From Slate:
In the title of his latest book,
Wired Editor Chris Anderson
is clear that he thinks the maker movement will change the world.
Enabled by a swath of new technologies, the hacker culture known for
tinkering with computer software is moving into the physical world,
giving rise to new forms of art, manufacturing, and industrial design.
And as Anderson explains in “
Makers: The New Industrial Revolution,”
this union of Web culture and the real world could change everything
from American manufacturing to business creation to primary and
secondary education.
Anderson sat down with
Slate editor David Plotz Thursday evening at a Future Tense happy hour at the
Microsoft Innovation & Policy Center in Washington, DC, to discuss the power of the maker movement and celebrate the release of his new book.
Of all the technologies driving the maker movement, few get more
attention than the 3-D printer. Cheap computers, feature-rich
smartphones, thriving online communities, and physical hacker spaces
have all bolstered the Do It Yourself mentality, so what makes the 3-D
printer so revolutionary? Makers cherish machines like
MakerBot, but at the end of the day, as Plotz put it, they’re just “extruding some plastic doodad.”
“Let us not discount that extruding a plastic doodad is kind of
amazing just by itself,” Anderson said. The 3-D printer follows a trend
of new technology empowering individuals to create in ways they haven’t
been able to before. Personal computers and desktop printers gave rise
to desktop publishing in the 1980s, when anyone could write, design, and
publish whatever they wanted from their home office. Then publishing
moved to the Web, where centuries of printing technologies fused into a
single “publish” button on a Web page.
We might not be impressed by these technologies today, but the impact
they’ve had on society is undeniable, allowing bits of information to
be shared more easily than ever before. The 3-D printer is the next
machine to do that. It’s just that now,
atoms are the new bits.
To illustrate the point, Anderson described one way his household has
embraced the 3-D printer. His daughters wanted to get new furniture to
put inside their dollhouse. Looking around the web, Anderson noticed
that the available options were very expensive, that choices were
limited, and that it was hard to find something in the right size. So he
went to Thingiverse,
an online community for sharing digital design files. The furniture
hunters found a design for a chair they liked and printed it out in the
color and size they wanted for no more than the cost of the materials....MORE
