Human beings have been making things
for approximately 1.76 million years.
We are caught between two opposing forces.
Our tendency to produce more and more stuff
that we're literally drowning in,
but the other is our human ability to make things.
We've moved too far into just being consumers.
We've forgotten to be makers.
You know in the old days people knew how to make and fix things.
In the morning there was a pile of plastic pellets
and in the afternoon there was a toaster.
And I did it.
And it wouldn't have happened without me.
This was one of those pizza things that they have pizza.
This is a broken pen, and I don't know what this was.
That was the back of a motor.
Oh.
This hands-on I'm not going to take the world
as something you just buy,
I'm going to take it as something you make –
that's kind of the maker spirit.
Children! The maker faire's only official UFO.
We put the U in UFO.
Well actually we put your kid in the UFO
because this is no cover no minimum no adults.
You must be this is high to ride this ride.
You are an example. You must be this high, right there.
That's all.
When kids see somebody making something cool,
they aspire to it.
There's a whole set of little things that make kids growing up thinking
it's a reasonable thing to do to make things.
And I think that's going to be one of the enduring legacies
of make magazine and the Maker Faire,
that we've created a new generation of makers.
Dale had this brilliant idea pitched to me 2004
in the back of our taxi cab at our open source convention,
and I said it sounds like a great idea, go for it.
DIY is something that happens at home.
It's been traditionally invisible.
Now Maker faire helps to flush that out.
You see a lot more than what you might have expected to find.
Seeing people creating physical things,
and as opposed to digital things.
We want to hack this physical world in the way
that we've been used to hacking computers.
This wonderful thing that Dale did
where he said being a maker is just not taking the world as its given.
That's – you know, it gives me an identity.
I began with nothing or began with a set of raw materials
and ended up with something that say it was a rocket.
And the rocket went up in the air, and boom,
I did that.
People doing crazy projects –
sending up an old digital camera in a kite for aerial photography.
A guy built a programmable cat feeder out of an old VCR.
These are the kinds of projects that were in make magazine –
Dale called it technology n your own time.
He had this slogan: if you can't open it, you don't own it.
When I was very young I was in love with animation.
But I found myself flowing more into sculpture
because I, I realized that for my own temperament,
the effort and time involved to make the thing actually move
is about the same as the effort and time involved
to make an animation.
So all of these things are just
a little sort of closed loop of a single instance.
I never quite get to make the whole story,
but I content myself with making individual frames.
I've had a lot of good luck with craigslist and,
you know, second hand.
This stuff is all garbage.
If it isn't sorted in a way that makes sense to me,
than I'm just warehousing garbage.
If things have their place, and I know where they are,
then this is a stockpile of valuable material.
These things are treasures to me,
but not if I can't access them and remember where they are.
But it still gives me a lot of pleasure
just to be able to have this shopping center of old crap.
We have to make sure these guys don't move around
or they start to butt their heads together.
I found myself in an interesting sort of gap
between the maker movement and the art world.
A majority of people are excited about it,
but they want to know what's it for.
If you have to ask what's art for,
then chances are you will never need art in your home.
If you aren't exposed to art you,
you need to be made aware of what can happen
when somebody really lets their imagination run.
In the 50's a lot of this,
say tinkering existed and, happened in isolation.
Like we have phrases ike the lone tinkerer
who's in his garage doing things
and no one else really knew what he was up to.
But I think today we sort of see this social tinker,
which is a different archetype in a way of someone who is doing it
and is communicating to other people.
A little device that has funny noises,
it has knobs where you can adjust the sound.
And you know in many ways a good maker project
has these qualities that,
you build something but you get to play with it,
and it engages you after you build it,
it isn't something that you just build and put up on a shelf.
It's, it's something you walk around, say hey listen to this!
And you know one of the responses
might be "Hey where do i get one of those?"
Well, build it yourself, and here are the instructions on how to do that.
So, um, that's a tesla coil and this is a small version of one.
Um, we have a tesla coil project in the magazine which is behind you.
So it's a children's' toy, inside of it,
I can't open it here but is an arduino that is processing.
And then we have a pr sensor I think they have it choked off
Yeah, but the idea is the monkey bangs the cymbals
and scares the cat away.
There we go.
Good to see you, thanks for coming up here.
I'm glad to have you here.
so I'm Sylvia or super awesome Sylvia.
I'm from Albourne California
and I make Sylvia's super awesome Maker show.
Um, I was really interested and curious about how things work when I was five.
Um, We went to maker faire and my dad and my family were very inspired
about how family friendly
and how amazing the maker movement was and how educational it was.
I learned to solder when I was seven,
when I was eight the Make Company wanted me to make some shows for them
and I've done that ever since.
Welcome to super awesome Sylvia's maker show. Episode 3.
Before we get going, let's get rid of these pesky black bars.
That's better.
You will be making what we call
The Randomly Influenced Finger Flute.
