BY ERIK LEONARD
As the co-founder of a makerspace, I end up at a lot of events or social engagements where I’m talking to the public or people that are otherwise unfamiliar with makerspaces and the maker movement. A question that comes up time after time is “Where did the maker movement come from? Why is it happening now?”
This is a complex question with no one good answer and I am by no means a philosopher or a historian so my answer is going to be neither authoritative nor definitive. That being said I will attempt to answer this. The simplest answer to the question of where makerspaces came from is, Europe. Like chiptunes and tea based energy drinks, the makerspace movement is an offshoot of the hackerspace movement. Hackerspaces can be thought of as the lungfish ancestors of modern makerspaces. They share a lot of traits, they are shared spaces where people with similar ideas and goals can meet, they are a means of cost sharing to acquire expensive equipment, and they have a collaborative and communal mindset. But while makerspaces tend to focus on building physical objects, hackerspaces operated in the ethereal realm of software, encryption, and pure mathematics. Hackerspaces helped birth a lot of the tools and software that we take for granted nowadays in the maker ecosystem.
Before we go any further down this path, we need to make a leap back in time. Let’s think about technology prior to circa 1980. If you owned a television in the 1950’s it was a purely analog device, meaning that there was no onboard computer or microprocessor that helped it run, it was a creature of vacuum tubes and dials. It also included something that most devices today lack, if you popped off the back cover you’d find a schematic that outlines how the TV was wired. This is a treasure-trove of information for anyone that wanted to make their TV do something it didn’t do from the factory, or for someone that wanted to repair their own TV. This era of analog electronics that had user serviceable parts spawned a 3-4 decade long era of electronics experimentation. HAM radio, CB radio, early video game systems, and the first mini-computers that industrious proto-makers could assemble from mail order kits were all results of this. In the end though cheap computers would help put a damper on the maker movement for many years.
Let’s flash forward to the three decades spanning the 80’s to the mid 2000’s. There was a massive change in electronics of both the industrial and consumer varieties. Microcontrollers (essentially low power computers on a single chip) were cheap and easy for industrial designers to use, they also offered more reliability over older analog systems. This led to a new methodology in design, why take all the time to design an analog circuit to do something when you could throw a microprocessor in it, and program it to do the task at hand?
We went from having a device that was designed to do a single function to a general purpose minicomputer that happened to have a single function. Everything from video game consoles, to microwave ovens and automobile control systems became general purpose computers with some application specific hardware to help it function. This was a deathblow in the maker community. How do you tinker with something that has zero documentation and inside is nothing more than a few support components and a microprocessor under a blob of epoxy? You could go out and get a good oscilloscope, a logic analyzer, a reflow oven, a decent solder station, and some industrial microcontroller development hardware, and after you mortgaged your house you might be able to try and muck about with tweaking that shiny new DVD player you dropped $200 on at Circuit City. But for most people it wasn’t worth the effort, so many makers turned to software and the web, and thus hackerspaces we born.
However as we well know the maker movement, much like punk rock, wasn’t dead, it just smelled like it. The late 2000’s to present has seen a renaissance in hardware design, the cost of computers is at an all time low, there is a buffet of cheap tools that only a decade before would have cost more than a Camry. So the makers turned software developers have an slew of code tricks up their sleeve that when combined with their hardware knowledge gave us Arduino’s, cheap 3D printers, and all sorts of other amazing open source hardware. We live in a time where the average makerspace has gear that only 30 years ago even the largest companies didn’t have
So back to the question at hand, where did the makerspace/maker movement come from, and why is it so big right now? In my opinion the makers never went anywhere, they’ve always been around, from the early pioneers of electricity to the guy down the street that spends long nights in his garage restoring a vintage car, the makers are everywhere. We had a brief period in the early days of the internet and personal computing where making phase changed into web development and software. But the bar for making is so low that we’ve reached a wonderful time when anyone who wants to can make something truly fantastic.