Nick Pinkston may be inventing the factory of the future. He’s smart, independent-minded, and a risk-taker. He has worn his hair thick and long and has grown a beard since moving to San Francisco from Pittsburgh in 2011. He’s not yet thirty. He comes across as oddly professorial because he’s intellectually curious, yet he’s also a maker and an entrepreneur. Nick could be the new face of manufacturing.
Nick said he has ADD, but he’s not at all fidgety during a long sit-down for a conversation. He talks fast and changes direction in an instant. His business, Plethora, is located in a semi-industrial area of San Francisco near Pier 80 that some might call “sketchy.” Inside, Plethora is mostly a very large concrete slab with masonry walls: a super-size garage with CNC machines used mainly for cutting metals and plastics.
Plethora is in the business of on-demand manufacturing, optimized for custom jobs: one-offs, specialized work, short runs. The Plethora factory makes pieces and parts, not finished products, but it may one day do the assembly required to produce a finished product. For now, Nick thinks that China is better at that.
Nick wants to make creating a custom part from a design as easy as the push of a button. If you are a product designer in San Francisco, you can sit at your computer and design a part; his software will provide feedback as to whether it can be made or not; and then you can press a button to send a design file over the internet to the Plethora factory, where it will be directed to a machine. After the part is machined, it will be sent by courier to you. You’d have your part in your hands possibly within hours. Nick believes that he can automate the order-taking, the validation and testing, the interface that controls the machines, and the setup for the job. If he’s successful, his factory would be replicated in many places around the country or the world—and he would put many machinists, as well as the job shops where they work, out of business. Nick explained:
There are thirty-five thousand job shops in the United States. Who knows how many overseas? You go to those places. You call them on the phone. You send them your files. That’s how it happens. It’s basically way slower and more expensive to do that. What we’re trying to do is to bring an Amazon Prime–like experience, where you just hit a button and it shows up.
It’s also like Uber. Why have your own car if you can get access to one when you need it conveniently and affordably? Why have your own machines or a machine shop when you can get access to one? Certainly, this has been part of Mark Hatch’s vision of TechShop: You get access to any machine when you need it for a monthly membership. Nick is going one step further. You don’t even need to go to TechShop or a fab lab to access local machines.
When the Plethora factory is scaled up, it will be full of sophisticated machinery, but it will employ almost no one. As Nick sees it, he’s taking manufacturing to its logical conclusion by automating it. There aren’t really robots in this factory; what happens is mostly in the software that controls the machines. To be clear, it’s not necessarily the ability to send design files to a manufacturer that is the innovation here. That has been happening for quite a while. One can send a design file directly to a factory in China, if it is prepared to do the work. Nor is it automation per se. It’s relatively easy to automate a process to create the same object over and over again. It’s much harder to automate a process when the objects are different with each job. That’s flexible manufacturing. Nick is eliminating the human intermediaries along the way, such as a contract engineer. That engineer’s role is to evaluate a design, decide if it can be made, how best to make it, and provide a quote on how much it will cost.
A consistent problem with design software is that a person can design something in software that no machine can make. This means that a designer needs an engineer to look at the design and provide feedback on whether a machine can make the design. The challenge Nick ended up focusing on was first to analyze a design file and determine if it could be produced, for example 3-D printed; and second, to provide a quote for the work. Various 3-D printing service bureaus like Ponoko were doing this work by human inspection until they began using Nick’s software. Getting a quote for a job required a phone call and a discussion, plus a day or so of research before the quote came in. Now Nick’s software can prepare a quote on the spot, instantly, through the Internet.
Nick was the only child of two parents in the military. They moved around a lot. He went to a Montessori preschool, which he said was “the last school I liked. Every other school in my life, I hated.” Montessori was hands-on. “You could do what you wanted. They had all these books. I remember just going through all the books and learning that stuff.” He and his family always went to bookstores, and he recalls loving books that explained how things work.
Nick’s family moved to the Pittsburgh area, where he struggled with high school. “That’s when I started doing race cars and rockets,” he said. “I used to hack that kind of stuff. Cars were a great thing. Everything in making can be done in a car: electrical, mechanical, chemical, everything. So, after sixteen, I was a car guy.”
He went to the University of Pittsburgh and chose bioengineering because he was obsessed with nanotech, having read K. Eric Drexler’s book Engines of Creation when he was younger. “No one in my class cared about making things,” said Nick. “A bunch of them were good at math and thought they would be engineers. Even the professors really didn’t care about it.” He expected to be spending a lot of time in the lab, but he wasn’t getting that opportunity. Instead, he started working with a race team for SAE International. “Because I could actually make stuff, they welcomed me on the team.”
He decided to drop out of engineering. As much as he wanted to leave school, his parents wouldn’t let him, so he came back as a business major, which gave him more time to do other things. He had read Neil Gershenfeld’s book Fab, and he started reading Make:. He discovered that there were people like him, online but also in makerspaces, and he visited NYC Resistor, Hack DC, and Pumping Station One in Chicago. He thought Pittsburgh needed its own space. He eventually turned his shop into the first makerspace in the area, called HackPittsburgh, which he founded with Matt Stultz.
“HackPittsburgh let me know about other people who wanted manufacturing,” and he would often connect people who needed manufacturing services with local manufacturers—job shops. “I would manually connect people and take a commission.” Nick realized that perhaps he could create a way to make those connections online, and he began trying to automate the matchmaking between product designers and manufacturers.
