Fascinating to hear about personal engagement in Making, Graham!
I, too, have been personally, hands-on involved in Making since
Access Space's turn towards digital manufacture, and the interface
of the physical and the digital, since around 2010.
(For those of you who aren't aware of Access Space, it started as
a "DIY Media Lab" which I and various friends who had accreted
around "Redundant Technology Initiative" (lowtech.org) in 2000. It
re-interpreted donated digital debris as resource, rebuilding
computers, installing free operating systems, making them
available to participants, and encouraging and supporting
creative, self-directed projects.)
Part of the motivation behind Access Space was our hope that
digital engagement and skills had the potential to empower. This
proved to be the case in the early 2000s, and numerous time-rich
participants engaged with Access Space, taught themselves and each
other technological skills, and became web designers, graphic
designers, technicians or even better-known artists. (Though
whether "art" is, in the context of networked global capital, a
viable or empowering career for a statistically significant
proportion of its participants is, I suggest, in question.)
By 2010 we'd seen far less business incubation, and
proportionately fewer participants able to self-teach to a level
that it made a real difference to their life prospects or creative
leverage. We saw that hardware and software skills devalued as
pre-installed devices became cheaper, and that the digital realm
was becoming dominated by global digital services, including
social media, that, while they didn't do a great job, diverted the
vast majority of potential digital design clients away from
bespoke, local service providers.
In short, the window of opportunity suggested by the first phase
of the graphical internet was closing. While, in 2000,
speed-reading an HTML primer, combined with a little design flair,
a few copywriting skills, and some sales confidence could make you
a web designer in a month, in 2010 this was no longer the case.
We concluded that when any new technology is introduced, there's
a period of opportunity, before that technology has become fully
adopted or systematised, in which the individual can get involved,
and (in a short time, with a level of skill only one page ahead of
their clients) can empower themselves, converting an interest into
saleable skills, products or resources.
We've seen the same window open and close with blockchain (which
I believe to be illusory, unproductive, and, in the end, simply
gambling). A vanishingly few people made money though
cryptocurrency trading, but now it's dominated by grinding Ponzi
schemes, viral mining fiddles, or blockchain is being repurposed
by multinationals. The moment of opportunity for the individual
has passed.
At Access Space we saw Fab Lab or "Maker Technologies" as a more
genuinely productive line of approach, and, even though many of
the technologies had been around for a decade or more, saw that
the window of opportunity had not yet closed. As technology
requiring significant physical engagement and investment (you need
to buy real-world machines and materials!) the timescale of its
adoption and exploitation by capital would be far slower.
So at Access Space we raised money (thanks EU structural funds!)
and bought a CNC, a Lasercutter, a 3D Printer, Arduinos, Raspberry
Pis, a digital embroidery machine... and set about a research
partnership to explore the potentials of these technologies for
creating local jobs and enterprises.
In the end, for those not in the highfalutin' and disconnected
academic realm (sorry, researchers - you're my friends really!) a
key element of whether a technology is empowering or not is "Can
you get paid for using it?"
And "using it to engage and educate" doesn't count - actually
using it to create product or paid-for service is key. In Access
Space's particular case, we took the position that we didn't care
about "industrial transformation", nor "increasing supply-chain
efficiencies". We cared most about actual, tangible jobs in
Sheffield, not abstract (however numerically significant) jobs in
San Fransisco or Shenzen.
The research engaged with local makers, both individuals and
startup enterprises, and concluded that the technology we looked
at with most potential to generate local jobs and enterprise was
lasercutting, and the one with the least potential was 3D Print.
Even seven years later, we still agree.
This failure, it seems to me, to engage with the economics of
making is exactly what's thus far marginalised the "Maker
Movement". It's also true of the Fab Lab - while it's a powerful
context for education, the economics of fabbing just don't work.
To give a simple example: one of the Fab Lab founding principals
its to engage with a wide range of materials and processes, on a
wide range of scales. For a business to become profitable, the
imperative is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. To optimise manufacture, it's
necessary to reduce the number of processes, and minimise the
variety of materials. In terms of marketing, the key is to focus
on a particular product and market. It is supremely irrelevant to
a person who wants to buy a new pair of shoes to know that you can
also make customised wifi amplifiers, repair bicycles, design
lamps or sell toy robots.
Shoe advertisers (physical or digital) sell shoes, not
"Anything... uhh... including shoes".
The Maker Movement comes out of academia, where the core product
is learning. To the business world, high skill is the enemy.
Skilled processes are expensive - you want your highly skilled
people to be doing as much as possible, over as wide an area as
possible, so you can employ as few of them as possible.
So, with this context, my wife Lisa and I opened "Makers". It's a
shop, where we make things. You can commission us to make things,
or come and make things with us. We run educational workshops, too
- but it's not the mainstay of our business. We did this with the
intention of further exploring the opportunities afforded by
digital manufacture, with a view to uncovering the sustainable
business models that might emerge from it. Having just done two
and a half years of research into the employment potentials of
digital manufacture, I thought we might have a head-start.