Or the R.I.F.F.
First, pick an arduino and hook your speaker up to ground,
and then to one of the digital output pins.
Get your code from team42.com/rift,
hook up your arduino, press upload, and voila.
Music.
Well, sort of.
On this episode,
it's time to make Adafruit's alarmingly awesome,
Monochrome clock kit.
Psst, the answer is 42.
Thanks monochron.
You're welcome.
Um, recently it's been an inspiration for kids,
more girls to get into science and technology and making.
I hope for that to take off for girls to actually see
that they don't have to be like a fashion designer,
they can be anything they want to be.
Um, I taught my little sister how to solder.
To like, you know you have to hold it like a pencil;
you have to be careful because it's very hot,
Um, and it's just very fun. I really like doing it.
That's all you have for this episode! Try to upload some new clocks.
Don't give up and get out there and make something.
I was in San Francisco and I received a phone call
who politely informed me that my house was on fire.
Dryer fires are the single greatest sole cause of residential fires.
People don't know this,
but if you ever leave your dryer on to finish its cycle
while you go out and run errands, don't.
The damage to the house was confined to the laundry room,
but our entire house filled up with smoke.
So we had to move everything out,
literally every object has had to be cataloged,
photographed, inventoried, cleaned, packaged up, and removed.
515 boxes of stuff.
Um, It's made it very personal.
It's given me a very literal, um, kind of visceral feeling,
of how stuff tends to accumulate in our lives.
It's given me an occasion to really think hard
about what we have lost
in the passage from the hand-made one of a kind
into the world of industrial mass production.
And the key thing that I think that we have lost
is the sense of the value and meaning of objects.
So five years ago, I was just a guy, a dad.
Playing around with Lego with his children.
Um, I tried to find something fun for the kids to do –
they were bored by robots,
they were bored by computing but I thought maybe flying a plane
with a Lego as an autopilot would be kind of challenging.
And that the fact that I could design an autopilot
and a drone on the kitchen table, with my children, with Lego,
gave me chills.
I recognized that this was a moment
that this should not have been possible.
This was ten years earlier,
it was military industrial classified technology.
Ten years before that it was literally impossible.
So I think of the maker movement as being
the web generation meets the real world.
It is the tinkerers, the do-it-yourselfers, the hobbyists,
the workshops of the world,
now working together online and using digital tools to do something
that none of them could do by themselves.
Let's say the first industrial revolution
was the mechanical revolution.
1700s, the replacement of muscle power with machine power.
The second industrial revolution was the information revolution.
But this was not the creation of the computer,
but rather the democratization of the computer.
Putting computers in the hands of regular people
so that they could do extraordinary things.
And that basically replaced brain power with machine power.
The Third industrial revolution is just a combination of the two.
The information revolution
meets the mechanical machine manufacturing revolution.
And the reason it's happening now
is because that essential democratization moment
has finally kicked in.
It's not enough to invent the technologies,
they have to be put in the hands of everybody
and it's that sort of mass consumerization element,
the mass... the mass reach that these new technologies
that makes it a true revolution
because it liberates the ideas and creativities of so many people.
It's not simply hobbyists.
In many cases we have people who are prototyping
a next generation of a product.
People in general are tired of just being limited
to what they see on the store shelves.
They want either something that's different
or they go to the store
and they don't see the product that they want.
I wonder if I could just make one myself.
I think that's what's made the maker movement
happen in the first place.
Techshop is a public access workshop, so you come to Techshop,
join as a member and you use all of our tools
and equipment to make anything that you have always wanted to make.
It's like a gym.
Everybody has ideas of things they want to make.
The problem is they don't have any way
to make that project into the real thing.
With a place like Techshop, or a well-equipped maker space,
you can develop the prototype yourself.
Maybe make 20 or 30 of them,
and put them on the market and see if they sell.
See if people actually want to buy them.
In the United States, the high school shop classes,
the metal shop and wood shop classes are gone,
almost completely gone.
People tended to think that it was the dumb people
that went to shop class.
The smart kids went to the other classes,
all the science classes.
But the dumb kids, they weren't going to go to college
so they went into shop class so they could get jobs in factories.
That's actually not true at all.
It really needs to be a mix.
One reason they used to shut them down was liability.
Hey, Kids could hurt themselves with these machines.
But they were probably shut down
because people didn't value that activity as much as they might have.
I think, again we have public swimming pools.
Kids can drown in public swimming pools.
We didn't eliminate swimming pools,
we figured out how to avoid that circumstance.
So if you want to eliminate risks,
I think you're eliminating creativity.
Ford motor company has actually partnered with Techshop
as a way to innovate faster better cheaper.
But those that have come up with products
that are much more innovative than they could have done in-house.
You know it was Bill Joy who said,
you know, no matter what company you work at,
the smartest people in the world are not going to work for your company.
This is why you begin to see visionary companies
beginning to embrace the maker movement,
because they realize that if you cannot fight them,
you have to join them.
