Computer interface in a shoe box.
Today I had an interview with Jennifer Baum, a writer for ArtServe Michigan. They're doing an article on the Kalamazoo Makers Guild meetup group. In preparation for our discussion Jennifer was kind enough to supply me with some topics we might discuss and I jotted down some notes while I thought about what I would say. Here are those notes and roughly what I said.
About Kalamazoo Makers Guild...
The Kalamazoo Maker's Guild is a group of people interested in DIY technology, science and design. We more or less pattern ourselves after the Homebrew Computer Club that founded Silicon Valley. Like them, our members tend to have some background in a related profession, but that's by no means a prerequisite. This group is about the things we do for fun, because they interest us, and anybody can be interested in making stuff. We meet every couple of months, report on the status of our various projects and sometimes listen to a presentation or hold an ad hoc roundtable on a topic that catches our interest. "Probably the most useful aspect of the group is that you start to feel accountable to the other members of the group and you're motivated to make progress on your project before the next meeting."
How did it get started...
When I gave up my web design business I ended the professional graphic design association I'd formed on Meetup.com, and then I had room on the service to start another group. MAKE magazine had really caught my attention. I did a few projects from the magazine and thought it would be fun and helpful to know other people who were working on the same kinds of things. The group didn't get going, though, until about 8 months ago when Al Hollaway from the posted to an online forum about RepRap 3D printers at the same time I was building one. He wanted to meet and talk about RepRap. I told him about my Meetup group. We joined forces and here we are.
Meetup.com?
Meetup.com is a great web site because it's a web service that's all about meeting people nearby in person to share a common interest.
About membership and kinds of projects ...
The group is growing steadily now. We have twenty something members and we're seeing membership tick up at an increasing rate month to month. We have a high school student who is working designing assistive devices for the blind using sonic rangefinders, one member who last meeting showed off a prototype of computer interface built into a shoe box, and another member is on the verge of completing a working DIY Segway (the self-balancing scooter) made using a pair of battery-powered drills for motors. Al should be done with his RepRap 3D printer and I've just finished my 2nd. At least two other members are in some stage of building their own 3D printers. I'm building both a laser etcher and a 3D scanner right now, and I'm excited to start playing with the products of a couple Kickstarter projects I've backed. There are a few of us about to start building CNC milling machines, and there's been a lot of excitement in the group around the brand new, hard-to-get Raspberry Pi (a $25 computer.) Almost all the members so far have dabbled in a bit of Arduino hacking. One member is designing a flame thrower for Burning Man. Another is making a calibration device for voltage meters. So, there's a range of things going on.
Where do I see this headed....
Our approach to this group has been to learn from the mistakes other groups have made. All of the other groups I've seen in Kalamazoo start out with facilities and try to bring in members to support and justify it. Getting people to work on actual projects that interest them is something that comes later down the road. It's the, "if you build it they will come" approach. Those groups quickly get into trouble managing the building and funding, and they go away. We're coming at it from the opposite direction. We're gathering together a community of makers first, people who are already doing things on their own. Once we reach a tipping point then we'll worry about the next step, like getting a hackerspace put together. That kind of bottom-up approach is, I think, much more sustainable and durable, and it fits in with our modern culture (particularly in the maker subculture.) It was good enough for Homebrew, so it's good enough for us.
About impact...
Silicon Valley came out of a group like this, so the potential is there for us to have a big impact on the community. Being a college town we have access to a lot of smart people, and Kalamazoo has a strong progressive, energetic, entrepreneurial vibe going on. I think what's more likely, though, is that we will have an impact in aggregate with all the other makers--groups and individuals--around the globe.
"Makers aren't just hacking new technologies, we're hacking a new economy. We're trying to figure out how to live in a world without scarcity."
The unsung official slogan of the RepRap project is, "wealth without money."
I don't know that another story like Apple is likely to happen again. Steve Jobs relied on a very traditional, very closed model for his business, as did most of the people of that era who went on to make a name for themselves in technology. The ethos of that time was centered around coming up with a big idea and capitalizing on that idea to the exclusion of the competition. It's interesting that even then this view was at odds with that of his partner, Steve Wozniak, who was content to build computers in his garage and share what he learned with his friends at Homebrew. In this way Wozniak was much more like the modern maker/hacker and is probably one of this hobby's forefathers.
Makers/hackers today are all about open-ness and sharing -- not in a hippy, touchy-feely kind of way, but in a calculated way that weighs the costs and benefits of being open verses closed. The success of Linux and the ever increasing number of open source software, and now hardware, projects has proven that there's enormous power in being open. "We tend to think that's the way to change the world."
About the Maker Movement....
I know there are a lot of people who are keen to talk about the "maker movement" but I'm not so sure that I would characterize it as a movement. If it is, then it started in the 60's with people like my dad who were HAM radio enthusiasts and tinkered around with making their own radios and antennas. I think that what we're observing and calling a movement is really an artifact of reaching the steep part of Moore's Law. Ray Kurzweil is famous for talking about this phenomenon. The pace of advances in technology is itself accelerating, it's exponential, and moving so fast now that if you're not paying close attention things seem to pop out of nowhere. For makers, technology has reached a point where Moore's Law has forced down prices and increased the availability of things that just a few years ago were far out of reach. We're just taking those things and running with it. In effect, we're just the people paying close attention.
About me...
I started college in the engineering program at WMU, but I couldn't hack it and dropped out. I went back to community college and got a degree in graphic design. In my professional life I've been paid to be a web designer, photographer, videographer, IT manager, technical document writer, photo lab manager, artist, and I've even been paid to be a poet. For fun I do all those things and also play guitar, peck at a piano, and watch physics and math lectures from the MIT OpenCourseWare web site, do exercises on Khan Academy, play board games and roleplaying games, and commit acts of crafting -- woodworking and model making. For work, I now teach at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. I've taught web design, digital illustration and this fall I'll be teaching classes in 3D modeling and 3D printing with the RepRap 3D printer I have on loan there. I live near downtown Kalamazoo with my wife and many pets, including a 23 year old African Grey parrot named KoKo.
Post interview notes...
I mentioned SoliDoodle, the fully assembled, $500 3D printer. The big hackerspace in Detroit is called i3detroit. Also, Chicago has Pumping Station: One. I'm on the forums for both and will be visiting each this summer. The presentation about 3D scanning we had was from Mike Spray of Laser Abilities. You can actually see the entire presentation on my YouTube channel. Thingiverse was the web site that I kept going on about where you can find 3D designs for printing.
