I think the points both of you make are important. Everyone should have
the agency (if they choose to use it, not everyone has to be a maker) to
make whatever they like /and/ we should be helping those who want to
build businesses around their making to do so and succeed.
In DoES Liverpool the more commercially-minded makers benefit from the
experiments and skill-sharing of those "just" pursuing an interest; and
the culture of knowledge- and skill-sharing goes the other way too,
along with a greater contribution to the financial cost of running the
makerspace.
James, I think I did a poor job of crafting the sentence you quoted. As
I said earlier in my post "we /did/ deliberately choose to encourage
more businesses", and they do benefit the space. Your point elsewhere
about the utility of laser-cutters over 3D printers is borne out in our
experience too, with there being six more laser-cutters in the city as a
direct result of businesses getting started using ours and then
outgrowing our facilities and buying their own (and of those, four of
them are businesswomen).
The makerspace (/maker movement) doesn't need to protect itself against
businesses, it needs to protect itself against bad actors acting badly.
If we're going to find a route to a future where an open-source,
collaborative mindset and widely distributed (and cost-effectively
scaleable) manufacturing allows a panoply of individual and
earning-a-good-living making, we need to carve out spaces and time for
that to take shape. The risk is that it's co-opted into a
business-as-usual mainstream.
A raft of new artisans succeeding at an arts-and-crafts movement for the
modern day is a good step in the right direction, and we need to be
working out how we carry that forward into ways to manufacture
everything else.
Cheers,
Adrian.
On 12/06/2019 17:35, Richard Sewell wrote:
James - I think from my point of view the greatest value of the maker
movement has been an explosion of people making things that don't
entirely make sense and that are not intended as commercial ventures.
That's not an issue, that's the point. They are learning that they can
pull ideas out of their heads into the real world, they are learning
to envision things and then make them and then learn from them, and
they are making their own marvels
I'm very much in favour of startups and the kinds of enterprises that
have sprung out of the world of makers, but only a small fraction of
the people that want to make things actually want to make it into a
business. It's one of the things about Make's approach that I never
really got on with - the idea that there was a sort of admirable or
even inevitable progression from making things for yourself to
starting a business.
Richard
On 12/06/2019 16:19, James Wallbank wrote:
Hi Adrian,
I'm really interested in this comment:
"There are people in the space who see it as a way to bootstrap their
startup, and there is a risk that it can be exploited by someone only
out for themselves, but the culture of the space mostly manages to
protect itself from that."
My view is that the key to wider adoption of superlocal making is not
just to allow, but to encourage people to use your space to bootstrap
their startup, and find some way to that the space benefits via that.
In our case at "Makers", we manufacture for others for money, so
there's nobody we like better than people who are bootstrapping a
startup and shifting lots of product! As peoples' micro-enterprises
take off, we make, they pay, and they take away items of greater
value than we charge. Everyone's winning!
The issue, it seems to me, is that many makers want to make "just out
of interest" and manufacture fascinating things that just don't make
economic sense. For us, having a shop in front of our workshop really
helps - when you put something on the shelf, you can start, quite
easily, to see what price it must have to sell (not always lower than
you hoped, BTW). Typical maker products, chock-full of sensors, logic
and LEDs, often cost more than people will pay for them.
Getting to grips with the reality of products, and the hard facts of
economies of scale (a wifi enabled, music playing, colour changing
light-bulb retails for £6!) starts people thinking about "the new
economy". Things people are prepared to pay a sensible price for are
ludicrously specific and particular. They're about them, their lives,
and their particular context.
This flies in the face of just about everything we've been taught
(and how we've been taught) about making: look for the common
factors, ways to increase efficiency, ways to generalise solutions,
methods to scale up. Perhaps we need to start thinking about the
unique, the special, the "only works here and now". Perhaps the
things that the new artisans will manufacture in each locality will
be not just the hard to replicate at scale, but the pointless to
replicate at scale.
Cheers,
James
P.S. Was talk of the death of Nettime somewhat premature?
=====
On 12/06/2019 15:20, Adrian McEwen wrote:
There are people in the space who see it as a way to bootstrap their
startup, and there is a risk that it can be exploited by someone
only out for themselves, but the culture of the space mostly manages
to protect itself from that.
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