We're reinventing a traditional event - the original fairs in England with farmers bringing products and animals to market to share ideas and look at the work others are doing.
The image of the tinkerer in the garage, strapping together bits of junk or spare parts to bring an idea into the material world, has become a solid piece of Americana. It represents a heritage of frugality, raw ingenuity, free-wheeling creativity—and scrappiness. This sense of being resourceful and using what’s at hand has gone missing today in a growing consumer culture.
Dale Dougherty is trying to resurrect this “maker culture” to consider what we can create with technology. Currently the general manager of the Maker Media division of O’Reilly Media, Inc., which he helped found with Tim O’Reilly, Dougherty has spent the better part of 30 years writing about technology. His experience has shown him that the world is not created with ideas alone.
“You have to get hands-on,” he says. “That’s what maker culture is.”
Dougherty began his professional life as a technical writer just as computers appeared on the cultural horizon. He specialized in writing how-to articles and eventually began writing books about computers, most famously, his Hacks series. In 1993, he developed the first commercial Web site, Global Network Navigator (GNN), and in 1995, he developed the Web Review, an online magazine for Web developers.
After the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2001, Dougherty coined the term “Web 2.0” when he saw that another generation of developers were looking to the Web as a platform for a new generation of applications. He says that Web 2.0 also mapped to Tim O’Reilly’s idea of the Web as a platform to harness collective intelligence. It would grow and improve with user participation. It would be open and scalable and infinitely malleable.
“To some degree it’s about technology, but it’s more about people and opportunity,” Dougherty says. “It’s about seeing what people are doing, seeing a pattern to it that other people aren’t seeing— and seeing it early.”
In 2005, recognizing that software developers were looking at hardware and learning to hack the physical world, Dougherty started Make magazine, which is dedicated to individuals with insatiable curiosity and dogged industriousness. It is a dream publication for closet inventors who feel compelled to build, experiment or simply play around with objects and ideas.
Interested in electronic origami? A dummy surveillance camera with a deceptive blinking red light? Lady GaGa video glasses? Read the magazine and make them yourself.
The founding idea of Make is to create a community around the Do-It-Yourself enthusiasts, according to Dougherty. People who constantly want to know how to do something will find a profusion of projects and ideas that excite other like-minded individuals. He calls it “Martha Stewart for geeks.”
But if reading about the ingenious exploits of others is not quite satisfying enough, Dougherty brings all those creative sparks into the real world with Maker Faire, a huge gathering of tinkerers who congregate to share their resourceful—and sometimes quirky—handiwork.
This year alone, O’Reilly Media has organized three separate Maker Faires—in the Bay Area, in Detroit and in New York—with a combined attendance of over 125,000 people. Even though it’s a new phenomenon, Dougherty says it stems from some very Old World roots:
“We’re reinventing a traditional event—the original fairs in England with farmers bringing products and animals to market to share ideas and look at the work others are doing.”
People headed to Maker Faire bring things from their garages, displaying their wares for the purposes of sharing and discovery. “Maker Faire reflects the community and what individuals and small groups of people are doing,” Dougherty explains. “We bring makers together so they can learn from each other and get feedback on their work from a much larger audience.”
The very hands-on nature of what drives Make magazine and Maker Faire is an enhancement of the digital revolution we are experiencing. That is, digital discoveries don’t necessarily situate us more firmly in an electronic universe, walled off from the tangible world in a self-created virtual space.
They also bring us out into the living world, a programmable environment that we can modify to adapt to our desires. Inventors piggyback off digital discoveries by applying them to everyday objects to create something new. Maps and sensor networks, he says, are examples of what can happen when we connect the digital to the physical.
Dougherty senses huge potential sitting in the garages around America. Through Make magazine and Maker Faire, he calls out to all tinkerers to share their industry and eccentric inventiveness and bring their ideas into the open.
“I want to build recognition for people who are doers, makers, producers,” he says. “There is a maker movement growing out of their combined efforts to create and make new things. It’s a hands-on approach to changing the world.”
Thank you!
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