Soon what you're going to begin to see
is a whole ecosystem is going to come in place,
key players coming together.
For example starting with training the makers,
the next generation of makers,
so that once you have an idea you prototype it in Techshop,
you can raise more funding.
The next revolution is going to be manufacturing light.
This will take probably five to ten years or maybe less,
but once this ecosystem is in full swing,
I think it's going to fundamentally revolutionize
not only manufacturing,
but also industries like education,
Healthcare and financial services.
So biotechnology's a relatively new thing in the maker movement.
Um, you know making has been a lot about electronics
and about things that are almost like traditional hand crafts.
So, the idea of a biohacker space is pretty common in biotech today,
although I think outside of the biotech industry
it sounds a little bit futuristic.
One of the main questions I would get a lot would be
I want to know more about the science of what's happening here.
Where do I go, what do I do.
And there are places you can go and you can get,
you know, lectures and people talking at you,
but the fun is really in doing it and in getting your hands dirty
and getting to put on the gloves if you don't normally wear them
and put on the lab coat and be scientist for a day or a week.
Biocurious is a place where you can really harness
and channel that creativity
and that curiosity that you have and really explore.
This is the bioprinter.
It's probably the most well-known aspect of one of our community projects.
So it's a very simple system,
but it's able to actually print out bacteria, E.coli,
which are an improved organism.
And then these are, um,
algae that are growing for another project,
and what they're trying to do, it's a mix of hardware, software,
a little bit of biology where they're trying to make a bioreactor,
to actually cultivate algae in a compact system
that would actually be able to nourish astronauts
as they go out into space.
So we dream large.
I see a huge part of the impact
of any kind of a maker space being education
and letting people know what's possible.
Because we all live in the this technocratic democratic society,
we've got to make these decisions by what products do we fund,
what do we not and what do we support and what do we want to restrict,
and if you don't know how things work,
you've got somebody else telling you what you ought to be doing
with your money and with the rest of your lives.
So people to be responsible citizens
need to be to have a good basic understanding
of a lot of different deep technical subjects.
Biohacking is this great movement just like computer hacking.
You know how can I play with these tools and do new things –
we're doing the same thing that was happening in the 70's.
Taking biology, teasing it apart and playing again playing with it,
looking to see why does it work the way that it does?
And what can I learn about that?
And how can I apply that in my own life?
Um, Open ROVs is an open source under water robot.
So ROVs aren't really new at all, they've been around for decades.
You know scientists use them to explore the ocean.
Um, what's unique about open ROV is that it's so low cost,
and we've bought it from mostly off the shelf parts.
It's got a video camera on board,
it allows you to see what it sees on the surface live.
So I have a first-person view from the ROVs perspective
and it's just live video
and I can control it with a game pack controller
and just like playing a video game.
Open ROV is completely open source and open hardware.
That means that not only is the source code
for the computer available online,
but also the CAD flies, the bill of materials,
you know all the information about
how to build one on your own is available.
So the open source aspect of the Maker movement
I think is really important.
There is the arduino micro-controller
which is one of the first open source projects,
and it really just enabled this broad spectrum of innovation.
People were able to take that initial idea
and then craft it and use it for whatever they wanted to make.
Trusting in the capabilities of the many combined working together,
as opposed to the old model of relying on the privileged few.
So my name is Peter, I work for the Nanosatisfi.
And we build satellites, very small satellites,
they're about ten by ten centimeters.
Filled with arduinos and sensors.
And we let students program and control those satellites
for an education experience.
So people have online curriculums, videos, little quizzes,
an environment where they can actually develop the code and test it
with the click of a button,
send it up to the satellite, and then it runs on the satellite,
controls the sensors and cameras off the satellite,
and then they can analyze the data.
You know I see a lot of my friends playing video games
and they spend hours and hours a day flipping bits.
What I say is let's get them to flip rocks.
Let's make that real life.
Right now we're in the Hall City Cave kind of near Redding California.
And the cave continues underwater but no one really knows what's' there.
Once we actually do deploy this in the water
and see how it behaves in a cave environment,
maybe that will give us the information
that will be useful for designing the next type.
He is exploring, you know, all the deep sea ocean
with citizen scientists,
I'm exploring space with citizen scientists.
We actually, we're also on Kickstarter at about the same point in time.
We also raised about the same amount of money
and have gone on to build our company
around that concept of citizen scientists.
So basically democratizing access to exploration.
3 2 1 Ignition.
And liftoff.
Liftoff of the HTV on a journey to the international space station.
I've verified satellites are deployed.
Station Tsukuba congratulations on a successful deployment of Pico Dragon,
Ardusat 1, and Ardusat X.
Thank you Hsu, from the monitor it looks really beautiful.
I'm sure we captured good footage from the Cupola.
For the most part right now we're just making kits.
Essentially compiling all the parts,
putting them in a box, and shipping them.
