The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkerers / Edition 1

by Mark Hatch

Overview

A revolution is under way. But it's not about tearing down the old guard. It's about building, it's about creating, it's about breathing life into groundbreaking newideas. It's called the Maker Movement, and it's changing the world.

Mark Hatch has been at the forefront of the Maker Movement since it began. A cofounder of TechShop—the first, largest, and most popular makerspace—Hatch has seen it all. Average people pay a small fee for access toadvanced tools—everything from laser cutters and milling machines to 3D printers and AutoCAD software. All they have to bring is their creativity and some positive energy.Prototypes of new products that would have cost $100,000 in the past have been made in his shop for $1,000.

The Maker Movement is where all the next great inventions and innovations are happening—and you can play a part in it.

The Maker Movement Manifesto takes you deep into the movement. Hatch describes the remarkable technologies and tools now accessible to you and shares stories of howordinary people have devised extraordinary products, giving rise to successful new business ventures. He explains how economic upheavals are paving the way for individuals to create, innovate, make a fortune—and even drive positive societal change—with nothing more than their own creativity and some hard work.

It's all occurring right now, all around the world—and possibly in your own neighborhood.

The creative spirit lives inside every human being. We are all makers. Whether you're a banker, lawyer, teacher, tradesman, or politician, you can play an important role in the Maker society.

So fire up your imagination, read The Maker Movement Manifesto—and start creating!

Praise for The Maker Movement Manifesto

"It’s the same revolutionary innovation model, but now applied to one of the biggest industries in the world—manufacturing."
—Chris Anderson, CEO, 3D Robotics, and former Editor-in-Chief, Wired

"He (Henry Ford) probably would have started in TechShop."
—Bill Ford, Executive Chairman, Ford Motor Company, and great-grandson of Henry Ford

"We are heading into a new age of manufacturing . . . Hatch has a front-row seat and has written the must-follow guide to democratize this new age. This is the book I wish every American would use. It contains the keys to the future of work and joy for everyone."
—Robert Scoble, Startup Liaison Officer, Rackspace

“TechShop is the garage that Thomas Edison wished he had, and thanks to Mark Hatch, it’s open it to the public. This book is a lifeline to a country with a skills gap that threatens to swallow us all. For aspiring inventors and entrepreneurs, The Maker Movement Manifesto is a ‘celebration in the making’—even if the only thing you make is a mess.”
—Mike Rowe, Dirty Jobs

"Mark’s book is pitch-perfect on why the Maker Movement is so important for our collective future."
—Beth Comstock, CMO and SVP, GE

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780071821124
Publisher:	McGraw Hill LLC
Publication date:	09/04/2013
Edition description:	List
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

MARK HATCH is CEO of TechShop, a membership-based, do-it-yourself (DIY) makerspace. It provides the digital and physical tools to make almost anything. TechShop members have made everything from robots and a lunar lander to a successful iPad case and craft businesses.

Read an Excerpt

THE MAKER MOVEMENT MANIFESTO

RULES FOR INNOVATION IN THE NEW WORLD OF CRAFTERS, HACKERS, AND TINKERERS

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By MARK HATCH

McGraw-Hill Education

Copyright © 2014 Mark Hatch
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-182112-4

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CHAPTER 1

Maker Movement Manifesto

In the spirit of making, I strongly suggest you take this manifesto, make changes to it, and make it your own. That is the point of making.

MAKE

Making is fundamental to what it means to be human. We must make, create, and express ourselves to feel whole. There is something unique about making physical things. Things we make are like little pieces of us and seem to embody portions of our soul.

Make. Just make. This is the key. The world is a better place as a participatory sport. Being creative, the act of creating and making, is actually fundamental to what it means to be human. Secular philosophers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Carl Jung, and Abraham Maslow all came to the conclusion that creative acts are fundamental. Physical making is more personally fulfilling than virtual making. I think this has to do with its tangibility; you can touch it and sometimes smell and taste it. A great sentence or well-written blog is creative and makes you feel good about what you have accomplished, but it is not the same as the satisfaction that comes from the physical labor involved in making something physical.

