research before any attempt is made to build. In this model, ideation is cheaper, and iteration happens by talking over the plan, instead of actually incurring the costs of building the thing. The model that Massimo talks about for interaction design requires getting to a physical representation early, and iterating over it often. That’s a very basic, organic view of design from a maker’s point of view.
Formal models of this process, such as design thinking, which comes from David Kelley and the work of the design firm IDEO, describe a human-centered design process for understanding a problem, focusing on it deeply, then developing new ideas for solutions, building out prototypes and then testing them. The stages can be presented as:
• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test
Design thinking is a representation of the design process that allows us to talk about it. It’s not the process itself. Indeed, the process we experience is not linear and less logical than formal models make it appear.
Gary Donahue, a teacher at an international Pre-K–5 school in South Korea, shared a video with me of his fourth-grade class giving a tour of their makerspace. It begins with a young boy pointing out the elements of the design cycle, consisting of Investigate, Design, Plan, Create, Evaluate. What shines in the video is the children giving a tour of the makerspace and describing the materials available to them. What speaks to me is seeing the students with their creative projects, from robots to windmills to wearables, and their sense of joy and excitement.
Formal teaching can sometimes leave out the joy and excitement, substituting an emphasis on rigor, formulas, and systems that seem like ends in themselves. Typically, engineering students have a lot less choice in what subjects they take and how much time they get to make things. In short, they aren’t encouraged to tinker. Some think it doesn’t reflect well on engineering as a profession to talk about tinkering. In fact, on a visit to the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C., a leader of a group responsible for engineering education in the elementary schools told me that “engineers aren’t makers.” I shook my head, waved a copy of Make: at him, and said that the next generation of engineers are reading this magazine. The guardians of the engineering profession would like us to think of engineers as doctors in lab coats, not the Maytag repairman. They would like kids to aspire to join the engineering profession from an early age. They don’t like people informally calling themselves engineers, without the proper credentials; in fact, there has been an ongoing debate about programmers who call themselves software engineers.
The process of makers might be informal, messy, and organic. It’s a process that includes but overcomes repeated failures, misunderstandings, and kludges. It’s their own process that reflects real life rather than an ideal or model. A maker thinks: if it works for me, it works. If it doesn’t, keep changing it. Also, makers learn from others; they can reflect on their own process, compare it to others, and borrow what they need.
In an interview by William Lidwell in Make: volume 4, the inventor Dean Kamen was asked if he saw himself as more similar to Thomas Edison, whose method was trial-and-error on a large scale, or Nikolai Tesla, who worked out his models in his head before ever building them. Kamen replies:
Unfortunately, I would put myself closer to the Edison end of the continuum: the tinkerer, the get-your-hands-dirty and keep-screwing-with-it-until-you-make-it-work side. I am much more in awe of people like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein than I am of the tinkerers who just kept working with the tools and technology of their day until they got something to work. I am just in awe of those people. I wish I was one of them, but it’s not in the cards. So I work hard to succeed at the other end of the scale.13
Kamen, a successful self-taught inventor and engineer best known for the Segway, considers himself more a tinkerer than in the ranks of scientists who discovered fundamental truths about the world. Yet Kamen is a genius in his own way, as are others who may call themselves tinkerers or engineers, with or without formal training.
Engineering is undervalued in Western culture, especially compared to science, writes Steven L. Goldman, a distinguished professor in the humanities at Lehigh University, in a paper “Why We Need a Philosophy of Engineering.” He writes that engineering is associated “with the probable, the particular, the contextual, and the temporal,” while science is associated with “the necessary, the certain, the universal, the constant, and the timeless.” Placing science on a level above engineering “subordinates practice, values, emotion, and will to theory, value-neutral principles, and deductive logic in ways that leave us ill-equipped to deal rationally with life.”14 I believe the maker mindset reflects a shift in valuing practice over theory and uncertainty over certainty.
Craig Forest and his colleagues at Georgia Tech, who have supported the Invention Studio for students described in chapter 4, writes: “University environments that foster open-ended design-build projects are uncommon.… In standard engineering curricula, students do not generally create or invent anything tangible until the culminating Capstone Design experience.”15 There was a major shift in engineering departments between 1935 and 1965 that moved away from “hands-on, practice-based curricula.” A new curricula was developed that fostered “theory-based approaches with a heavier emphasis on mathematical modeling.”
So universities load up students with textbook knowledge, expecting that they will find some of it useful when they find a job after school, and it is on the job that they will get more specific, more practical training. Yet the National Research Council in 2004 said that the engineer of 2020 must be able to create, invent, and innovate, and schools should do more to help students cultivate these skills. That’s what the Invention Studio does. When companies come looking for summer interns, the students in the Invention Studio are their first choice because they are “doers.”
Perhaps, as Goldman points out, we should understand the ways in which science and mathematics are different from engineering and technology, despite the convenience of an acronym like STEM that packs them all together. “Engineers use mathematical and scientific knowledge to solve their problems,” writes Goldman, “but they do so in ways utterly different from the ways that mathematicians and scientists solve their problems.” An engineer like Kamen is looking at solving different problems than a scientist like Einstein, so their methods are different. “Where scientists aim at the truth about nature,” writes Goldman, “engineering design reflects … consciously operating under conditions of partial information and acting on solutions judged good enough to do the job that needs to be done, even though they are not optimal.”16
Engineering is pragmatic, especially as practiced by makers. Makers also understand that they aren’t perfect and they have gaps in their knowledge or abilities. Yet that doesn’t keep them from making.
Ugo Conti is the seventy-year-old designer and builder of a prototype of a whole new kind of boat called Proteus. It suspends the body of the boat above the water on spindly legs that make it look like a water spider. Ugo is Italian but moved to the United States to get a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and never left the Bay Area. He works in a garage shop, building much of his boat there. If he wasn’t working on his boat, he was working on his house, crafting a beautiful wooden spiral staircase for his home. He is wonderfully Italian, combining artistry with “a feel for engineering,” the title I gave to the article about him in Make:. What fascinated me about Ugo was his emphasis on the gift of intuition:
I was born an engineer. That’s what I am. The instinct of wanting to understand how things work and using that understanding to do something, to make something—in my case that started at a very early age. I have intuition about how things work. I understand certain simple things, like the laws of physics, for instance, without mathematics. I’m not a mathematician. I don’t do mathematics.
I’m a very normal person, but I have big peaks. It impresses people, because I can approach a problem without knowing anything about it and come up with a solution. It may be a problem people have been working on for months, but I solve it quickly, just out of intuition. It’s a gift. I was born with it. People look at the peaks and think I’m a genius. Well, yes, in the peaks I am, but most of the time I’m just normal. In fact, I make a lot of mistakes. I mean, one mistake after the other.17
The philosopher of science Karl Popper wrote, “All life is problem solving.” He added that “all organisms are inventors and technicians, good or not so good, successful or not so successful, in solving technical problems.”18 What to eat? What to build? Where is it safe to live? All organisms, including people, have to figure out what to do each day to get food and find a place to sleep, and even more, what makes us happy. If we accept what Popper says, then a person who is not solving problems is not really living, and an education that does not solve real problems is not really about learning, and a job that does not have us solve problems is not really working.
Emily Pilloton liked problem-solving as kid. She is the founder of Project H, which was the subject of a documentary titled If You Build It. In an interview by Stett Holbrook in Make: volume 40, she said that what excited her as a kid was “the kind of MacGyver-style eagerness of solving a problem under tight constraints.” She adds: “I love being constrained—having $10, one hand tied behind my back, and being blindfolded, having nothing and making something beautiful out of that.” That attitude is reflected in what she has done working with students, first a group of high school students in Greenville, North Carolina, and now an all-girls class in Berkeley, California. Emily’s goal is to “excite young people in a way—inside or outside of school—that is meaningful to them, that is meaningful to their communities, and that helps them bring their ideas to life to ways that maybe they didn’t think possible.”19 As they develop as makers, they will develop a maker mindset.
Makers enjoy solving problems, so they are willing to spend lots of time trying to solve them. Some people would ignore the problem or find someone else to solve it. However, a maker not only wants to solve the problem but believes that there’s some intangible benefit gained from the experience alone.
Initially, the problems may be small and personal, but makers are also tackling bigger, more ambitious problems as they get good at problem-solving. And they are doing it by collaborating openly on open, distributed projects such as e-NABLE, a global network of volunteers who are using 3-D printers to create prosthetic hands for children. They are sharing and modifying open-source 3-D designs but also educating people on 3-D printing. At Maker Faire Bay Area in 2015, I met a father from Cincinnati whose son who was showing off his red 3-D-printed hand. The father told me that he knew nothing about 3-D printing just two years ago, but then he learned about this community and realized that he could get involved and help his son.
