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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