Makers is now coming up to its fourth birthday, and we haven't
gone bankrupt yet. (Not to show off, but that fact alone
apparently puts us into the top 5% of UK retail!) We've discovered
a whole load of stuff about digital and analogue making, the
economics and sustainability of local manufacture, that we just
didn't know, and we've not seen the wider Maker Movement really
touch upon.
We've rejected whole categories of product lines, and focussed on
particular processes and products to make our living. We still
make a wide range of things, and we're constantly experimenting
with new ideas, but bearing in mind that we need to create things
that aren't characteristic of the typical maker-space product
("really fascinating, but I have no use for it!"). The objects we
make must have the key characteristic that people are prepared to
put their hands in their pockets and buy them - for a sensible
price - and that means that they must be appealing.
We have a range of clients for our making services, including
individuals and businesses. For individual clients, we're
typically making home decor, but for micro-businesses we're at the
cutting edge of business incubation - people come in with an idea
(often its something crafty, with a very specialist market) and we
help them design and produce their products.
But... get this... around 80% of clients who commission us to
make things, or make things with us, are women. It's a completely
different demographic from the typical "maker dude" who inhabits
our friendly neighbourhood makerspace. Our repeat making clients
are often making money out of making - we're helping to design and
manufacture stuff that they sell. There's also an interesting line
of products that helps people to sell - signage, packaging,
point-of-sale displays.
We're also thinking about how making impacts on our locality.
Traditional retail is in freefall - but we're finding that shops
are being replaced by "makey" and "crafty" services. Our shop was
(twenty five years ago) a greengrocer. Now it's "Makers". On our
little block of 16 shops we see computer and phone repairs, a
dressmaker, bicycle repairs, baking, and of course, a barber and
takeaway food shops. Very nearby we find micro-brewers,
woodworkers, picture framers, upholsterers, photographers...
These sorts of services seem, over time, to be replacing the once
ubiquitous mini-marts and retail outlets that have been displaced
by online shopping.
Recently, we've been a research partner in research into making
(MakEY - Making in Early Years) which has been very interesting,
but again does what academia is wont to do - assume that the
product is learning. In my view, far from being over the hill,
making may now be transforming from academic and hobbyist interest
to actual economic models. I think it has huge potential to
revitalise localities and communities, and I urge researchers to
get involved. (Will lecture for food!)
But let's lose the glamour - and start thinking about real
products, real places, and real business models. Want an example
of "sustainable superlocal digital manufacture"? How about key
cutting? Yeah, it's not so cool now, is it?
All the best,
James
=====
On 11/06/2019 18:43, Graham Harwood
wrote:
I just want to interject a little
into the Post-Maker universe.
I
work a lot these days with the maritime, a technical culture of wooden boat repair that in Essex, I also worked a lot with people who restore old telephone exchanges and people who build steam engines - through having run a free media space in 00 ties were
we hacked, pirated recycled at will. Among the many things that are interesting about these technical cultures is that they produce value for those engaged in the process - but this value has only a limited relation to the accumulation of capital. The maker
phenomena could be seen in this context as a way to monetise the non-discursive technical cultures - a tinkering world that has an unbroken line back to at least the enlightenment but probably before. In 1799 the
Royal Institution of Great Britain was established to put science to work for particular class and keep the theoretical away from a populace that presented a threat (the demon of the French revolution) - The Royal Institution was a place where an artisan
class built technicals object but where not allowed in, or allowed to lecture. Faraday had to have elocution lessons, learn how to eat properly before being allowed to lecture and even then had to be deemed a genius to escape the his class background and address
gentleman. What Im trying to suggest is that non-discursive technical tinkering exist within many technical cultures and long may it remain so.
I'll
tag on a little introduction this I wrote.
“The
science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power.” Karl Marx(1858)
In
1958 the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon published On
the Mode of Technical Objects
to address just this form of cultural alienation implicit in the quote above. He writes, among other things, about two ways in which people come to know technical objects. He says technology viewed from a child's eye, which I imagine he is seeing as, naive
and innocent we gain an implicit, non-reflective, habitual tendency. A baby strapped into a buggy, is given a parent's mobile phone and is happily learning to play a game but cannot yet utter the words to express these interactions. Simondon then imagines
an inverse, a trained adult engineer, reflective, self-aware using rational knowledge that is elaborated through science. Something like an Apple engineer who creates closed technologies imagining its users still strapped in that buggy unable to articulate
their critical needs. Simondon seeks out another form of relationship with technical objects which he finds in the Enlightened Encyclopaedism of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (Encyclopédie
(1751–1777)) in which concrete knowhow is abstracted and assembled into a technical orchestra. Contemporarily, is it worth considering our networked technologies in this mode of encyclopaedism? An evolving off-grid, red-neck, student, coder, geek pedagogy
producing technical information, hacks, howto’s, shakedowns, and open source code repositories, that respond to an evolving technical culture. This technical republic is nothing new, it’s genealogies can be traced to and beyond the amateur experimentalists
of the London Electrical Society and William Sturgeon (1783 - 1850) and the artisanal formation that knowledge can be contained in the object built and it’s functioning is its explanation.