We're not just selling these for the profit of selling them
and that's all we get –
there is a huge amount of research and development
that we're getting out of it.
So we're not only open source, we're also crowdsourced.
Using the community that we've developed to help give ideas back.
The way that we use our creative common license says
that if you use our ideas that's fine but you also have to be open source.
So if someone comes up with a better way to do something
then they should be sharing that as well.
People wonder how is it possible to have an open source model.
To give away your design.
In our case the business model is incredibly easy.
We sell products for money.
We charge slightly more than it costs.
And how is it possible to avoid clones and pirates and all that kind of stuff,
and the answer is it's not.
As a matter of fact our licenses
specifically allow people to clone
and we're cloned within days of releasing our products.
But you know, they can't clone our community.
You know frankly the patent system is flawed in a lot of ways.
I mean the whole concept of being ripped off
is really one of kind of the old way of doing things.
If we come up with an idea,
go through the two-year often Patent process,
by the time that goes through we're already a million miles ahead.
Innovation happens so quickly that, you know, it's,
you're going to be slow if you just spend time copying.
I think if you make the analogy between say desktop publishing
where it was in the 80s and maybe early 90s,
everybody's able to publish their own certainly flyers and things like that
but also websites and brochures and all these other types of material.
You know, your, what you could do with your dot matrix printer
on your desk was not that attractive
but you could go to Kinko's and use a pretty high-end laser printer
and make thousands of copies or do things like that
you couldn't really do at your own desktop.
So I think that's kind of what's happening with 3D printer.
You know people might have a maker-bot printer at home and that's,
you know, fun for making stuff that you and your kids will play with,
but if you really need a, you know,
a quarter million dollar 3D printer,
um, that's going to do something metal,
most consumers can't have that at home.
There's a lot of different types of 3D printers.
Some of them extrude plastic filament,
layer by layer in parallel layers creating an object.
The resin or material
is what's used to create the object and less is wasted.
If you compare that to a CNC mill,
they'll typically take a block of material and carve away
the parts you don't want with the spinning end.
In that case you lose that, perhaps not to be recycled or reused.
So when you use traditional manufacturing
there's certain designs that are very difficult to do.
On the 3D printing pretty much
almost anything that you design is quite doable.
So 3D printing has been around for over 25 years now.
And 2 things have happened to make it available to everybody.
One is the quality is getting better,
so instead of just using a low-grade plastic
you have things like titanium, stainless steel, sterling silver.
At the same time the patents are starting to expire
on some of the processes.
As more patents expire on some of the processes
we'll see more mainstream.
3D printing has a place in a workshop,
or a place in an office for a facilities manager,
or a place at home,
or a place in different kinds of industries
like the dental industry.
Cause this a lower jaw.
Or in the architecture industry where students
are looking at different kinds of studies
of wall treatments and light treatments,
or industrial design and engineering.
You know I think 3D printing has gotten a lot of press time.
3D printers are tools.
You know it's a tool to make something,
it has some really good characteristics,
it has some terrible characteristics.
I think it's great that people can get all excited about it,
but the maker movement happens independent of 3D printing.
Is 3D printing going to replace all other methods of manufacturing?
Not exactly.
And the way to easily explain is,
you remember when we came out with the microwave oven concept,
everybody thought the microwave
would replace every single oven and the only heating device
that you're going to have in your kitchen would be the microwave.
And it haven't disappeared.
Because there's certain things that you want to do with the oven
and there's certain things you want to do in the 3d printer,
on the microwave in this case.
So I think it's an extension tool that we're going to have,
and it's going to be easy for many people to access those tools.
One thing we use as an example with a collaboration with SoundCloud.
Choose your favorite song, grab that wave form,
and print it into an iphone case.
So that way you can always feel the memory of that sound,
whether it is your baby saying your name for the first time,
or your wife saying I love you, or your favorite song.
Shapeways is an online 3D printing market place and community.
It's a place where you can buy, make,
and sell anything you want using 3D printing.
You can go there as a maker.
You upload your design,
you see how much it costs in every material we have.
Because we charge by the volume of material use.
We print it on demand and then send it directly to your door.
We then have the shops so you can sell your design.
Then the other way you can use Shapeways is as a buyer.
You can chose something as is and get it printed for you
or you can customize something.
Every single thing can be different
because it's printed on demand
and there's no additional cost for that complexity of customization.
So think we're a mass customization factory.
After we're done printing, err,
we have a block of powder basically in these trays.
Somewhere inside of it has 200 customer parts.
Because we pack so many things in there
that's why we're able to get the lower cost,
provide a good price to our customers.
So in the same way we've seen digital forms change,
music television and games,
we've started to see digital manufacturing
change the way things are made.
It's democratizing the manufacturing process
by giving the tools of manufacturing into everybody's hands.
Over time with industrialization
we begin to structure the way we do business.
