| Adrian McEwen on Thu, 13 Jun 2019 01:27:10 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel |
It seems to me we are facing many challenges: the climate emergency; labour conditions; plastic everywhere; wealth inequality...
Assuming we want to do something about all (or even some) of that, there's lots of work to be done.
The hair shirt environmentalism didn't succeed in the 70s, it's even less likely to succeed now, so we need new ways of continuing to make (at least a proportion of) the luxuries we're used to (Bruce's last viridian note [1] is my go-to on that matter) without just outsourcing it to huge sweatshops in China.
How do we wean ourselves off plastic? Maybe we return to more traditional materials like wood, glass, ceramics, textiles. Apple is CNC milling its laptops out of blocks of metal, so we could do similar with wood. Or look at the experiments in materials from groups like Materiom [2].
What happens when container ships can no longer burn oil to get around? Maybe that skews economics back to more local production?
If we're repairing our products more then every town will need a bunch of people who can design replacement parts and make the repairs. The old Dyson vacuum knocking around DoES Liverpool has custom shapes of nozzles 3D printed and its on-off button is a 3D printed replacement - not to Dyson's exact shape, but perfectly functional. Over time we'll build a commons of parts for everything, but there'll always be customisations and variations.
Open hardware will then have an advantage because the schematics and designs will all be already available for that.
We have pick-and-place machines to assemble our electronics. The geeks are working out how to build the desktop versions, maybe it's only a matter of time before they can start designing the inverse - machines to selectively unsolder parts and sort them into bins for reuse.
That might not be economically viable to begin with, maybe a citizens dividend will give some people enough of an income that they can decide it's more interesting and useful than a job in a call centre.
These are all baby steps, and there are holes in my arguments you can drive a bus through; but they're steps in the right direction and the more of them we take, the more momentum will build into attacking the related ones that seem insurmountable now. How do we scale it all quickly enough? By sharing how we're doing it so others can join in and share their improvements.
Makers aren't the answer to everything, but I think there's an opportunity for us to provide an important piece of the puzzle.
Cheers, Adrian.[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160407032751/http://www.viridiandesign.org/2008/11/last-viridian-note.html
[2] https://materiom.org/ On 12/06/2019 21:31, Richard Sewell wrote:
Adrian - I'd agree with all of that - but can you say a bit more about the last bit: "working out how we carry that forward into ways to manufacture everything else"R. On 12/06/2019 21:20, Adrian McEwen wrote:I think the points both of you make are important. Everyone should have the agency (if they choose to use it, not everyone has to be a maker) to make whatever they like /and/ we should be helping those who want to build businesses around their making to do so and succeed.In DoES Liverpool the more commercially-minded makers benefit from the experiments and skill-sharing of those "just" pursuing an interest; and the culture of knowledge- and skill-sharing goes the other way too, along with a greater contribution to the financial cost of running the makerspace.James, I think I did a poor job of crafting the sentence you quoted. As I said earlier in my post "we /did/ deliberately choose to encourage more businesses", and they do benefit the space. Your point elsewhere about the utility of laser-cutters over 3D printers is borne out in our experience too, with there being six more laser-cutters in the city as a direct result of businesses getting started using ours and then outgrowing our facilities and buying their own (and of those, four of them are businesswomen).The makerspace (/maker movement) doesn't need to protect itself against businesses, it needs to protect itself against bad actors acting badly.If we're going to find a route to a future where an open-source, collaborative mindset and widely distributed (and cost-effectively scaleable) manufacturing allows a panoply of individual and earning-a-good-living making, we need to carve out spaces and time for that to take shape. The risk is that it's co-opted into a business-as-usual mainstream.A raft of new artisans succeeding at an arts-and-crafts movement for the modern day is a good step in the right direction, and we need to be working out how we carry that forward into ways to manufacture everything else.Cheers, Adrian. On 12/06/2019 17:35, Richard Sewell wrote:James - I think from my point of view the greatest value of the maker movement has been an explosion of people making things that don't entirely make sense and that are not intended as commercial ventures. That's not an issue, that's the point. They are learning that they can pull ideas out of their heads into the real world, they are learning to envision things and then make them and then learn from them, and they are making their own marvelsI'm very much in favour of startups and the kinds of enterprises that have sprung out of the world of makers, but only a small fraction of the people that want to make things actually want to make it into a business. It's one of the things about Make's approach that I never really got on with - the idea that there was a sort of admirable or even inevitable progression from making things for yourself to starting a business.Richard On 12/06/2019 16:19, James Wallbank wrote:Hi Adrian, I'm really interested in this comment:"There are people in the space who see it as a way to bootstrap their startup, and there is a risk that it can be exploited by someone only out for themselves, but the culture of the space mostly manages to protect itself from that."My view is that the key to wider adoption of superlocal making is not just to allow, but to encourage people to use your space to bootstrap their startup, and find some way to that the space benefits via that.In our case at "Makers", we manufacture for others for money, so there's nobody we like better than people who are bootstrapping a startup and shifting lots of product! As peoples' micro-enterprises take off, we make, they pay, and they take away items of greater value than we charge. Everyone's winning!The issue, it seems to me, is that many makers want to make "just out of interest" and manufacture fascinating things that just don't make economic sense. For us, having a shop in front of our workshop really helps - when you put something on the shelf, you can start, quite easily, to see what price it must have to sell (not always lower than you hoped, BTW). Typical maker products, chock-full of sensors, logic and LEDs, often cost more than people will pay for them.Getting to grips with the reality of products, and the hard facts of economies of scale (a wifi enabled, music playing, colour changing light-bulb retails for £6!) starts people thinking about "the new economy". Things people are prepared to pay a sensible price for are ludicrously specific and particular. They're about them, their lives, and their particular context.This flies in the face of just about everything we've been taught (and how we've been taught) about making: look for the common factors, ways to increase efficiency, ways to generalise solutions, methods to scale up. Perhaps we need to start thinking about the unique, the special, the "only works here and now". Perhaps the things that the new artisans will manufacture in each locality will be not just the hard to replicate at scale, but the pointless to replicate at scale.Cheers, James P.S. Was talk of the death of Nettime somewhat premature? ===== On 12/06/2019 15:20, Adrian McEwen wrote:There are people in the space who see it as a way to bootstrap their startup, and there is a risk that it can be exploited by someone only out for themselves, but the culture of the space mostly manages to protect itself from that.# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: --- This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. https://www.avg.com# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: