Maker Movement

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Contextual Citation


- John Hagel, Deloitte, The Impact of the Maker Movement [1]



Although the movement started with just a few techno geeks, artists and hobbyists, it has attracted thousands over the decades. A record 65,000 people waited in traffic for two hours to get to the Maker Faire in the San Francisco area this spring. Make Magazine now has a circulation of 110,000.

Maker's Law

On a basic level, the movement is about reusing and repairing objects, rather than discarding them to buy more. On a deeper level, it's also a philosophical idea about what ownership really is.

"If you're not able to open and replace the batteries in your iPod or replace the fuel-sender switch on your Chevy truck, you don't really own it," (

Drivers of the Maker Movement

Sharon Ede:

"In ‘Why Makers Are More Empowered Than Ever to ‘Create’ Today’, PSFK articulates the depth and breadth of the movement:

From Shanghai to Seattle, hackers, tinkerers, enthusiasts, self-learners and entrepreneurs of all ages and abilities are applying a ‘hands on’ approach to constructing the world around them. Leveraging a confluence of digital and analog toolsets, makers are deftly handling both smart styluses and soldering irons to take their concepts from idea to prototype to market reality. What defines the influence, scope and power behind this movement is its optimism in action-the belief in individuals’ ability to enact change, and then to do it. PSFK also cite three driving forces pushing the Maker Movement forward at both the individual and systemic level:

  • Economic

Individuals are empowered by a growing array of alternative ways to engage in the economy — taking advantage of new services and marketplaces to share, shop, sell and scale.

Communities are championing maker efforts to revitalize urban centers, stimulate small business and provide a competitive advantage to attract even more business.

  • Societal

Curiosity, ideology, necessity: whatever the reason, people are relying more heavily on their own hands and brains to meet daily needs. By experimenting with self-sufficiency, individuals are recognizing their own power through everyday action.

Makerspaces and private/public fab labs are popping up everywhere, allowing communities to teach themselves new skills that could revive local business or traditions in craftsmanship.

Massive person-to-person interactions are changing the landscape of information exchange and political action. Rather than waiting for institutional change, individuals are banding together to initiate social reform.

  • Technological

The barriers of access to making have come crashing down, as simplified design tools and cost-effective DIY kits provide individuals with cheap means to make extraordinary projects.

Makers and hackers are pairing indigenous materials, found artefacts or repurposed tools with lab-grade technology to tailor solutions to local community needs.

Knowledge of making, once passed down through specialized guilds, is being digitally codified, documented and shared. The global community of makers radiates outward from these digital networks, transcending both language and geography.’ (



"Open Source Hardware has a loud and passionate following in the hobbyist community. In 2005, O'Reilly Media began publishing Make magazine, a quarterly how-to guide for all sorts of engineering and science projects. Make now has more than 100,000 subscribers and has spawned events known as Maker Faires, which are a cross between souped-up science fairs and high-tech craft shows. Last spring, 65,000 professionals and amateurs flocked to the San Francisco Bay Area Maker Faire to demonstrate projects that ranged from arts and crafts to engineering and science--and many that blurred the boundaries. And as they showed off their creations, attendees also shared ideas and met potential collaborators.

Around the time that Make was getting off the ground, Eric Wilhelm '99, SM '01, PhD '04, launched the Instructables website, which provides a template for step-by-step instructions that lets people document their engineering projects online. Since its users are allowed to comment on other people's projects, Instructables has created a vibrant community of technology enthusiasts who share information on building just about anything--including a computer mouse made from an actual dead mouse, an eight-foot-long match, and biodiesel fuel." (

The History of the Maker Subculture

By Aurelie Ghalim, in the study, Fabbing Practices:














The Prehistory of Maker Culture: the arts and crafts movement

Evgeny Morozov:



Dennett’s tireless social activism bore fruit in other realms, but she lost this fight to aesthetes like Ross. As the historian Jackson Lears describes it in “No Place of Grace” (1981), the Arts and Crafts movement no longer represented a radical alternative to the alienated labor of the factories. Instead, it provided yet another therapeutic escape from it, turning into a “revivifying hobby for the affluent.” Lears concluded, “The craft impulse has become dispersed in millions of do-it-yourself projects and basement workshops, where men and women have sought the wholeness, the autonomy, and the joy they cannot find on the job or in domestic drudgery.”