A riff on the Chinese proverb “May you live in interesting times” might be “May you find interesting problems.” Makers are defined by the problems that interest them the most.
“As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography. “This we should do freely and generously.” In 1742, Franklin had invented a new stove, first called the Pennsylvania fireplace but later more commonly known as the Franklin stove. It was more efficient at generating heat from less wood and did a better job of circulating heated air in a room. The governor was so pleased with the construction of the stove that he offered him a ten-year patent. Franklin declined it “from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions.” Franklin published a pamphlet about his stove, and others began making it, at a profit. Yet Franklin preferred sharing his work openly, as he said, “freely and generously.” What troubled him, and it remains a problem with the patent system today, was that by choosing not to obtain a patent, he left the door open for others to obtain a patent that could potentially restrict the free use of his own inventions.
Franklin’s thoughts are reflected today in the maker community and its development of open-source hardware. Makers are influenced by the notion that “information should be free,” which was embedded in the culture of the Internet as well as Richard Stallman’s Free Software movement. As a result, the maker community started out with sharing as a default setting. It became an accepted way of doing things because of its very personal benefits. However, it would be wrong to think of openness as a requirement. It’s a choice made by the maker balancing his or her own interests with the best interests of the community. Makers usually realize that choosing to share is a kind of payback in return for the benefit they received from others who shared their work.
Open-source hardware is a formal expression of the responsibilities of those who share their work and those who make use of that work. Openness is more than open source, more than a license. It is part of an open, collaborative culture that supports art and innovation, not just in individual or business terms. It encourages participation without asking for permission. It allows for work to be passed around and passed on without limits.
In my office I have a picture of a lettered roadside sign, supposedly created by a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, that reads: “All I want to be is someone who makes new things and thinks about them.” That “all I want to be” reflects the zeal of an inspired maker. It is more than a mental state. It integrates our whole physical, mental, and emotional being.
The origin of the word enthusiasm is Greek, meaning “the god within.” Perhaps in our context, it could mean “the maker within.” To be enthusiastic means to be inspired, eager, rapt, or in ecstasy. It’s associated with intense emotion. Enthusiasm describes an energy or power within us that we discover in ourselves, and it fills us up. The fascinating thing about enthusiasm is that it seems to be something we use up, but doing so seems to generate more of it. We don’t lose it by using it. It’s a kind of eternal flame. When I see enthusiasm in a person, I trust that what they are doing is done with conviction. I know they are true and not false. I don’t look for other motives in why they do what they do. I trust that they are both passionate and dedicated. That enthusiasm was what made me first notice makers, partly because I had learned to recognize it in myself.
“We are agents of creative change, but only if we see ourselves that way,” said Jay Silver at Maker Faire Bay Area in 2013. The coinventor of MaKey MaKey, described in chapter 6, retains the sense of joy and wonder that we see in children and that we ourselves experience when we look at the world with fresh eyes. At a talk at Maker Faire Orlando, Jay told a story about how his young son discovered that flying gnats responded to the sound of his voice, and together they hooked up a speaker to see the gnats flying in a pattern set by the sound waves.
Jay says, “We don’t want everybody the same. We want a diverse ecosystem of unique thinkers. The Maker Movement isn’t about robots or 3-D printers almost at all, it’s really about freedom, the freedom for us with our hands to make the world we live in.”20 Jay now has a PhD from MIT, having completed his thesis, The World as a Construction Kit. The world is reconfigurable: Everything in the world can be used to remake the world. It is right in front of us if we choose to see it that way. That kind of worldview is fundamental to the maker mindset. The things around us are not ends in themselves, but components or parts that can be remixed in projects of our own desire.
At Maker Faire Oslo in 2014, I met Erik Thorstensson of Göteborg, Sweden. Erik developed a simple, modular system for building with plastic straws called Strawbees. An open-source design, Strawbees uses simple connectors that can be die-cut on demand from scrap plastic or bought as a kit. With the simplest of materials, it teaches how to build 3-D objects, even complex ones. I watched young kids and adults walk up and build structures from straws: a pointy hat, a wand, a diamond that folds in on itself, a pyramid. All of them were having fun, and Erik was the ringleader, usually accompanied by a team of like-minded instigators. He wears a bow tie, adding a touch of formality to his flair for showmanship. He has boundless energy, talking to everyone and encouraging them to get started creating something with Strawbees. He is always adding new things and expanding his system. In Singapore, he used Strawbees to build a winged aircraft. Adding a few motors and a brain, he turned it into a drone and flew it out over the audience. Erik puts heart and soul into what he is doing.
