The Maker Movement

Although this aricle on the “Maker Movement”  is interesting , it comes across mainly as an ad for the 3-D printer.

Collaboration and transparency are at the heart of Anderson’s new book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. Here’s its argument: After the personal computer revolution and the Internet revolution, the latest tech upheaval is the “Maker” movement. In a nutshell, the term “Maker” refers to a new category of builders who are using open-source methods and the latest technology to bring manufacturing out of its traditional factory context, and into the realm of the personal desktop computer. “Until recently, the ability to manufacture was reserved for those who owned factories,” Anderson says. “What’s happened over the last five years is that we’ve brought the Web’s democratizing power to manufacturing. Today, you can manufacture with the push of a button.”

According to Anderson, who consciously invokes Karl Marx in his book, new technology has “democratized the means of production,” making it possible for anyone to be a builder or “maker.” Anderson compares the current moment to the early 1980s, just before Apple released the Macintosh, thus making desktop computing available beyond the early-adopter tech-geek community, to the regular consumer.

Today, consumer 3-D printers build models using plastics and other starch-based materials, but Anderson says that by uploading designs to services like Shapeways, one can print in glass, ceramics, and stainless-steel. “It’s not even that expensive,” Anderson says. “It’s, like, $20 to print a metal object that’s beautifully done and you can’t tell that it’s not professionally manufactured.” Other metallic substances like titanium, brass and even gold-plating are possible. “You can do food, cupcake-icing and cakes,” Anderson adds. “How long until you’re printing biology, printing cells?”

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The most high-profile “Maker” tool to emerge so far is the 3-D printer, as exemplified by the Replicator 2 desktop 3-D printer, built by Brooklyn, NY-based MakerBot Industries. Instead of using printing ink or toner on flat sheets of paper, 3-D printers produce layers of material to create 3-D models. According to MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis, the Replicator 2 has been optimized for use with a renewable bioplastic “build product” called Polylactic acid (PLA) that comes in the form of filament on a spool through the printer in order to manufacture 3-D models. At $2,199, the entry-level Replicator 2 isn’t exactly cheap, but as expected, the cost of these 3-D printing devices is coming down over time.

“We’re building a whole new industry in Brooklyn,” Pettis said last week at a New America NYC event on the state of U.S. innovation, adding that his growing company recently hired 35 people, and plans to add more workers soon. (Watch this awesome video of the new Replicator 2.)

As the Maker movement gains momentum, Anderson detects the emergence (or re-emergence) of the American spirit of tinkering and building, re-tooled and made user-friendly for the Internet Age. “When I went to high-school we still had industrial arts, shop class, and home economics,” Anderson says. “There was a notion that those skills were the roots of the middle class. Then, as many manufacturing jobs left the country because of cheaper labor in Asia, we lost that sense that these were skills worth having.”

Anderson says the great virtue of the digital-manufacturing movement is that today’s builder doesn’t need to master an underlying skill-set of manufacturing engineering. “In the same way that you don’t need to know how a printer works to press ‘print,’” he says, “you don’t need to know how a desktop manufacturing tool works to press ‘make.’” Today, you can upload your design to a cloud-based printing service and order 1,000 units of your model. “You don’t need to be a company, you don’t need permission, you don’t need to fly to China,” Anderson says. “It’s just point-and-click, and they take credit cards.”