However, there were a few problems. One was that running a business out of the makerspace created a rift. “People would think, ‘Nick’s a business guy. We’re hackers.’” He eventually left and moved to San Francisco, which he believed would allow him to find more funding for his next start-up, which became Plethora.
I met Nick after he moved to San Francisco and he had organized what became an important monthly meeting: the Hardware Startup Meetup. Typically, it takes place in a warehouse in the Dogpatch neighborhood, where a hundred or more people gather with pizza and beer and listen to two-minute pitches from individuals who have a start-up or want to create one. They are wonderfully informal, rough-edged but friendly meetings that help makers who are looking for additional talent, funding, or just feedback. Nick became known as the hardware guy. Nick’s model of the Hardware Startup Meetup has spread to dozens of cities, creating connections and providing momentum to those who want to turn their idea into a hardware product or service.
He pitched the idea for Plethora to investors. “I probably pitched eighty investors to do a seed round. It’s like throwing things against the wall. Most said no.” He raised $1.5 million, half of that coming from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. “They’re into countervailing ideas. They liked my contrarian angle.” I asked him what he learned from fundraising. “I learned that I have to be the guy to learn it. If I am the problem, I have to fix myself. I had to keep trying and failing and just knowing that if you keep pushing, you’ll do it.” A year and a half in, Plethora was up to thirty employees. The irony is that Nick is now recruiting those engineers who were really good at math but didn’t really make stuff.
Nick sees his initial audience as “engineers with credit cards: They’re buying prototype parts, and the parts are used for a machine.” Plethora had made microscopes, robots, coffee machines, other 3-D printers and mills, and factory components. I asked Nick if he sees Plethora as the future of American manufacturing. “I don’t think of it as American. It’s going to be everywhere; in China, too. We’ll deploy this to Earth,” he said, laughing like a mad scientist. Plethora could be a way that manufacturing, which has been centralized, is decentralized and once again distributed regionally.
His focus, though, is not geopolitical but on the individual:
I think, what capabilities does a random person have? A maker should be able to say, “I want to make a new coffee machine.” Right now, you’d need a million bucks to build one if you want to build one that’s good enough for sale. The reason is that it’s really expensive and time-consuming to get the factory set up to make it. Having that local is really nice. It gets you more iterations. We often think about it in terms of giving engineers superpowers. The whole point of Plethora is that one person can do the entire thing. This is a factory that will allow you to make anything. It’s not just milling or any one process. It’s about the entire process of engineering. At Plethora, we will not rest until all hardware is like using a magic wand.
That’s his enthusiasm to transform the nature of manufacturing speaking, or his ADD.
A factory that allows makers to make useful things without needing the skills of a machinist, Plethora is a perfect fit for creators in the creative economy. It’s not such good news for the people who work in machine shops. Factories were the backbone for industrial America. Pittsburgh was a steel town, as were many Midwestern cities such as Youngstown, Ohio, and Rockford, Illinois, that flourished because of their steel mills. Yet in the 1970s, many large factories began to decline and eventually were abandoned, creating the so-called Rust Belt, with few opportunities and high unemployment. Towns that had expanded because of a single industry were left devastated and remain so a generation later. Detroit’s decline from one of the largest and most vibrant cities in America became the symbol for the disruptive changes impacting factory towns. Even the auto companies, while they continue to make cars, need fewer workers. Membership in United Auto Workers declined from 1.5 million in 1979 to about 391,000 in 2014.
I remember a visit to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where a community leader told me that forty years ago a young person could drop out of high school, walk into a factory, and land a job and a middle class life. This person, likely a man, could afford to own a home and a car, and raise a family where the kids were likely to go to college. However, in Winston-Salem, the three main industries—textiles, tobacco, and furniture-making—have closed their factories. Today that young dropout doesn’t have a lot of options, except a low-paying service job such as a clerk at Wal-Mart. He or she probably continues to live at home. It’s not a path leading to a middle-class life. It’s as though the path is no longer there to follow.
In 2009 I had the idea of bringing a Maker Faire to Detroit. I wondered if Maker Faire, which tapped into the Bay Area’s creative culture, could work in Detroit, which was at one of the lowest points in its history. I had no personal connection to Detroit, but I came to feel that Detroit mattered to me. I knew that the people of the region had making and manufacturing in their blood. I wondered if they could tap into that power to reinvent their city.
I found a partner in the Henry Ford Museum, which helps us understand both the agricultural world that Henry Ford left behind and the world he was part of reinventing with the automobile. In many ways, Ford was a lot like Steve Jobs. Ford didn’t invent the car, but he understood before anyone else how much it would change our lives if each of us had a car. Similarly, Jobs didn’t invent personal computers, but he understood what might happen if we each owned one. Jobs had a vision of what personal computers could do for “the rest of us.”
I began making trips to Detroit to look for makers. One of the first I found was a young entrepreneur named Andrew Archer who was looking to meet makers. That was the keyword Andrew used in his help-wanted ad on Craigslist. He needed help completing a large robot he was developing for use in auto factories. He wanted to target hobbyists who were curious and willing to figure things out for themselves. Jeff Sturges saw the ad and responded. Like Andrew, Jeff had moved to Detroit within the last year.
