Stills from Maker, a forthcoming documentary about the Maker Movement
Core77 2013 Year in Review: Top Ten Posts · Furniture, Pt. 1 · Furniture, Pt. 2
Digital Fabrication, Pt. 1 · Digital Fabrication, Pt. 2 · Digital Fabrication, Pt. 3 · Digital Fabrication, Pt. 4
Insights from the Core77 Questionnaire · Maker Culture: The Good, the Bad and the Future · Food & Drink
Creation culture has seen some interesting incremental advances this year. DIY remains a powerful buzzword, while “handmade” is no longer a meaningful descriptor. We’ve Kickstarted many projects and undershot even more. The trend of community (i.e. crowd) support of product development and the growth of collective tech shops is heartening, while the Etsyesque implication that anyone with a hot glue gun can make an earning without skill or hard work remains aggravating. Small scale production is on the rise, and large scale domestic manufacturing is showing flickers of a comeback.
Between the highlights and danklights of this year, you can find hints of where the makin’ train is headed next year. Here are some of my favorites with a smattering of points on the good, the bad and what’s in store.
DIY Movement
Along with exciting developments in ever-ensmallening technology and cheaper options for prototyping and connectivity, the social elements of the DIY world got some boosted signal. This year DIY culture has gotten a little more self-aware—a little more precious and corporate too, but hey, wheat with the chaff.
On the good side, the series The Makers of Things and the movie We Are Makers. While it’s easy to fall into self-congratulation and romantic notions about craft and heritage, these largely steer clear of clichés and offer a human perspective. Both documentaries highlight the innate human urge to create, and the current role of “making” as a sort of social currency. Since Doing-It-Yourself is not currently an economic or survival necessity, the choice to make things takes on an unusual air—you’re “THAT person” in a group of normal folks, providing an automatic connection point for community building with likeminded “THAT persons.” The movie also features higher-ups at companies like Make Magazine and Etsy who cop to the financial gain in capitalizing on the DIY industry. So there’s that.
On the badder side… Etsy itself. While continuing to extol its own lucrative role as an individual-empowering vending platform, Etsy also continues to relax the standards for their “handmade marketplace” to the point of meaninglessness by allowing mass produced items to vend side by side with the work of individual craftspeople. While “handmade” is a necessarily complicated designation—where does the act of “making” begin?—this move is understandably considered unfair to the small enterprises that the site supposedly promotes. The owl-loving neckbeards at the top claim that incorporating mass produced products on the site is reinventing the relationship between buyer and producer. Well that sure makes sense, considering the consumer has so few other sources for factory-produced items. Thriving handmade marketplace indeed.
The future? People will keep making things. I promise.
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