Is
a tinkering internet a critical technical republic? A social space that potentially can break down the state actors with encryption, corporations by opening up software and proprietary technics by hacking them open, making things public? Is the marginal technics
in a teenagers dirty bedroom, the dank basement of a bored salaryman, the ham radio garden shed a strategy to unfold the clean room and its magic men in white coats? Or is this largely a white male space that has eradicated other forms of objectivity and subjectivity
from view? How can we attempt to instate a devolved technics that refuses misogyny, racialisation and yet envisages technology outside of the paradigm of human slave or potential human enslaver.
Harwood
On the mention of recycling I just
wanted to mention the Precious
Plastic (
https://preciousplastic.com/)
project, which is very much in
this vein and currently active. Looks good, I'd like to
build a
recycling machine and melt down some plastic at some
point.
On a more local and mainstream level, my town has a show
that sells
'upcycled' furniture which has been done up (new handles,
repainted with
flower motifs etc). Recycling and maker culture is great
but I'd like to
see more projects which are local or community oriented:
this is
essential to truly address the problem of waste. We
separate glass in my
borough, maybe we could feed that into local double
glazing firms, or
something else.
*stopping here before I ramble on for 10KB*
John
On 2019-06-11 16:27, Jaromil wrote:
> dear Bruce and nettimers,
>
> On Sat, 08 Jun 2019, Bruce Sterling wrote:
>
>> *Well, so much for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 version
of popular
>> mechanics. Fifteen years is not too bad a run
by the standards of
>> an increasingly jittery California Ideology.
Now what? — Bruce S
>
> Felipe Fonseca has seen it coming years before and
express it well:
>
https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/repair-culture-65133fdd37ef
>
> he wasn't alone: for those of us who were into the
"recycling" and DIY
> scene in the late nineties, the Make magazine circus
was the sort of
> poison to kill a movement by sugar coating and
extraction aka
> franchising. While doing that for 15 years, there are
a three points
> it missed to address IMHO:
>
> 1. the right to mod your hardware, esp. video-games
which represent
> the vast majority of new hardware sold and thrown
away around the
> globe
>
> 2. the "peripheries of the empire" aka South of the
World (remember
> Bricolabs?) where DIY is *amazingly* developed in
various forms.
> As usual, we have learned nothing from that, just
advertised us
> westeners doing it better and with more bling.
>
> 3. the "shamanic" value that can be embedded in uses
of technologies,
> as opposed to the sanitized and rational
interpretation given by
> designers in the west. Techno-shamanism is
something Fabi Borges,
> Vicky Sinclair and other good folks in Bricolabs
have been busy for
> ages!
>
> so then, what now? I believe the functional need of
aggregating places
> for "hacker culture" is lowering: everything can
exist virtually as
> software, more or less. Machinery + franchising have
a too high
> production cost compared to their output, not
sustainable at all. Also
> moving hardware around is a *big* effort and the only
ones lowering
> overhead costs for new players are in China
(...Aliexpress).
>
> Plus the acceleration of hardware production resulted
in way less
> sustainability especially in relation to
obsolescence: buy a part now
> then ask if it will be still available in 20 years!
you'll be
> presented an NDA to sign and then discover there is
just a 3-4 years
> plan behind it. Spare parts anyone? Meanwhile is
almost 2020 and there
> is no service to print and sell-on-demand USB sticks
with stuff on:
> what a contrast if you think of the CD/DVD on-demand
industry of 15
> years ago! which partially resists only on garage
music productions.
>
> So, software still offers possibilities, but will it
produce a
> cultural shift? I doubt it will do more than what it
did already in
> crypto, which is already highly controversial and
poisoned of a sort
> of unstable sugar coating mixed with toxic financial
capitals.
>
> At last, looking at the new generations, the bling is
what really
> counts: I guess most "fablabs" could be converted to
> "fashionlabs". Personally I'm planning to revamp
dyne:bolic which
> besides running on old computers and modded game
consoles did one
> thing which is still actual: it was a media
production studio. The
> best part of "maker culture" was its cultural
_expression_, mined for
> its value until exhaustion; but isn't it harder to
express cultural
> values using hardware? Much easier with music and
videos etc. they
> also travel easier.
>
> For more *practical examples* of projects who may
inspire new
> horizons: you are all invited to an event we
(
Dyne.org) are setting up
> in Amsterdam on the 5th July. We will fill the stage
with many new
> faces: 16 projects we awarded with EU funding for
their pro/vision of
> "human-centric" solutions, purpose driven and
socially useful. Hope to
> see some of you, we will also have a new call end of
year, its about
> 200k EUR equity free so lets engage in new
sustainable challenges
>
https://tazebao.dyne.org/venture-builder-eu.html
>
> ciao
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