Is running corporations and businesses like a big orchestra.
Very top down. Very hierarchical. Very rigid as well.
But in the process we kind of killed this kind of maker movement
which very much is like a jazz band.
It's much more fluid, more improvised.
It's funny because I began my career as a rock journalist
working for magazines like spin and rolling stone,
covering a lot of the great indie bands of the 80s and 90s,
and when I started working on my Tinkerers book,
I realized there was an interesting connection
between indie rock bands who learn to make something out of nothing
and often times had to create their own instruments
out of old broken instruments
and has a lot in common with what a lot of people
are doing in the maker movement these days.
In the music scene that ultimately resulted in bands
like Nirvana becoming huge success stories.
And I think in the maker scene
we haven't really quite seen the huge mainstream effect
of all this innovative activity.
But it will be interesting to see
what the maker movement's Nirvana will be.
So Pebble's a watch that talks to your Smartphone.
Its similar like if you have a blue tooth headset
for voice calls,
pebble is your blue tooth headset for Email,
text, Facebook, Twitter, all of that good stuff.
I was commuting by bike,
I had a new smart phone
and I didn't feel like I wanted to take it out
while I was biking because I didn't want to drop it
on the ground or into a canal
so I wanted to create a device
that would let me see what was happening with my phone
without having to take my phone out of my pocket.
So I started working on a prototype,
I built this small prototype myself using
spare cell phone parts and an arduino.
And then I started working with some of my friends
who were interested in the same project
and we got together and worked collaboratively.
We were expecting to raise 100 thousand dollars on Kickstarter
and that would have helped us build the first thousand Pebbles.
But at the end of the 37 days we'd raised over 10 million dollars.
Almost 69 thousand individual backers who supported us.
Every day I wake up and I put on a product
that I helped make and I think it's really cool.
Crowdfunding is becoming a permanent piece
of the entire financial eco system,
because Crowdfunding is empowering
and allowing ideas to raise to the top based on their merits,
not based on a lucky connection.
Essentially people voting with their dollar saying
I want this idea to exist so badly
I'm willing to put money into it right now.
Our resource is like, err, Crowdfundings,
like Indiegogo or Kickstarter
allows a lot of these makers
to take their hobbies and create companies.
What I really like about Crowdfunding is
before you spend those millions of dollars,
if you can get a functional prototype,
and get people like Pebble did,
to be able to support it on a pre-sale basis,
you have a very strong poof point
that people actually will buy what you're building.
So you get money you get product market fit
to make sure that people are going to buy,
you create a passionate community.
And it's also a great way to attract media attention.
VC would much prefer to come in and look at our project
that's been successfully funded
because they have the data points that people want to buy it.
One of the terms we actually picked up from a video
that was published on the site
and I think it resonates quite well with how we see the world,
is this concept of more art for more people.
I mean if you think about it right now there's only I think 300 films
that make it in Hollywood, at least in the United States.
In the future, millions of films will be made every year,
millions of films should be able to be viewed everywhere.
And that's how Youtube is completely democratized,
kind of video distributions.
You know I would describe this as for the farmer's markets right?
We're the parking lot of the farmers market
exists on where things happen.
Things get made.
Yeah. Err, I made a swing for my daughter this weekend.
So I made that.
And I made kickstarter.
You know obviously it takes a village to make Kickstarter,
everybody behind the company is part of the community
I think the biggest misunderstanding out there
is that people think Crowdfundings is just stranger funding.
It's like a field of dreams, you put up a project you walk away
and all of a sudden money comes and appears out of nowhere.
That's not the case.
It's community funding,
it's raising money from your inner circle first with the goal of,
then raising money from your outer circles
because they will help you bring it in.
And then eventually stranger dollars.
And with Indiegogo and Kickstarter and other related platforms,
suddenly we have found a way to bridge that gap
and start a company and find a capital.
And then you hear those amazing –
I mean, we had a, we had a women there
who for six years wanted to start a local library in Harlem.
And she had talked to every single bank that she could find
and was turned down over and over and over again.
Until someone said why don't you try Kickstarter,
and now east Harlem has a book store because of her.
We actually do need to figure out-
Can we fund a company that makes a device to-
...how to shelve sunflower seeds.
I believe that falls under the gadget empire.
What's its name?
Riley.
Lemnos Labs is a hardware focus incubator.
Jeremy and I know each other from MIT and as mechanical engineers
we were really frustrated that a lot of our graduating classmates,
they had to chose either do I want to be an entrepreneur
or do I want to be an engineer?
And if you wanted to be an engineer
you went to go work for a big boring company.
If you wanted to be an entrepreneur you learned how to write code.
So you know we wanted to you know tell the makers of the world that,
you know, you can start companies involving
manufacturing the physical product too.
So this is one of our consumer electronics companies
and they make a tele-presence tablet stand.
And this allows you to dial in and pan
until it actually kind of feel like you're actually there.