Andrew was offering only $10 to $12 per hour, but Jeff thought it was more interesting than any IT job he might find. On the phone, Jeff told Andrew about a community meeting for Maker Faire Detroit at the Henry Ford Museum that Sunday, and they agreed to meet there. That’s where I met them both in January 2010. Jeff had moved from New York City, where he’d been involved in the Sustainable South Bronx fab lab. In Detroit, he was able to buy a house for $500, and he rode his bike around town to live on the cheap. Jeff grew up in the Boston area but had a degree in architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, so he knew Detroit. He returned hoping to create a hackerspace and develop school programs to get kids involved in making things.
Andrew had moved to Detroit from Duluth, Minnesota, where he’d started his company, Robotics Redefined. He was using off-the-shelf components to design new kinds of robots for factories. He said he had a dozen contractors working for him and had sales worldwide. I interrupted him to ask how old he was. “Twenty-one,” he said. I smiled. I immediately thought that finding people like Andrew and Jeff was a good sign for Detroit, and that makers were already connecting with each other.
Jacqueline Campbell Archer is Andrew’s mother and his financial officer. As a single mom raising Andrew, she recognized that he had unique gifts that amazed and baffled her. “As a kid,” she said, “if he went to sharpen his pencil, he’d end up taking apart the pencil sharpener.” From age six, he took over the garage, bringing home things from yard sales or dumpsters. “Andrew liked anything with a cord,” said Jacqueline. Once he hauled home a toilet so he could see how it worked. He then turned it into a fish tank. She would buy him tools instead of toys as birthday presents. He built a capacitor from cookie sheets and mineral oil. For a ninth-grade science project, he built a two-foot-tall Tesla coil, something his teacher didn’t believe he—or anyone his age—could do. He was about to demonstrate the Tesla coil in class, but the teacher was so afraid of electrocution that he made him shut it down. “I was really comfortable that I was a person making weird stuff,” said Andrew. He was mostly bored in school, feeling held back from exploring what interested him. He didn’t like sports. He didn’t connect easily with his peers. He dreamed of building a private spacecraft in his garage that would take him away to a new world.
More practically, he noticed that the rich kids in town all had mopeds to get around on. Unable to buy one himself, he began hacking one together from four bikes and an industrial weed-whacker engine. Jacqueline worried about her son. When he was young, she had taken him to the Mayo Clinic to consult with specialists. She learned that Andrew had a genius-level IQ, but she could easily see him dropping out of school or getting involved in drugs. High school was not challenging enough for him, and she sought to enroll her fourteen-year-old in courses at Lake Superior College. To do that, she had to sue the local school board.
One positive experience for Andrew was his involvement in SkillsUSA and its annual competitions. In tenth grade, he entered the robotics competition and won third place in the state. “They gave us a robotic arm and a box full of components to build an automated assembly,” recalled Andrew. “You had no knowledge going in of what you’d have to build.” The next year he was the state champion, traveling to the national competition in Kansas. A year later he was the national champion, requiring just four of the eight hours allotted to complete his project. Andrew graduated from high school in 2006, and a year later completed his degree in robotics at community college. He’d already completed a degree in machining at sixteen. “I was planning on going to Carnegie Mellon in the fall of 2007, but I decided not to,” said Andrew. While he liked the university, he didn’t want them owning what he worked on as a student. “I decided instead to pursue my own thing,” he said, and started the robotics company that year.
At high-school graduation, Andrew saw his biological father, Bryan Fisher, for only the second time. Fisher, an inventor, had developed industrial baling equipment and built a successful company, Excel Manufacturing. From the short time they spent together, Andrew thought that the two of them were identical. “What he was thinking, I was thinking. He’d approach problems the way I’d approach problems, and we’d come up with the same solutions and say it the exact same way,” said Andrew. “It was very strange.” Nonetheless, Fisher remained distant. Fisher “had his own set of issues and stayed away, thinking he would probably be more of a negative influence on Andrew,” said Jacqueline.
Both Andrew and Jacqueline say that Fisher was consumed with his own success, living life in the fast lane. In April 2010, Fisher was found murdered in his home, part of a triple homicide by a tattoo parlor owner involved in selling drugs and running an escort service. Fisher’s company website said about the forty-six-year-old founder: “All who knew Bryan knew he possessed an all-consuming passion for power and precision, which manifested itself through his love of airplanes, cigarette boats, Ducati motorcycles, and scary fast sports cars. That same passion guided his equipment designs and broke the industry mold.”
Andrew visited Excel Manufacturing the week after his father’s death to meet his employees and take them out for an informal dinner, something they said that his father would have done. “I tried to take away just the positive things,” said Andrew.
Like his father, Andrew has a fascination with motorcycles. On a summer night in 2009, Andrew was riding a Ducati Hypermotard and hit a culvert. “When I crashed, my first thought was—oh, God, my bike.” He didn’t notice at first that he’d nearly torn his thumb off and his foot was crushed. He rode the motorcycle to the hospital. His injuries, which included a lacerated spleen, kept him in the ICU for several weeks. Doctors worked to reconstruct his foot, and he used a walker for the rest of the summer. His planned move to Detroit would have to wait until October.
Jacqueline helped Andrew find a place overlooking the Detroit River in a brick building near downtown. He set up a small workshop where he could work whenever he wanted. There’s orange tape on the wooden floor for testing some of his line-following robots, and his furniture comes from antique stores. After Andrew connected with Jeff in January 2010, they began working together to meet a March deadline for the factory robot. “I give everyone a test to find out what they can do,” said Andrew. “Jeff got ninety-four percent on the test. It’s really hard. Electrical engineers coming out of school would get about sixty-four percent on the test. That Jeff did so well is really odd, because he has an architectural background.”