Erik is a true believer, a phrase Mister Jalopy once used in a talk. Mister Jalopy meant that makers are true believers who act out of the belief that what they are doing is worthwhile. They are committed, not sitting on the fence. Makers believe in their work long before they know it will succeed. Makers believe in engaging others in their work, spreading it as far as they can.
Making fulfills a deep human need to create. The poet Frank Bidart writes:
There is something missing in our definition, vision, of a human being: the need to make.
We are creatures who need to make.…
Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.21
That human need becomes a belief system that supports our understanding of the value of what we create and why. We create meaning in our lives by discovering the maker within us.
The maker mindset can be found as an element of any nation or culture, although it may be expressed differently in each one. It is not a uniquely American trait, although our national pride makes us think so. Because we can find it in the past, we think of making and its mindset as part of the American character.
Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs, wrote a piece in the Washington Post titled “The America Ben Franklin Saw,” in which he commented that the American character has two separate strands: one a “liberty-loving individualist” and the other a “civic-minded citizen who sees the nation’s progress as a common endeavor.” He sees Franklin as “the first embodiment of that American archetype.” Franklin “believed that the business of America was not merely to celebrate success but also to ensure that each new generation had the opportunity to achieve it,”22 wrote Isaacson.
Franklin might be the first famous maker in America. He is practical but endlessly curious. He is the self-made man, starting out as an apprentice, lacking much formal schooling and learning from real-world experiences. He ventured into any area that interested him and made significant contributions to different fields, while also doing well in business and politics. His many practical inventions in addition to the Franklin stove are bifocals, lightning rods, and swim fins. His kite experiment famously allowed him to discover and describe important properties of electricity, coining terms such as battery and conductor that we use today. The lightning rod, which saved wooden buildings from burning to the ground, was a practical application of what he had learned about harnessing electricity.
Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, Virginia, is a must-see museum of an American maker who also pursued many interests, influenced by the Enlightenment. On a tour of Monticello, I saw the writing instrument, an invention called the polygraph, that Jefferson used to create copies of his correspondence. The polygraph has a second writing pad whose pen is mechanically linked to the pen used by the writer, so it composes a duplicate copy. Jefferson didn’t invent the polygraph; he was an enthusiast and early adopter, trying it out and communicating with the inventor and builder about how it might be improved. Given that he wrote twenty thousand letters in his lifetime, one wonders what Jefferson would have done with e-mail.
Yet there were many more American makers we don’t know by name but who shared this mindset: men and women alike who, out of the necessity of having to provide for themselves, acquired practical skills. The Foxfire Book series, first published in 1970s, developed as a project led by rural high school students to document the how-to knowledge of previous generations living in the Appalachian Mountains when they realized that very little of it had been written down. The first book in the series covers basket making, soap making, building a log cabin, slaughtering a hog, and “moonshining as a fine art.” It is a handbook on the ways in which pioneers struggled to be self-sufficient, living off the land.
What makes Foxfire special is that the students rediscovered this knowledge for themselves and learned to appreciate their past. “It wasn’t until I had worked on Foxfire for five months,” writes a student, Paul Gillespie, “that an inexplicable void between myself and the old people of our region disappeared.”23 He went to visit Aunt Arie, who lived in a remote area by herself. “I was apprehensive because I didn’t know what to expect,” writes Gillespie. He thought of her log cabin as a time machine that took him back to the 1880s. “Everything she had—from the stern-looking pictures of her grandparents to the fireplace that was her only source of heat—made me stop and look deeply for the first time.” Aunt Arie wasn’t just sitting in her rocker when the students arrived to interview her. She was, with some difficulty, removing the eyes from a freshly killed hog’s head. She asked them to help, and told them that she was making souse meat, “the best stuff I ever eat.”
The Foxfire books can still shock us today into seeing what life was once like without all the conveniences. “We made a good life here,” said Aunt Arie, “but we put in lots’a time. Many an’ many a night I’ve been workin’ when two o’clock come in th’ mornin’—cardin’ ’n’ spinnin’ ’n’ sewin’.”24 It was constant hard work, but one can appreciate how much they knew how to do.