So we actually use this
when we're having conference calls and people can dial in
and look at individual people.
So this is pantry and its' one of our startups
and they're all about making fresh food available everywhere.
So what they do is they create a great solution
where all you have to do is swipe a credit card
and then you just take out whatever you want
and they're RFID experts so
it automatically bills you for whatever you remove.
The challenge we see from current Crowdfunding campaigns
is that many of the entrepreneurs come at this from a software background
but they don't have a hardware background.
And the challenge with hardware is that it costs money.
In all Crowdfunding platforms
you typically will set a certain threshold
that if you exceed that you get the money
and if you don't then you know
there wasn't quite the product market fit.
The problem comes they would end up not setting the threshold high enough.
They would get funded and have a successful campaign
but the second after the campaign closed they just failed,
unless they brought on outside money
and financing that they could possibly deliver the product.
And so sometimes people come to us and they say
hey I've done a Crowdfunding,
you know I'd love to join your incubator,
we're like well unfortunately you've priced it wrong.
Or you didn't account for a CE sticker.
We think it's really important to coach them and be with them
and invest in them really early on
and then use that Crowdfunding as that final validation.
Lemnos? Lemnos is the Greek island where Hephaestus,
god of metallurgy,
which we've sort of loosely defined as the god of technology.
He actually built all the really cool things
in Greek mythology like Achilles' armor,
Zeus's thunderbolt, Helios's chariot.
Lemnos is the island where he had his forge
and built all that stuff.
30 years ago, if I had said
that in 2013 everybody's going to be walking
around with a telephone in your pocket,
you would have laughed at me and said
look you know I saw this movie somewhere of a guy walking around
with a briefcase sized telephone.
You think everybody's going to do that? That's crazy.
But it was almost inevitable that they would get
smaller and smaller and lighter and lighter
and sexier and sexier.
And now everybody's walking around with a telephone in their pocket.
For me to the maker's movement today
is the exact inverse of what we are seeing.
A small number of tinkerers in 18th century England.
And somebody's experimenting with a different way
of wrapping wool around a spindle.
Or somebody else is experimenting
with a different way of getting a cylinder
to seal properly in a piston.
And somebody is experimenting with this
and with a new method of producing a higher
and more consistent grade of steel.
And you know taken by themselves they look like small scale,
not very meaningful experiments,
and then suddenly we have the cotton industry
and the railroad industry.
And steam power.
And the electrical industry.
And the world pivots and it does so
in the extraordinarily short period of time.
Oncoming attractive useful products.
Well-made.
More and more products acceptable
to the more and more exacting demands
of more and more Americans.
All in our own personal choices of colors,
models, sizes, styles, price-ranges and types.
Better made, more dependable,
more nearly trouble-free
than products made in any such quantities
anywhere else in the world.
All a part of the beauty produced so bountifully for you and for me,
by our American makers.
If you think about the industrial revolution,
one of the essences of the industrial revolution
was this idea of mass production.
And the idea of mass production
was that in order to get really high quality at low cost,
you had to make a lot of things.
The change that's going on today
is we can now make things of really high quality –
at low volume at reasonable cost.
You know I've been making things for 40 years or so.
I'm a little bit of both.
I'm both the CEO, I'm the CEO of autodesk,
and I'm also a maker.
You know for many years I kept them separate.
Ten years ago I realized the two worlds were coming together on both sides.
One is the software we were making was being used more and more for makers,
and on the other side I found out
that in my personal work I started to use software.
In the design, in the engineering,
and nowadays even in the fabrication.
Oh, here's one of the things I made a lot of.
I made a lot of baseball bats.
So I made these with my kids.
But the whole story started out with this wood that I bought in,
I bought it in Oregon.
The thing about wood particularly as opposed to the work I do with metal,
like with metal,
I can go to bronze or aluminum or steel any time I want.
You just go buy the metal when you need it.
Wood is different you know, each piece is kind of unique.
I just finished making a piece of furniture,
I made a bed with a piece of wood that I'd carried around for about 25 years.
Sometimes the wood just sits there for a while
and then I eventually figure out what I'm going to do with it.
Right now I'm working on a table using the five axis Router
to carve some sculptural components.
These are some planks that are glued up to do that.
Here's another design that I'm working on,
this is a little 3D print,
been using that a lot lately, of a chair that we're going to make.
So the chair will look something like this
and here's the first – here's a,
one of the first tests that are being metaled –
this just started as a big blank,
use the CNC router to do it.
So I think mass manufacturing,
you know particularly in places like Asia
as well as places like Mexico,
parts of the Middle East, will continue.
The capacity and capability they have is kind of unrivaled.
But I think we've reached the peak
where manufacturing around the world is centralized.
And I think you're going to see a steady advance
in localized manufacturing.
What I sometimes like to imagine
is that a phenomenon such as the maker's movement
is not a return to a pre-industrial type of production.