Jeff, a young thirty-three, started out by assembling circuit boards, doing surface-mount assembly, and learning how to test the boards. With his excellent people skills, he soon began doing project management. Jeff also recruited Bilal Ghalib, a maker from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had organized the All Hands Active hackerspace there. Bilal’s job was to write the laser-scanner interface for the robot. “I just threw it at him,” Andrew said. “I didn’t give him any instructions, and he did it.”
Andrew was satisfied that he and his band of hobbyists worked so well together. “The hobbyist way is a really effective way to do things,” Andrew told me. “We’re utilizing tools that are available to everyone.” He wants Robotics Redefined to become a kind of think tank for building things. “I want to do some things that are unconventional,” he said.
Meanwhile, Jeff was also looking to find a place in downtown Detroit to set up a hackerspace. On a cold March day, he was in the Eastern Market district looking at vacant buildings in the old meatpacking area. The buildings smelled of dried blood and worse; they were in terrible shape. Pieces of mail were strewn about the floors, a good many of them delinquent tax notices. Jeff could see only the possibilities for each space, believing that they could be transformed. He liked the support he was getting from the management of Eastern Market, the location of the city’s largest farmers' market and an area in need of new occupants now that the butchers had left town.
By mid-April 2010, Jeff had formed the hackerspace OmniCorp Detroit with a group of makers including Bethany Shorb and Andrew Sliwinski. With a grant from the Kresge Foundation, he started developing an entrepreneurial community workshop to build tools for urban farming, in association with Earthworks, a leader in Detroit’s urban agriculture movement. He opened the Mt. Elliott Makerspace in the basement of a church, offering soldering and electronics workshops for children on Sunday mornings. He chose to work with the church not because he was religious but rather because it already had a community. “This is what I wanted to be doing,” Jeff said. “This is why I came here.”
Detroit had a variety of talented young makers. It was like they came together, formed a band, and played their own music for a while before breaking up, with each going their own way. Jeff remains an activist who believes that making is a way to introduce new skills and confidence to people living in disadvantaged neighborhoods, many of whom are left behind in the new economy. His model of engaging children through faith-based communities should be propagated widely.
Bilal Ghalib is a man without a category. He left Detroit and headed for the Bay Area, working for Instructables for a while. He spent a lot of time visiting makerspaces in Egypt and Lebanon and connecting makers in the Middle East. I once had dinner in Dearborn with his parents, and Bilal wanted me to help explain what he was doing with his life. They just didn’t seem to understand him, and he made it difficult for them: he didn’t have a regular job. He may never. He is a free spirit, an extra-extroverted maker.
Bethany Shorb runs a small business, Cyberoptix Tie Lab, making custom screen-printed neckties that combine a punk and geek sensibility. I visited her shop in a funky building in downtown Detroit, where she had four employees who were processing orders or making the ties. She makes locally but sells globally online: “Nobody in this neighborhood can afford to buy what I make.”
In 2010, Andrew Sliwinski had his own interactive product design firm in Detroit. In 2011, he moved to the Bay Area and became chief maker at DIY.org for several years. In 2015, he moved to Boston, where he is now at the MIT Media Lab in the Lifelong Kindergarten group, working in Mitchel Resnick’s group on the Scratch team. Andrew Archer took over as CEO of his father’s company, Excel Manufacturing, a Minnesota-based maker of industrial baling machines for the recycling industry.
Several strong makerspaces cropped up, getting their start right around the first Maker Faire Detroit. I3 Detroit was the first makerspace in the area, located in Ferndale. Nick Britsky is one of its ten founding members. He told me that I3 brought together people who were previously working alone in their garages: “We pooled our resources to buy bigger, cooler tools. At the same time, we have this giant brain trust. You can build better projects, because you don’t have to be a master of all of those things.”
Dale Grover organized a coworking garage in Ann Arbor. On a visit there, I met a group of ex-Ford engineers building an electric motorcycle. At Ford, they worked on one element of a car as part of a very large team. Now their small team had to do everything, from design to build. They were loving every minute of it. Dale Grover teamed up with Tom Root to launch Maker Works as a member-based fourteen-thousand-square-foot workshop in an industrial park in 2012.
When I went looking for a new future for Detroit, I found makers—or I went looking for makers and found a new future for Detroit. The small, independent efforts by people like Andrew, Jeff, Bethany, and Bilal: there were enough of them to matter, and increasingly they were connecting to each other. Along with many others, they represented a new creative and industrious spirit that was emerging in Detroit. It is still at a prototype stage that will require many iterations.
Economic development wonks charged with revitalizing a place like Detroit tend to think big. They dream of attracting a large manufacturing company that would bring ten thousand jobs to the region and restore the old system. An example of this was an attempt in 2009 to establish Michigan as a manufacturing center for a new generation of batteries. The Obama administration awarded $861 million in federal stimulus grants, and the state of Michigan chipped in $543 million in tax credits for four plants, the kind of large private-public partnership that offers good publicity for all involved. Except that five years later those plants had failed to thrive. Each plant had employed a few hundred people, and according to a 2014 story in the Detroit Free Press, they had failed to use up all the grants and credits made available to them. Big is not always better.