If you come from a Judeo-Christian religious background, whether Jewish, Protestant, or Catholic, then you know that the first book of the Torah or Old Testament is the book of Genesis. Read Genesis Chapter 1 closely. Whether you believe in the literal interpretation of Creation or not, we can probably agree on two things coming out of this chapter. God is a maker, and he made us in his image. It is a very powerful introduction to God and who we are as humans. What do you know about humanity by the end of the chapter? It says, "God made" (or "let," or "created") some 15 times and ends with making people in his image. At the end of Genesis 1, we may not know much about God or humans, but we do know one thing for sure: we were made to make.

There is nothing that can replace making—philosophers, religious scholars, and personal experience make that clear. Wars have been fought when the common people thought they were going to lose access to ownership of their own productive tools. So the first thing we must do is make. The do-it-yourself (DIY) home improvement industry in the United States is worth over $700 billion. The hobbyist segment is worth over $25 billion. The most valuable segment of the $700 billion DIY is the perpetual remodeler, specifically those who have enough money to let business professionals do the work for them, but don't. You might know or even be one of these people. In your heart of hearts, you know you don't really need to redo the bathroom, or certainly not the way you plan to do it, yourself. But you do it anyway. This is because there is more satisfaction in completing the remodel yourself.

A makerspace is a center or workspace where like-minded people get together to make things. Some makerspace members are designers, writers, practitioners of medicine or law, architects, and other white-collar types who come in and start making things for themselves, their families, and friends. They spend time in makerspaces because they just love to make things. They don't need to make Christmas presents; they want to.

Tina Albin-Lax had made a New Year's resolution for 2012. She was going to learn how to make something. She signed up for TechShop's basic laser cutter class and has never been the same since. For $60, she learned how to use a laser cutter. Then she booked it for the next day so she could practice what she had just learned, but she needed a project to practice on. As luck would have it, that evening Tina's sibling called and invited her to attend her nephew's birthday party that weekend. With a flash of brilliance, Tina asked for the names of all the children who would be at the party.

The next day Tina used her new training to make cupcake toppers for each of the party attendees. Using the laser cutter, Tina cut out the name of each child and etched in some nice patterns. She finished them with a nice glossy coat and that weekend put one on each child's cupcake. What child doesn't love to see his or her name emblazoned on something? Particularly something chocolaty and sweet? Not surprisingly, the parents wanted cupcake toppers for the rest of their children and then wanted them for their children's parties. It snowballed.

Soon Tina had an online store (www.etsy.com). Then she began teaching classes on how to launch a business and had a great mention in Martha Stewart's magazine, Martha Stewart Living. Her phone couldn't make it through the day from all the order notifications she was getting. Last I heard, she was working on a book.

This all came about from a simple desire to make something for the first time since sixth grade. An accidental entrepreneur was born. And what was Tina's background? She was a labor organizer.

I grew up playing neighborhood football with a kid named Ben Parks. His dad was a ceramic artist and had throwing wheels, clay, and amazing glazes around his house. One day his dad invited us all to come out and throw a pot. What a great afternoon. I attempted to make a large vase—and after what seemed like dozens of attempts and lots of help and encouragement—I ended up with a sad-looking, lopsided, very small coin holder. It will hold a couple of dollars' worth of quarters. I glazed it beautifully with help from Ben's dad. A couple of days later, after it had been fired, I got to take it home.

This thing is an ugly duckling that will never grow up, but guess what ... I still have it. It's small enough that I've taken it everywhere I have moved. Its only value is that I made it and it is some kind of memento from my childhood. Looking back, I realize now that I was not the target of that day of making, though I still appreciate the gift it was. Ben eventually became a ceramic artist himself, following in his father's footsteps. There is something fundamental about making.

SHARE

Sharing what you have made and what you know about making with others is the method by which a maker's feeling of wholeness is achieved. You cannot make and not share.