Although the Arts and Crafts movement was dead by the First World War, the sentiment behind it lingered. It resurfaced in the counterculture of the nineteen-sixties, with its celebration of simplicity, its back-to-the-land sloganeering, and, especially, its endorsement of savvy consumerism as a form of political activism." (


Chris Anderson, interviewed by Vikram Alexei Kansara:

"BoF: What is the Maker movement? What are the forces driving this movement? And why is this the new industrial revolution?

Basically, the Maker movement is what happens when the Web meets the real world. It’s the combination of the Web’s innovation model with a new generation of computer-controlled desktop manufacturing tools that have a democratising impact, much like the PC and the Internet did a generation ago.

I would argue that there have been two major industrial revolutions, with the third one emerging now. The first industrial evolution was about mechanisation; replacing muscle power with machine power and amplifying human productivity by letting machines do the work. The second industrial revolution was arguably the computer revolution. But it wasn’t the invention of computers. It was their democratisation; putting them in the hands of everybody with the PC and the Internet that unleashed a huge amount of talent, energy and creativity which was transformative. The third industrial revolution is just a combination of the first two: it’s the Web revolution meets manufacturing.

The reason that this is even more transformative than the Web is simply that the world of physical stuff is bigger than the world of digital stuff. The manufacturing economy is much bigger than the information economy. And if those same social forces that transformed the world through the Web can be applied to physical goods, you would see tremendous social impact.


BoF: Where do you see the Maker movement in 5 years?

We know that the tools are only going to get better and cheaper to use. I really do think 3D printers will be commonly found in American homes in five years. And the moment you bring a 3D printer into a home, especially a home with children, the light bulb goes off. You are suddenly training a generation to believe that anything they can imagine, they can make. And the fact that the cloud [manufacturing services] side of things is developing equally quickly — they realise that they can make almost any volume and quality they want.

That’s liberating and exciting and it’s going to be fascinating to see what kind of industries emerge. It seems almost unlimited what kind of products can come out of the Maker market. I think what’s going to happen is we get the first billion dollar Maker company. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but the same way you needed a Gates and you needed a Jobs and you needed a Zuckerberg, somebody like that is going to emerge from this movement." (


The Impact of the Makers

John Hagel et al.:









On the need for Maker Incubator Communities

Eric Hunting:

"Though I certainly can't blame people for pursuing things for fun, I've sometimes been a little frustrated by the triviality of a lot of the things you see in the sites like the Make and Instructibles blogs when there's this tremendous need for functional and quality/performance-competitive alternatives to corporate consumer products -particularly in the developing world as a means to improve standard of living and challenge colonial economic hegemonies. Coming to learn about things like the ill-fated Africar project, the Hutterite communities (one of the three branches of the Anabaptists, but with a very different attitude towards technology compared to the Amish), and the tinker communities of the Pashtun region with their remarkable ability to replicate by hand modern factory-produced weaponry I came to realize that barriers to standard of living improvement are often as much the result of Industrial Age patterns of design favoring high-capital-cost tools/processes as it is basic economic situations. I started asking myself questions like, if tinkers can make a functional clone of an AK-47 by hand, why, when they're so cash-poor, are they buying portable generators and refrigerators from China and second-hand Toyota pick-ups from Japan? The answer may be designs that are deliberately intended to be dependent on tools like three storey multi-million-dollar steel presses when there are alternative ways to design things that still work as well even if they don't fit mass production logic. Designs that associate a technology exclusively with a high-capital production method because it secures market control or simply because no other alternatives have ever been explored. This is what Tony Howarth (unfortunately incompetently, perhaps because there was no Open Source model in those days) was trying to address with the Africar. He observed first-hand how western vehicle designs just turned into junk when taken out of their western environmental and economic context and realized that a practical vehicle for the rest of the world needed to be designed to be compatible with very different local physical and economic infrastructures. I've sometimes suggested that the reason auto companies were so reluctant to introduce hybrid cars, and then grudgingly introduced them in the most ridiculously and unnecessarily over-complicated forms, may be that they fear this is a technology so flexible that they can't control it. Once the mechanical power train is gone, you can make a car with anything and your choices of power plants and fuels radically expands. You can just-about build a hybrid car now from almost-commodity components like a computer and that's a scary prospect to corporate dinosaurs used to relying on very exclusive components production/distribution to suppress bottom-up competition. This, I suspect, is also why Volkswagen deliberately killed the Bug. It was too successful, too ubiquitous, and when it got to the point where the only component left that wasn't being made by unauthorized producers somewhere in the world was the bare chassis, they pulled the plug. The Bug was very close to doing to VW what the PC did to IBM -and it's too bad they caught on too soon because the whole world might be different if they hadn't.