The Maker Movement has the potential to change cities like Detroit and industries like manufacturing because makers think small, and it empowers people to think for themselves and act independently. The Maker Movement is open where businesses are closed; it is a self-organizing ecosystem, not a hierarchy. It is inclusive, not exclusive. In this new ecosystem, anyone, large or small, can participate.
What makers need is low-volume, small-batch manufacturing. They need to be able to make from one to five thousand of a thing. Plethora is doing that for one factory, but what if there were online interfaces to all the factories and suppliers in a region? If they were aggregated usefully, a maker could identify available resources needed to get something made. That’s how we find a restaurant or a hotel today. Literally, we’d have manufacturing at our fingertips. It would help link local, regional, and national manufacturers with all kinds of makers, small and large.
In the twentieth century, Jane Jacobs wrote about the development of cities, looking at what makes them vital for social, political, and economic life. In her book The Economy of Cities, she wrote that economic growth happens as new work is added to old work. This kind of innovation comes from individuals and small groups, working independently but also interdependently. “The little movements at the hubs turn the great wheels of economic life,”1 writes Jacobs.
Small is not only an alternative to big manufacturing. It is what manufacturing has become in the United States. One of the National Association of Manufacturers’ twenty facts about U.S. manufacturing is that “the vast majority of manufacturing firms in the United States are quite small.” All but 3,626 firms of the 256,363 firms in the country’s manufacturing sector have fewer than 500 employees. “In fact, three-quarters of these firms have fewer than twenty employees.”2 If we could connect more of them to makers, there would be more work and more ways to get things made in Detroit or across the United States. If you’re a maker, nobody needs to know that your factory is actually your garage, your spare bedroom, or a community makerspace.
The first factories in England and America were for textiles. In the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, all the operations of textile production, including spinning, weaving, dyeing, and cutting, were organized in one mill. Previously they were distributed, and the work had to move from one place to the next. In Lowell, the entire process, from bales of cotton to finished fabric, was the product of the factory. The labor force was mostly young women, so-called “mill girls” who came from rural farming families and lived in boarding houses.
What might those mill girls think of fashion designer Danit Peleg? She is designing 3-D printed fabrics for use in her own clothing line. Danit was a student in the fashion design program at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Tel Aviv, Israel. She knew nothing of 3-D printing until she went to Burning Man and someone gave her a 3-D printed piece of jewelry. She was fascinated and began wondering if she could 3-D print a dress. “I was always curious about the connection between fashion and technology, but I never had the chance to work with 3-D printing before,” she told me at World Maker Faire in 2015. She decided to explore the idea for her final school project, developing her own 3-D printed collection.
Before she could make a dress, she had to make the fabric, a bit analogous to taking cotton thread and weaving it to create fabric using a loom. “I realized that if I could create a flexible structure, a flexible material, it would act like a regular textile,” she said. The regular plastic filament used in consumer 3-D printers was not flexible enough. She got a lot of help from 3-D printer enthusiasts in Tel Aviv. One person pointed her to a filament that was flexible. She experimented with making fabrics, some of which look like lace, others like chain mail. Once she had the fabrics, she began to design dresses. Everything her models wore at Maker Faire had been 3-D printed, even their shoes.
“I was really happy to join an incredible global community of makers who share their knowledge, designs, and time to help each other realize their dreams,” she wrote on her website.3 Danit envisions a future where 3-D fabric designs can be downloaded and dresses can once again be made at home. In reality, it takes a long time to print the fabric. Danit estimated that it took her two thousand hours to print the dresses that she had in her collection. One red jacket that she pointed out to me took about 350 hours. Danit believes that new thinner filaments will come that have properties more like cotton or polyester and will help improve this new method of dressmaking. She believes more people will once again be making clothes again at home, thanks to 3-D printers.
In London, at Somerset House, I visited a shop called Knyttan, where you could make your own knit sweater or scarf. In the middle of the store, inside a large glass and wood box, is a fully automated industrial knitting machine. There are iPads in the store where you can choose from a set of premade designs and then modify them by changing patterns or colors or adding personal touches. When you are satisfied, you can send the design off, and it queues for the knitting machine, where your garment will be made on the spot for you.
Looking at the knitting machine in the store, I thought it was a beautiful thing in a postindustrial era. It’s like a wood-fired oven in a bakery. Production and consumption are united in the same place, connected and made visible again. Knyttan doesn’t send your design off to a suburban warehouse or a factory in Asia. It creates the garment in the store, and it’s fascinating to watch it being made. Like the Plethora factory, Knyttan is also an example of automated on-demand manufacturing. No person is knitting the sweater for you. Nobody is there even to take your order. Knyttan represents an example of distributed production, which can be localized. It’s a textile factory disguised as a boutique store.
The local beer where I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, was Falls City Beer, using the city’s nickname for its location at the Falls of the Ohio River. The Falls City Brewery was incorporated in 1905, and its shareholders were local tavern owners and grocers. They wanted to establish an independent brewery as an alternative source for lager to the Central Consumers Company, a brewery that also owned taverns and controlled beer distribution throughout the city. According to the archives, “the brewer, acting as landlord and supplier at that time, caused the tavern keeper to be more or less at its mercy.”4 Falls City successfully broke the stranglehold of Central Consumers Company and became a popular local beer through the 1960s. In the 1970s, competition from national beer brands caused a significant decline in sales of local beer brands like Falls City, which was sold off in 1978. The triumph of mass production and mass media advertising made it impossible for local beer companies to compete, and soon all that was left was nostalgia for a local brand. National beer brands seemed to able to identify a beer that pleased pretty much everyone, and in truth, one beer was pretty indistinguishable from another.