We're not going to abandon having cars and motorcycles,
and digital equipment and,
err, a reliable food supply and things like that,
in order to go back to poverty and starvation and privation and that.
But we can think about using the technologies
that we have developed over these past 200 years
to return to smaller scale of production err,
that is marked by, um, customization, individualization,
um, small batch production, and, um, things of that nature.
About four years ago when I first started meeting
a lot of these American manufacturers,
what I notices that they would be doing samples
for all of these much larger brands.
Today we're seeing so many of these orders
that would have been sent overseas for mass production
now being produced within these facilities.
And initially a lot of people go overseas
because of the price differential,
but now we're seeing the prices very much more competitive
than they were before,
let's say 20 even 10 years ago.
And we also saw that it's started to become more of an on-demand economy,
was one of the real reasons why
we decided to focus on American manufacturing,
because now what you're seeing that speed to market
is becoming much more important in, within business.
And so for instance what the Netflix,
you know what Netflix did was really be able to bring movies to
so that it's more on demand.
So that you can get it instantly or quicker.
It was important for us not just to have a directory of manufacturers,
but also use this step by step process
in which from the basic concept to product in hand,
simple as ordering pizza.
Where you can basically track this whole process
where they'll tell you Jake is putting on the toppings now,
and it's going into the oven.
I would just say that now is the best time that I've ever seen
for a small business to be creative.
Not only the access to resources
but also just the outpoint and the social.
I believe that there's a renaissance in micro-manufacturing
in the urban environment.
I think there's a whole new generation of manufacturers
that are enabled by modern desktop manufacturing technologies,
digital technologies, laser cutters, 3D printers, digital printing,
all of these technologies combine together
to allow small manufacturers to make things locally.
Rickshaw Bagworks is a local sewing factory here
in San Francisco in the Dogpatch neighborhood.
Throw our door open every day
and invite people in to see how we make things.
Getting beyond that black box and looking back in there
and saying hey what really goes on inside of here?
Very interesting you notice that my sewing team,
all the women are Chinese.
Chinese is the first language in our factory.
It turns out that here in San Francisco
the Chinese community has really been the backbone of the sewing community.
The name Rickshaw is actually Japanese
for human powered or human strength vehicle.
Um, Our sort of tagline is fresh bags made daily
and actually we are using baking carts here
to move some of our fabric around.
This is a totally different scale.
I call this micro-manufacturing,
some people call it boutique manufacturing.
They first go to the laser cutter
where they're cut into the shape they'll be made,
and then they go through a lean manufacturing process.
Product goes through a sequential process,
a continuous flow,
it goes from one step to the next.
And having your own, you know,
manufacturing is that we can design, prototype,
and get into production very quickly.
Local economies and global supply chains can coexist.
I think the two are not mutually exclusive by any means whatsoever.
Some things exist at the local level,
some at the mass global supply chain level,
and there are things that are hybrids as well.
We have a product line here that has components
that are labor intensive that are made in China,
but we bring them together here
and do the customization in our factory,
so it's a hybrid product.
One day my kids were at school
and they were going around the classroom saying well
what does your father or what does your mom do.
My son says oh, you know my dad makes bags.
And someone right next to him said paper or plastic?
Which is the classic line here in the United States
when you're checking out of the supermarket.
Paper or plastic.
So I am the bag guy but I make different bags
than paper or plastic bags.
The United States used to have a hot rod culture.
And a lot of people spent a lot of time taking apart their cars
and putting them back together again.
That culture still exists but not quite in the same way.
If you open up the hood of a car today,
you'll usually see a sealed plastic cover.
It's very hard to tinker with your car now.
One of the tools of the maker movement
is providing today are really analogous.
They can do desktop publishing or to some of the early software that,
um, allowed people to publish things on the web.
It would be really hard to go back to say,
you know, the days of the TRS80 And predict something like Facebook.
So we can't really envision everything that will happen,
but what we can say in more general terms
is that rather than having a few large producers
of common standard almost products that we all use and know,
you'll have lots and lots and lots of people making a few thousands
or tens of thousands of something
which is really just what you're looking for.
So I'm Damien, Damien Declercq.
I've been working with Local Motors now for two years and a half.
And I'm looking after the business development of the company.
One of our mission which is co-creation.
So this means that we are not going for the one size fits all.
We're building small batches of niche vehicles
that are good for a local market.
This is where the main difference is with large automotive manufacturers.
They are building large plants to produce
a large amount of vehicles but all the same type.
So Local Motors makes cars.
From the design of the car to the manufacturing of the car
everything is designed to be profitable at a small scale.
So if General Motors designed a car
and they sold five or ten or 20 thousands units of their car,
it would be a complete catastrophe.
Um, but if Local Motors dos that they're,
they're actually geared up to, you know, break even at that price,
the same way that bloggers undermined a lot of the newspapers and other media.
And Youtube has changed the way we consume television.
And all these things are happening.