We make to share. Each of us is wired to show off what we have made. We get a lot of satisfaction out of the making, but the real payoff is in sharing. Some people are coy about showing their work off. Others are just terrified. One of the reasons we may have stopped making is that what we set out to make and what we ended up with may not match very well. Or others may have ridiculed us for our attempts. "I'm not good at making anything," need never be said again. We were born to make. It may take some practice to get good at some kinds of making, but technology has begun to make creating easy enough that everyone can make.

My favorite question to ask at any makerspace is, "What are you making?"

People open up like flowers when asked that question and given any kind of positive encouragement. In this regard, we are all still five years old.

Interestingly, after six years of working in a creative space, I've been told, "I can't tell you everything, but ..." probably hundreds of times, maybe thousands of times, but I've never been told, "I can't tell you."

Why? We want others to see what we have done.

When I worked at Avery Dennison, we used to let the newest junior product managers help work on the back panels of our product's packaging. They had to work off templates that had been approved and developed for the line, and they had to have all the appropriate approvals; nonetheless, the back panel was "theirs." The young managers would jump into this with gusto, argue over font choices, the kerning of apostrophes, the shade of loam green. I repeat, they cared about the kerning of an apostrophe—the space between a letter and an apostrophe. Look at the space they had to work with here:'s. Can you see it? On a high-resolution computer screen, this is about the distance of two or three pixels, and they removed one! Yet, they would protect their design turf like a pit bull protects its bowl of food, growling when someone tried to mess with their back panel.

Let me put this into context. To be a junior product manager at any Fortune 500 packaged goods company, you have to graduate from a respected MBA program at the top of your class. You have to work between your bachelor's degree and your MBA at another major company with consumer facing interactions. You are among some of the "best and brightest" our schools and companies produce. You will almost always make senior director, VP, SVP, or CEO if you choose, or you will go out and start your own company. If you are a junior product manager at this level, you are a very intelligent, type A, hard-charging, competitive professional.

That said, once the aforementioned products were launched into the channel and we all went to an Office Depot or Staples to see what the final product packaging and shelf positioning looked like in the stores, the junior product managers would rush like little kids to the stacks of "their" products. They would stand in front of them, momentarily admiring the way the products looked on the shelf and then pull a package off the shelf, turn it over, and examine their handiwork. A sense of satisfaction visibly rolled over them as they saw that the typesetters had taken their ideas into final production and the s was just a little closer to the apostrophe because it had been manually kerned. Invariably, these talented, impressive, type A young professionals would turn and say something like, "I did this."

"I did this."

"See the space between the apostrophe and that s? I did that."

The glow on their faces was like a new mother's when holding her child for the first time. Complete satisfaction. The need to show others one's new, beautiful child is embedded in the human psyche.

What is going on here? First, while the contributions that these professionals were excited about might seem insignificant—after all, the difference, distance-wise, between the spacing of an apostrophe that has been automatically kerned and one that has been manually kerned is negligible—but the end product is something that can be bought, taken home, and shown to a significant other. Second, it is public. Hundreds of thousands of these packages are shipped all over the world. Third, it is often the first tangible and public representation of years, if not a decade, of work. It isn't the size of the impact that is significant; it is that there was impact and it was made tangible, and tens of thousands of people would "see" their work. That really is powerfully satisfying, even if it is only the amount of nothing between an apostrophe and an s.

If you make something and don't share it, was it made? If you make something, even something as small as a one-pixel space modification on the back of a package, and share it, you have made something, and it must be shared.

Another aspect of sharing is sharing knowledge and knowhow. The best attribute of a well-run makerspace is the sharing of skills and knowledge. It starts with the formal instruction, but the best learning takes place while one person is building or designing and someone else with just a little (or sometimes a ton) more experience lends a helping hand and the project gets upgraded in the process. The sharing philosophy gives a makerspace its magic. People show off their creations knowing criticism was left at the front door, and everyone feels comfortable asking for help, guidance, and input into projects as they go through the build process. Sharing makes a maker-space a community.

GIVE

There are few things more selfless and satisfying than giving away something you have made. The act of making puts a small piece of you into the object. Giving it to someone else is like giving that person a small piece of yourself. Such things are often the most cherished items we possess.