In the 1980s, something happened to change that. A new generation of beer drinkers came to think of Budweiser and Miller as swill—uniformly without character. Some of the real beer lovers became home brewers. They could make different styles of beer at home. Increasingly, they could find beer-making supplies at a local store that also offered classes on home brewing. Some of these home brewers started sharing their brew with friends, and those friends began to encourage them to make more, and offered to buy it from them. Management consultant Peter Drucker wrote that “there is only one purpose in a business: to create a customer.”5 Well, sometimes the customers tell you to create a business.
Their businesses were microbreweries that produced distinct craft beers for a local market. Beer lovers were looking for a wider set of choices and were willing to pay for quality. Craft beer was better because it was fresh, just like food. The establishment of microbreweries brought back local beer production. Unlike national brands, they didn’t worry about distribution because their beers were mostly consumed on the premises.
An article in Forbes by Erik Kain, “The Rise of Craft Beer in America,” reported that before 1910 there were about 1,500 breweries, large and small, in the United States. That number fell to zero during Prohibition. After Prohibition, the number of breweries returned to about 750, half of what it had been at the peak. These larger breweries competed with each other, with the number of breweries steadily dropping until reaching a low in 1979 of under 50. In the 1980s, we began to see the number of craft breweries growing fast, while the number of large breweries remained constant.6 According to the Brewers Association, in 2014 there were 1,871 microbreweries and 135 regional craft breweries in operation, the highest total since the 1880s. Craft breweries make up ninety-eight percent of all U.S.-operated breweries.7
James Fallows, author and longtime contributor to The Atlantic, said at MakerCon in 2015 that his own leading indicator for the health of small towns and cities in the United States was whether they had a craft brewery. The return of local brewing in this country is at least one piece of evidence that national, centralized production is not inevitable or a permanent fixture. Things change, and the monolithic nature of national producers can limit their ability to respond to change.
Many of the things that are made locally today are in the food and beverage category. Farmers’ markets have provided an alternative retail outlet for locally grown fruits and vegetables, connecting producers to consumers. They provide a niche for local producers to thrive in. Yet local production doesn’t displace national production as much as it supplements it.
There is a resurgence of interest in locally made products, particularly when a product reflects its origin. Kate Sofis started SFMade, running it out of TechShop in downtown San Francisco. More than a promotional vehicle for locally made products, its mission “is to build and support a vibrant manufacturing sector in San Francisco that sustains companies producing locally made products, encourages entrepreneurship and innovation, and creates employment opportunities for a diverse local workforce.” In Portland, Oregon, there’s Portland Made, a collective organized by Kelley Roy of ADX. As a space, ADX has a focus on artisanal makers who are seriously into a craft or trade and making something for a living. At Portland Maker Faire, I met David Lewis, who had started the Veteran Bicycle Company at ADX in a ten-by-ten foot space. A machinist and veteran, David wants to engage other veterans in building bicycles. ADX has been a place to start a maker business for many like David. When he needed more space for his business, he was able to share space with another ADX spinout, the Portland Razor Company, which produces handmade straight razors and strops.
Are there other categories of products where local production makes sense? What about furniture? My brother, Dan, owned several furniture stores selling brands like Thomasville and Bassett. For years he went to High Point, North Carolina, for its annual home furnishings trade show. Most of the furniture he bought was made in factories in North Carolina. However, in the 2000s, most of the production moved offshore, and in 2014 Thomasville, over one hundred years old, went out of business. My brother closed his stores.
“Furniture designs and designers are valuable. So are the people who make furniture,” Josh Worley of London-based Opendesk told me. Opendesk is a platform for locally produced designer furniture. On their website, you can choose a furniture design from a collection developed by independent designers.8 Then you can choose a fabricator, ideally someone local with a CNC machine, to make the finished piece for you. Opendesk provides a curated set of designs known to be makeable, and a network of fabricators that can make it. “We give the customer a fixed price that includes the designer’s fee, the maker’s fee, and a platform fee,” said Josh. Designers get ten percent of the price, much higher than what they normally get for a product sold in a retail environment. The largest share goes to the person who does most of the work, the fabricator—about seventy percent of the price the consumer pays. “It’s a three-sided marketplace,” said Worley. Their concept is Open Making: an open, collaborative design-build network. Grounded in open source, this Open Making concept is also trying to respect and value intellectual property: a design is open-sourced, yet they include a fee for the designer as part of the total price.
Could a company like Opendesk become a competitor to Ikea, adding more choice and better quality, plus a sense that the consumer is more connected to the actual producer? Ikea is like fast food. Opendesk is more like a high-end sushi place where you can select your ingredients and watch the sushi chef cut and assemble your rolls.
Opendesk is collaborating in the United States on a program called MakeLocal with 100kGarages, a project that got started by Ted Hall of ShopBot, profiled in chapter 5. 100kGarages is a match-making service, pairing small businesses with CNC machines with customers who have work they need done locally. MakeLocal is “designed around the world” meets “made in your neighborhood.” This kind of design-build collaborative production model could be extended beyond furniture, allowing for more personalization and customization.
The big challenge is to generate enough demand: “If we can get an Ikea customer and convert them, that’s how it goes mainstream,” said Josh. If more people adopt a maker mindset, they will care more about where and how things are made. Hopefully they will prefer that which is better designed and better made.