You see the same types of things happening in manufacturing.
Basically when we do a project for us, it's fairly straight-forward.
Everything is open source.
You can download the CAD data of the Rally Fighter.
So if you want to build a Rally Fighter in your garage,
well, you have everything that you need available there.
But today when you come to build your Rally Fighter here
at the micro factory,
you pay for the hardware and you pay for the training
and you pay for the access to the tools to build your cars.
So this is how we generate revenue for the company to be sustainable.
So for the moment we have one micro factory,
and we're in this one, yes.
We're planning on opening a lot more, about 100 more in ten years,
and we're also planning to expand
the number of vehicles that we're doing.
So being a maker isn't just about electronics.
It's about seeing things that don't work as well as they could
and learning how to fix them.
So I have this old chicken coop which I inherited with the house.
And we have 8 chickens.
And um, it's not big enough.
You know that's one of the problems
because we travel a lot and we have to leave the chickens locked up.
But more than that,
you come in you'll see that it's pretty messy place
and it's not that well-designed
because the chickens roost up on the post,
and then they poop down into the nesting boxes
where they lay the eggs.
So that was clearly a bad design.
So,
if you look at the design of the new coop I'm building,
first of all it's got a wire mesh bottom
so when they're roosting,
the poop will just fall down
through the mesh down into the area down below
where it's a lot easier to clean.
And the nesting boxes have been pushed to the outside of the coop,
so there's no change that the chickens will,
um, basically do their business where they're also laying the eggs.
There's also a lot of little details.
You know, we had problems with rats,
so we got some, you know, rats can actually squeeze
through chicken wire like that,
but they can't squeeze through hardware cloth.
So little fixes we put hardware cloth a couple of feet down
so they couldn't tunnel under.
You know you think about how do you solve problems.
And it's that sort of engaging designing in a way
that makes something work that's the essence of making.
It's not that you use electronics.
Millions of entrepreneurs were able to come up
with the very effective and simple solutions
using very limited resources.
You know what they call in the US the MacGyver spirit,
you know, which is the ability to come up with the makeshift solution
when you have nothing except,
you know, duct tape and your Swiss army knife.
We needed to figure out a way to have TEMPT draw again.
His eyes were the only muscle that he could move
so we created something that worked within that.
One he was going to be able to talk through a machine
and two that he was going to be able to do his art again.
The Eye Writer we made for under 100 dollars.
Today I made eye writers in my 9 year old son's classroom
and the total cost of those devices were under ten dollars.
And by doing that I don't think
it's going to instantly change the medical industry over night,
but as you reduce the cost of goods sold,
you have the potential to make things more affordable.
For me this represents kind of the Jugaad or the maker spirit.
And Jugaad is a Hindi word that means an improvised solution
born from ingenuity and cleverness.
Some interesting entrepreneurs in India,
one of them is named Mansukh Prajapati.
He actually has created in my opinion
the world's greenest fridge made entirely of clay.
It consumes no electricity and it is 100 percent biodegradable.
It keeps fruits and vegetables fresh for five days.
And it cost only about 25 or 30 dollars.
So the maker movement
is not only spreading across 50 states in the US,
but it's now spreading also in other countries.
And particularly in Europe, especially the western part of Europe,
are very affected by the economic crisis.
The governments in Europe, in France, Spain and Italy
are closely looking at the maker movement
and are beginning to support and fund the growth of this movement as well.
I think that the maker movement represents
power shifting to the individual and power to the people
then I guess you could call it a revolution.
That has to lead to a cataclysmic shift of how economies work.
When you're in the middle of something,
it's very very hard to see what the larger arch of the story is.
Say we are here, and if you step back a year or two,
you'll get a slightly larger perspective.
But if you step back 50 or 500 or even 5000 years,
then you can see this larger pattern.
And, and I think the idea here today
that we kind of see in the maker movement
and what we see perhaps in web developments,
some of the earlier phases,
throughout very small groups of people can have very big impact.
Um, You don't necessarily need
the world's largest company behind you,
you don't need a huge lab.
We now recognize that a, that a, you know,
transformative set of tools are now in the hands of regular people.
We've seen it happen once with the personal computer,
we've seen it happen again with the web.
We have, we know that when you put powerful tools
in the hands of regular people they change the world.
That moment has happened now with manufacturing,
which is bigger than either of those two industries.
And um, if the past is prologue,
this is going to both create entirely new industries, product and companies,
but also transform existing ones.
So today we look at some of the silly things
that are coming out of the maker's movement.
Or the frivolous things, or the things that are just fun.
And we say what are the consequences of this.
And probably, you know,
in the short term the consequences, the implications
are very very modest.
And maybe they will go nowhere,
and it will be a fashion that fades.
but what if it doesn't and can we extrapolate,
what if it takes off and becomes a new model.
And that's the kind of thing
that I think we also want to be watching for,
listening for, and trying to imagine.