So it occurred to me that it would be very interesting to try and create a situation where people had a practical need to replicate as much of the western standard of living 'package' as possible using designs suited to the smallest scales of tools and simplest methods of fabrication possible. I'm not talking about pursuing some ideal of total self-sufficiency by adopting a neo-primitive lifestyle of altruistic self-sacrifice. The idea of absolute autonomous self-sufficiency is fantasy and asceticism is vanity. Even the first colonists in Alpha Centauri will be downloading their favorite TV soap operas and computer games. Nor am I talking about a 'junk world' community based entirely on adaptive reuse, though some adaptive reuse would certainly be practical. There should never need to be a sacrifice in comfort, performance, or beauty just to make things in a different way. I just want to see how much of the Good Life you can pull off without a distant factory given current technology and what the personal freedom/quality of life dividend of that would be. How far can we reduce the exchange between a community and the rest of the world to an input of just commodity components and foodstuffs or raw materials? What spectrum of in-community skills are needed to optimize industrial self-sufficiency? How much cultural and economic impact might the global export of designs from this community have?" (email contribution August 2008)

Reasons for its emergence

Bertram Niessen:

"The last years are witnessing the rise of a new phenomenon generally defined as Makers movement. Its pillar is the network grown around Make Magazine and Maker Faire. Make Magazine is a publication born in 2006 that connects a wide range of DIY projects related with technology. Makers Faire is a meeting held around the USA aiming at the connection of backyard inventors, artists and high-tech crafters. Behind this boom is O'Reilley Media, the publisher worldwide known for its software manuals and for the support to many initiatives related to technological innovation, social entrepreneurship and high-tech startups.

The Maker Faire is only the top of an iceberg of worldwide upturn in new forms of Do It Yourself, that includes communities and laboratories interested in hardware hacking (like Dorkbot), desktop manufacturing (MIT's Centre for Bits and Bytes, the FabLab movement), DIYbio, and many others “backyard” approaches to material production. Similar phenomena have always existed in the world of geeks, but there is something radically new in what it's happening now.

We can identify at least four main causes of this rapid social transformation. Firstly, there is an increasing number of people with high-level education in sciences and technologies. Secondly, this people is now connected through incredibly powerful means thanks to the rise of web 2.0 (and platforms, like Instructables, that allow to create and share extremely complex sets of informations in an easy way). Thirdly, desktop manufacturing technologies (like the open source 3D printing projects RepRap and the MakerBot) and services (like the on-demand lasercutting portal Ponoko) are becoming extremely accessible and cheap. Finally, there is an increasing interest in open hardware projects (think at Arduino: it's cheap, extremely flexible, customizable and even kids can learn to use it). According to many observers, this situation is going to reshape the way we think at the relationships among material production, technology, innovation and society." (

Issues between Maker Companies and Investors

By Alexandra Dean:








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