Another example of collaborative production is 3D Hubs. The company, which got started in the Netherlands, is a network of makers who own 3-D printers and who would be willing to print anything for a fee. If you don’t have your own 3-D printer, perhaps there is someone near you who does and is willing to print your job. You might even be able to walk over and pick it up when it is done. 3D Hubs is approaching thirty thousand service providers in their network. It’s fascinating to explore the interactive map on 3DHubs.com and see if there are 3-D printers in your town and where they are located. Makers appreciate the service, using money they earn to help them support their own 3-D printing habit.
Services like Plethora, Opendesk, and 3D Hubs provide new alternatives for consumers, but they also provide a greater ability for all kinds of makers to work independently. Makers can start small businesses that provide local services around 3-D printers or CNC machines. There are also a number of jobs in engineering and industrial design that once required working for a corporation in order to have sufficient capital and access to a lab or other resources. That work can now be done independently, as freelancers or small agencies, using makerspaces. Engineers or industrial designers may find that they have more control over the development of their ideas. They could become entrepreneurs, bringing those new products to market through online marketplaces.
The manufacturing industry talks about a “skills gap” in the United States, which means there are good manufacturing jobs that go unfilled. In a few talks with the National Association of Manufacturers, I’ve learned that they believe that young people don’t want to work in factories, and their parents hold the same view. The manufacturing industry would like to change that view, so they instituted Manufacturing Day as a nationwide effort to invite people to visit local factories to see what they do.
It’s clear to me that they have more than an image problem. Factory work, at its best, might be seen as something you might have to do, but it’s no one’s choice for work you’d want to do. It’s repetitive, manual work. It’s impersonal. There is a cultural stigma around factories, the kind of images we retain from enormous steel mills with smokestacks.
My own tour of factory duty happened the summer after high school, when I worked in a Ford automobile plant in Louisville, Kentucky. I worked as a vacation replacement at a variety of jobs on the assembly line. I still remember the distinctive smell of the factory. We mostly worked ten-hour days.
I got initiated on a job during which I got in the car during the water test. I climbed in the driver’s seat while the car was pulled forward on its chain into what was essentially a car wash. I had two jobs: to look for leaks and to check that the car manual was in the glove compartment. As I was about to get in one of the cars, another line worker made the car backfire. Everyone laughed at my frightened reaction. Someone tossed me a roll of toilet paper. It was a kind of welcome that never involved “Hi, how are you?”
Another job I had was testing the emergency brake. I stood in a pit as the car rolled overhead. I attached a caliper to the emergency brake line and tested the tension in the line. I did this procedure forty-two times each hour while carrying on a conversation with a coworker who was also in the pit and two other guys who stood above us putting on the back tires.
What I remember most is the number of guys who were my age, having just graduated from high school, showing up to start the rest of their lives as factory workers. They expected to be there until they retired. I saw their situation as hopeless, even though there was a certain camaraderie among them, always teasing each other and telling tall tales about girls, which somehow occupied them while they did these repetitive tasks. I couldn’t wait to get a break from the utter boredom of the job and go outside to sit against the factory wall and read a book for twenty minutes. I could not imagine doing that work for the rest of my life, even though I met men who were happy to do it. They got to go fishing on weekends and vacations. I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, but I couldn’t imagine working at a job in a factory.
I remember telling folks at the National Manufacturers Association that if they wanted to change the perception of factories, they had to make it personal. Manufacturing could be viewed as a creative process. What you can do with a 3-D printer is manufacture a 3-D object yourself. That’s pretty cool. I told them that their message shouldn’t be about jobs in manufacturing, but what people can do to become manufacturers. Those people were makers, and they looked at manufacturing in a different way. It actually wasn’t about factories. It was about what you could build if you had access to the tools of production.
The best companies and universities are considered to be good at developing talent. Yet they often fail at recognizing the talent that they have and misuse it. And there’s a lot of talent outside those organizations. How does that kind of talent develop?
The word talent can make us think that it applies to a special group, leaving out everyone else. I would agree with designer Charles Eames, who said, “I don’t believe in this ‘gifted few’ concept, just in people doing things they are really interested in doing. They have a way of getting good at whatever it is.”9 I see makers as trailblazers. They are among the first to go on this journey that will eventually be shared by nearly everyone.
How is talent discovered? If I were a record producer in the 1960s, I would be going to different cities and visiting small night clubs. If I were a curator, trying to look for new artists, I wouldn’t be visiting museums, because I’d be looking for artists who had not yet been recognized by museums. If I were looking for people doing start-ups, I would not be visiting large companies. In all those cases, I would be looking for talent in the wild, talent that had not yet been identified or widely recognized. I’d be looking for emergent talent, not established talent.
Over ten years ago, I went looking for makers in garages, former industrial parks, dark basements, recycling centers, city dumps, salvage yards, old abandoned factories, and artist lofts. I had to go out in the community and search for talented makers. When we started Maker Faire, the maker community began to come to us, each of them having found their own way. It created a way for us to find talented makers and get to know them.
Many makers are found outside institutions like corporations and universities. They value the freedom and independence that they have by working on their own. A makerspace fosters collaboration, and it can provide a new way to develop talent as well as provide a place for people to discover that they have talents worth developing.
