Building a maker movement

Makers come in lots of forms.

Some enjoy nee­dle and thread, hot glue and bits of fab­ric. And oth­ers favor 3D print­ers, sol­der­ing irons and cir­cuit boards.

I lis­tened to the lat­ter Mon­day night, but really, a lot of what I heard is rel­e­vant to both maker worlds.

Dale Dougherty — founder of Maker Media and Make Mag­a­zine, as well as a Louisville native — spoke at the Louisville Free Pub­lic Library about “how the make-it-yourself move­ment is open­ing up the world and bring­ing peo­ple together,” as the pro­mos put it.

Make-it-yourself … do-it-yourself … really the same thing.

I like the poem Dougherty opened his talk with. It is from an early 20th cen­tury children’s book.

There’s lots you can do — and who can doubt it? —
If only you knew how to set about it.
If some­one would only the trou­ble take
To give you a notion of Some­thing to Make.

What one’s made one’s self, I’ve always thought
Is bet­ter than any­thing given or bought —
We’re not so afraid of spoil­ing or break­ing it —
Besides one has had the plea­sure of mak­ing it.

So here are a few remarks to show
The kind of jobs you might try, you know:
Cut­ters, cas­tles, car­pen­try, cake –
Any amount of Some­thing to Make.

I kind of want to make a poster of that or embroi­der it on a pillow.

Com­mu­ni­ties need to be made that allow peo­ple to go from con­sumers to producers.

Maker spaces, like the LVL1 Hack­er­space in Louisville, help accom­plish this, he said. But on the other end of this I think there are other groups, like D.I.Y. Louisville and Good Garbage: Cen­ter for Cre­ative Reuse, the founders of which were at the event with me.

Being given scis­sors, paper, mark­ers and glue and being told to make some­thing can feel for­eign at first, but after one is regiven per­mis­sion, per­haps, to think like that the flood­gates — par­don the cliche — open.

Other inter­est­ing points from Dougherty include:

“Behind mak­ing is a sort of cre­ative risk-taking.”

“The only thing keep­ing peo­ple back is training.”

“Mak­ing is immersive.”

“That impulse to make things and cre­ate is in us.”

“Out of hob­bies … we find new opportunities.”

On that note, I want to go sew something.

What would you like to see in a maker com­mu­nity, and how do you think it could help?

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