One of the most satisfying aspects of making is giving away what you have made. Wonderfully, most people still value gifts made by the giver more than gifts that were bought off the shelf. If you do nothing else this year, make one Christmas present to give away. And reflect on the level of satisfaction you get and the recipient receives in that act. It is immeasurable.

If your parents are still alive, they probably are still hanging onto craft projects you made for them when you were a child. Quilts are often handed down for generations. A well-made item, meeting a real need, made by and for a loved one, is among the greatest of gifts.

There is another type of giving, that of your creativity or intellectual property. Embrace Global is a wonderful nonprofit that used TechShop for some of its development work. Naganand Murty was one of the design engineers who came to our space, under Embrace cofounder and CEO Jane Chen's direction, to address the problem of infant thermoregulation in developing countries. Babies who are born even a few weeks prematurely are unable to thermo-regulate, or maintain their body temperatures on their own, and consequently must be incubated within one hour of birth or risk death or serious permanent disabilities. For the hundreds of thousands of these babies who are born around the world every year without quick access to incubators (because they are born in rural areas where the nearest hospital with incubator equipment may be several hours, if not days, away), the problem is especially critical.

The question that Naganand Murty and his team had (you'll meet cofounder Jane Chen in Chapter 3) was fairly simple: Would it be possible to design a simple, affordable "blanket" that could maintain a baby's body temperature at a constant level for an extended period of time? And that was not dependent upon a continuous supply of electricity? Well, it turned out the answer was yes. The Embrace portable infant warmer, which looks like a mini sleeping bag and costs a fraction of the price of other baby warming devices, uses some fancy chemistry and design to make it work.

But here is the most amazing thing. Portions of Embrace's core technology were donated to the organization through interactions with other members of the TechShop community. These community members gave their ideas away freely. And as a result, General Electric has signed on to help distribute the blanket, and Embrace is on track to save the lives of 100,000 babies in the next five years. Jane has been recognized by the World Economic Council as one of the top social entrepreneurs in the world.

LEARN

You must learn to make. You must always seek to learn more about your making. You may become a journeyman or master artisan, but you will still learn, want to learn, and push yourself to learn new techniques, materials, and processes. Building a lifelong learning path ensures a rich and rewarding making life and, importantly, enables one to share.

Making brings about a natural interest in learning. It brings out the natural four-year-old in all of us. "Why is the sky blue?" "Where does milk come from?" "How are babies made?" This natural inquisitiveness seems to be beaten out of most people in school or at home. I'll let the educators in this community help figure out why "project"-based learning seems to fit some learning styles better than others, but it certainly feels more natural. I always found the order we did things in physics class backward. Instead of being taught the formula for determining the ratio of the required output force to the input force and then trekking to the lab to see how a lever works, it makes more sense to first observe the lever in action and then learn the formula for it. This is how the principle was figured out in the first place, through observation. You observe an effect, then build a theory to fit the observation. It may be faster to memorize facts than to experience them, but then I would argue you don't really own that fact. "Hot" is a pretty abstract concept until you've burned yourself.

The world is such a fascinating place. How do you design and build a table? What kind of joints can be used to join the legs to the table? Which are the best ones for what I'm trying? What periods in history used different technics? What glues should I use, and when do I use a screw or a nail, or a brad, or a staple, or a rivet? What woods have which characteristics? What style do I want? What tools should I use? The options go on and on. They don't have to; you can jump in and just do it. Or you can plan and plan and plan. The key takeaway, though, is that you are going to learn something. And no one can take it from you.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE MAKER MOVEMENT MANIFESTO by MARK HATCH. Copyright © 2014 Mark Hatch. Excerpted by permission of McGraw-Hill Education.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments          

Maker Movement Manifesto (Short Version)          

Introduction          

1. Maker Movement Manifesto          

2. Free Innovation!          

3. Communities of Practice          

4. Knowledge, Learning, Control, and Intelligence          

5. Fueling Innovation          

6. Democratization of Tools and Information          

7. Rise of the Pro-Am          

8. Distributed and Flexible Manufacturing          

9. Accelerating Innovation          

10. Changing through Participation          

Conclusion          

Notes          

Index