Aghillo

Recently, there has been a real emergence of what may broadly be called ‘maker culture’, incorporating diverse activities such as open-source hardware, data visualisation, design hacking, interactive products and art installations.

A number of events and communities supporting and facilitating this culture have appeared recently. As an example, Maker Faires now take place in many countries; originating in the USA, the first one in the UK took place at the Newcastle Science Fair in 2009 and was repeated this year, more recently there has been a series of events across Africa. Other examples include the interactive design community forming around the open-source microprocessor Arduino and the Processing visualisation language, events such as Hackerspaces and Dorkbots and groups like the Manchester based Madlab. It has also captured the interest of the literary world through Makers, a novel written by Cory Doctorow. This also fits with a culture around such activities as high-low technology at MIT, the re-emergence of Craft as a social and economic force, Fablabs and in design and fashion hacking.

I’m really interested in how this can support local sustainable (in the broadest sense) development – particularly in integrating traditional craft skills with digital technology skills. This is partly inspired by some thinking around the Bauhaus movement – in particular their ethos of design principles for mass production. However, in this case the design principles would be about taking into account local issues such as local needs, availability of materials, facilities and capabilities. Bauleban perhaps…