Micah Lande, an associate professor at Arizona State University, once used the phrase “additive innovation” in a talk about makers.10 It plays off the term “additive manufacturing,” which is a fancy description for 3-D printing. Additive innovation suggests that makers, working in the open and sharing their work, benefit from the existing body of work and add to it. Hal Varian, an economist at Google, calls it “combinatorial innovation.”11 Truthfully, that’s how science technology has worked. Inventions—as well as creative works—don’t come out of nowhere; they come out of the connections between people, ideas, and projects.
I have often wished there was an IMDb for maker projects, which is similar to the Maker Portfolio idea I discussed in chapter 8. If work can be defined as projects, knowing the roles of various contributors on a project becomes important, just as IMDb does for the creative and technical talent involved in movies and television. The best way to help talent develop is to make it more visible. In the creative economy, credentials and a career path will matter less than the expression of your talent in projects and performance. What will matter is actual evidence of real work, not a resume listing jobs held.
On a visit to Youngstown, Ohio, I was asked by a person who ran an incubator there how a place like Youngstown could become a hub for innovation. Clearly, they can’t compete with a Silicon Valley model or even what’s happening in large cities. My thought was to orient the incubator to attract recent college graduates—Youngstown State is the local university. Instead of these graduates going out and looking for a job, perhaps they could enter a program where they could develop a larger project. The program need not do much more than provide common space and promote interactions with others in the program. One might offer them a very small stipend—ramen money; after all, they are used to living like students.
The purpose of the program would be to encourage these students not to take the first job they can find, but instead to see if they can apply their talents in this unstructured way. They might fail in developing their project, but I’d hope they’d discover that they like this kind of work and the autonomy it offers. If so, you’ve helped create an entrepreneur or an artist, who still may need more years and experiences to develop, but who can choose their own adventure. If the person struggles to be productive in the incubator, they might decide that they are better off taking a job. Nonetheless, you have given this person the opportunity to explore a different path for success.
A recent study by Oxford University calculated the likely impact of automation in the next twenty years in the United States leading to forty-seven percent of current jobs being replaced by automated systems.12 I know that doesn’t sound like a sign of prosperity to most people, but what if we are able to eliminate useless work and find more useful work for more people? We need more machines and even smarter robots that can do more for us.
Even if such machines do eliminate jobs, they also create new opportunities, or at least new problems to solve, as we’ve seen throughout history. The Luddites, of course, protested that automated looms would eliminate jobs for weavers. The Washington, D.C.–based Columbia Typographical Union in 1903 sought to go before Congress and “enter an earnest protest against the installation of typesetting machines in the government printing office.”13 Linotype typesetting machines automated the placement by hand of individual characters to form a line of type. At a linotype machine, operators typed in the text at a keyboard and the machine composed the line of type. The International Typographical Union (ITU), perhaps the oldest trade union in America, had 121,856 members in 1964. Eventually linotype machines were replaced by phototypesetters, and typesetting became increasingly computerized. By 1985, the same year that the laser printer was patented, union membership was down to 40,000. By the end of 1986, the ITU ceased operations. Anyone at a desktop computer could do what typesetters once did. Those who learned to design for laser printers soon began designing for digital media. Today, graphic designers have job titles such as Web designer and UX designer. This is an example of the democratization of technology, where the ability to create typeset copy went from being a profession to work today that nearly anyone can do—yet a new creative industry was also born.
The democratization of manufacturing technology is creating new opportunities that didn’t exist previously. The industrial revolution was a transition from making things with our hands to making things with mechanical or electrical machines in factories. A new revolution in manufacturing is happening as digital fabrication technology such as 3-D printers becomes more affordable and accessible. As more and more objects embed electronics to make them smarter, we will have a whole new industry that some call the Internet of Things. We will find new ways to combine art and science, engineering and craft, design and technology.
In the future more people will be creating their own jobs instead of finding a job. The question is not what kind of work you can do but how your work can create the greatest value. We have to be constantly learning new skills and coming up with new ideas, changing as the world changes. How can more and more people have engaging, purposeful, gratifying work, the kind of work that makers do? The maker mindset seems more essential than ever: a sense of agency, self-determination, self-reliance, resourcefulness, collaboration, flexibility, and a can-do attitude.
The creative economy requires more than people who see themselves as creative. It requires people who are productive. They have confidence in their creative abilities, but they have the technical skills and a mastery of process that allows them to develop ideas and turn them into something real, something valuable. Or to solve a problem that others find difficult to address. In short, they are skillful at applying tools and methods to important problems.
The creative economy also elevates the importance of collaboration. There are two kinds of collaboration that we might think of: the product of teams, and the product of communities. Collaboration with a team is tight, intense, directed, and closely managed. Collaboration with a community is loose, open, and distributed. Team collaboration is usually an internal process, while community collaboration is external. If you are a leader of a team, you should be able to get team members to agree and assign them tasks to do. Communities have leaders, but they don’t manage people and tasks. You can’t really tell others to do something you want them to do, at least not in the same way you might ask a team member. However, you can ask for help and invite others to do something in an open-ended way. The Internet enables community collaboration in an open and self-organizing way, but it’s not necessarily easy to do. Learning this new form of collaboration with a community is essential to tap into a new source of creativity and innovation that can expand what individuals as well as organizations can do.
There are many questions that we don’t know how to answer: our own future and the future of the planet seems unpredictable. We have so much to learn, and so much of it is learning from each other and combining our individual talents in productive new ways.