“Our ancestors brought little more than a few tools and a great deal of ingenuity,” the editors of Foxfire write. “They had to find ways to convert wood into most of what they needed for survival, and the resulting reverence for and skill with wood was boundless and profound.”25 Sounding like a maker from a fab lab, they say that so many tools used for woodworking were themselves made of wood. They had a very specific vocabulary for the skills, tools, materials, and techniques used to transform wood in useful ways. Almost all of that knowledge was transmitted orally from generation to generation as lore. Some of this knowledge was written down and published, which allowed it to be shared more broadly.
In Napa Valley, amidst the vineyards, there’s a historic site called the Bale Grist Mill that stands as a reminder that the valley was first known for growing wheat, not grapes. The mill was built in 1846, just before California was to become its own republic, independent of Mexico, and before the gold rush. An English doctor who had gained a bad reputation in the Mexican Army, Edward Turner Bale got a grant of land in Napa and built a sawmill and a gristmill.
I visited the restored gristmill on a summer day when it was in operation. The most prominent feature of the gristmill is a thirty-six-foot overshot waterwheel. Water comes from a nearby pond and is directed by a wooden chute down a flume on top of the wheel to make it turn. Here is an elemental machine, powered by water and made of iron, wood, and stone. When it starts up, you hear the water begin to fall, and the waterwheel creaks a bit and begins to move. As the large wheel spins and the wooden gears kick in, the pair of grindstones begin to spin against each other. The whole building rumbles as kernels of wheat pass between the stones, and out of a chute comes a soft white powder.
The grindstones are large wheels cut from granite. The idiom “nose to the grindstone” comes from the constant attention required of the miller to check for ozone, which is caused when the two large pieces of stone are rubbing against each other. It has come to mean paying close attention to one’s work, but originally involved using one’s nose to smell the functioning of a machine.
I wondered how such a mill would be built in the 1840s. The construction required the work of different trades that weren’t likely to be found in the area. Perhaps one might hire an itinerant team experienced at designing and building a mill. The point is that you couldn’t buy a mill and have it delivered to you. If you wanted to own and operate a mill, you’d have to build it. How big a waterwheel do you need? What size gears? What is the best proportion for all the various gears?
The answers weren’t to be found in the local community but rather in a book, first published in 1795, called The Young Mill-Wright and Miller’s Guide by Oliver Evans. It was an early American user manual for the design, construction, and operation of a mill. Evans was an American inventor, and a biography of him says that he was known for two things: having a “compulsive urge to invent” and a zeal “to publish technical information for the guidance of young men.”26 His guide for millwrights, which was both theoretical and practical, incorporated his own inventions and ways that his American-made mill was an improvement on the English mill. He also pointed out areas where new inventions were needed.
A fifteenth edition of the book, published in 1860, can be found on Google Books.27 It’s a rather strange how-to book, but it begins with chapters on the theory of mechanics. He explained how and why mills work in a very detailed fashion for a person without any previous knowledge. It was the one book you’d want if you were building a mill in a community that didn’t have millwrights. It allowed ordinary people with perhaps some skill as in carpentry to build a large, very complex machine.
I found one particular feature of the book interesting. At the end was a section that listed the subscribers for the book. At the top of list were the names George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who had Evans build new mills for them. To publish a book meant getting enough readers to commit in advance to buying it—a practice that certainly reminds us of crowd-funding today. An enterprising publisher or author would try to cover the costs before incurring them by pre-selling subscriptions to the book. Yet I was surprised to see the list of subscribers printed in the back of the book. I asked the docent at the mill about the list. He said it had the purpose of identifying others who bought the book and were interested in the same subject. If you were studying Evans’s plans, you might want to correspond with someone else who knew the book. The docent pointed out that the subscriber list was a social network built into the book itself. A community of practice can develop around common projects, common tools, and common sources of knowledge.
The subject of books leads us back to Benjamin Franklin, who writes in Autobiography how he created a lending library. He recognized that it was difficult to obtain books in America and proposed to a group of friends in Philadelphia that each of them bring their books to a common room “where they could be a common benefit.” Then he thought the benefit should be made available more widely, proposing a member-funded public subscription library. “So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor,” he wrote, “that I was not able, with great industry, to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each, and ten shillings per annum.” He said that “on this little fund we began.” In similar fashion and with little funding, makerspaces are started today to pool resources and provide a common benefit.
The 1970s was also a time when there was a flourishing of the do-it-yourself mindset in books and magazines. The basic theme was taking control of your life, generally rethinking material culture and community. John Seymour’s The Self-Sufficient Gardner was a practical guide to producing your own food with rather ambitious goal of becoming self-sufficient. I have my forty-year-old copy. Mother Earth News magazine carried plans for building your own log cabin, yurt, or geodesic dome. Our Bodies, Ourselves was a pioneering user manual for women written by women. “We were just women; what authority did we have in matters of medicine and health?” the group of women in Boston wrote. They challenged the medical establishment by asserting the value of their own individual and collective experiences. They described the papers, which were originally typewritten and photocopied, as a tool that “stimulates discussion and action, which allows for new ideas and for change.” They sought to provide information about anatomy and physiology that demystifies the human body and how it functions, initiating a “collective struggle for control over our bodies and our lives.”28 These books were designed to inform and shape our actions, another example of “what you can do with what you know.”
The Whole Earth Catalog was first published in 1968 by Stewart Brand, who was an inexhaustible scout looking for new and old things to make part of an emerging counterculture. Eventually he was joined by contributors that included Kevin Kelly, Bruce Sterling, and Howard Rheingold. The catalog’s motto was “access to tools.” The Whole Earth Catalog, and its predecessors and successors, CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review, were products for settlers of a new frontier in need of new tools. The Whole Earth Catalog audaciously stated its purpose:
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.29
The Whole Earth Catalog represents a mind shift in defining progress in personal rather than industrial terms. I can’t think of any other paragraph that so clearly represents ideals that are reflected today—optimistically so—by the Maker Movement. It is a new world that waits to be created, a future that can be lived in part today if we aspire to make it real.
As an aside, The Whole Earth Catalog, like Oliver Evans’s book, lists its retaining subscribers on the same page as its “Purpose,” naming those who contributed funds in advance so that the book could be published.
Kevin Kelly continued the tradition of the Whole Earth Catalog in his own way, self-publishing the massive “Cool Tools,” a collection of tool reviews from the Cool Tools website. In a talk he gave at MakerCon in 2014, Kelly said that “revolutions begin with new tools,” paraphrasing Freeman Dyson. “Every invention is a tool to make newer things,” Kelly said. “When we make a new tool, we make a new way of seeing, which leads to new ways of knowing.” Tools can lead to transformation of culture.
Kelly talked about how the 1848 gold rush brought people with a certain mindset to California. It was a belief in the importance of doing things on your own and that you didn’t need anyone’s permission to do so. He sees that spirit carried through into the 1960s with the Free Speech Movement, coming out of Berkeley, California, and the Human Potential Movement, coming out of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Out of the culture of experimentation, which included music and drugs, came the Whole Earth Catalog, what Kelly called a “do-it-yourself bible” that was “exploring what we could do as individuals or as a small group.” He said that the catalog had “alongside the tepees, the beekeeping equipment, and the macramé and the hand mills for grinding your own flour, the first listing of personal computers.” All of this came from California, “where there was the least resistance to new ideas,” he said. The Homebrew Computer Club also got started here with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, in Berkeley and later in Menlo Park. Kelly said two strands came together: a revolution in tools that were developing along with a deep interest in human exploration. “This confluence came together in the personal computer,” he said. That confluence “sparked some of what we are seeing again in the Maker Movement.”30
In some ways, the personal computer is such a powerful tool—an all-in-one tool—that it has taken us more than a generation to absorb it fully and gain a perspective on what it does and what it can do. Or, more importantly, what we want to do with it. Now we are once again exploring new tools, recovering knowledge that was lost, and looking at how we can make our own lives better and contribute to the common benefit of all.
The maker mindset, and its reemergence in our culture, has as much to do with why there is a Maker Movement as any technology or economic trend. It represents a cultural mind shift: the empowered individual over the institution, the open and self-organizing network over the rigidly organized corporate hierarchy, experimental play over busy work, agency over apathy, creative expression over soulless conformity—the joyful life of the maker and producer over the contented consumer. It is a mindset that integrates what can be seen as separate: manual and mental, science and art, engineering and craft, risk and resilience, practical problem-solving and world-changing imagination. One might say about the maker mindset what Marvin Minsky said in The Society of Mind: “Much of [the mind’s] power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect.”31