DIY fanatics find a cyber showcase
By David Gelles
Published: June 29 2009 22:40 | Last updated: June 29 2009 22:40
Eric Wilhelm was studying for his PhD in mechanical engineering at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000 when he decided that he
needed an athletic pursuit. So he took up kite surfing, a sport that
was then in its infancy.
Because kite surfing was so new, there were no established manufacturers producing reliable equipment. So Mr Wilhelm decided to make his own. He began sewing kites from rip-stop nylon and crafting boards from plywood. “It’s a perfect sport for an engineer,” he says. “You can build all your own gear.”
Mr Wilhelm posted instructions and pictures of his craftsmanship on his personal web page. It soon gained a following, and readers e-mailed to ask where they could find documentation of similar projects.
The website evolved into Instructables, a San Francisco-based portal, and Mr Wilhelm is its chief executive. The business employs 10 and registers 5m unique visitors a month. The site, Mr Wilhelm explains, serves as a sort of collective repository for creative types who want to show off their wares.
More broadly, Instructables is a symbol of the latest evolution of a do-it-yourself culture of invention that has been the lifeblood of California’s Silicon Valley high-technology industry. Apple, Google and Hewlett-Packard are just three global companies that began with a couple of creative tinkerers experimenting in a garage.
From the garage to the
multi-national boardroomSilicon Valley gave birth to some of the world's biggest brands
● In 1938, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard rented a garage in Palo Alto. With $538 in working capital, they began work on an audio oscillator. The gadget would become Hewlett-Packard's first product. Today, HP is the world's largest maker of personal computers and the garage where it all began is a museum.● Thirty-eight years after HP was born, another pair of aspiring technologists got to work down the road. Steve Jobs (above) and Steve Wozniak started work on the original Apple computer in the Palo Alto garage of Mr Jobs's parents in 1976. They soon moved out, but today Apple's sprawling campus remains nearby.
● As the dotcom bubble was swelling in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both just 25 years old, rented a garage in Menlo Park from Susan Wojcicki. There they founded Google, which in 10 years grew to become one of the world's largest technology companies. Ms Wojcicki became Google's vice-president of product management and Mr Brin eventually married her sister Anne.
The new DIY tech culture is made up of a loose-knit group of computer geeks, arts-and-crafts fans and whimsical sculptors and is enjoying a mainstream renaissance, thanks in part to television programmes, magazines and festivals that celebrate the quirky culture of making.
It has also been enabled by the connectivity of the web, with sites such as Instructables acting as online hubs for adherents to find each other and exchange ideas.
“When you build something at home, you put it on the coffee table so people who come over can see it,” says Mr Wilhelm. “We’ve put that coffee table on the web.”
The decentralised nature of the DIY tech culture makes it hard to value it, and there are no estimates of how much it is worth. Yet with hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts around the globe, it is a potentially lucrative market for those who can tap it.
Indeed, scattered among the creative spirits are would-be entrepreneurs who are trying to open up the manufacturing process to encourage innovation and lower the costs of the research and development.
The biggest annual festival for the community is the Maker Faire, held at the San Mateo County Expo Center in the heart of Silicon Valley.
At this year’s Faire, held one weekend last month, more than 65,000 people showed up to admire interactive sound sculptures, handmade carnival rides and fountains made from Diet Coke and Mentos.
In one aircraft-hangar-sized hall, attendees took turns building their own alarm clocks and reliving their childhoods in a giant pen filled with Lego.
Nearby, petrolheads admired a finished version of the all-electric Tesla Roadster and a stripped-down version of the car exposing its battery and chassis.
Bre Pettis is the founder of MakerBot Industries, which sells affordable 3D printers. While most 3D printers cost anywhere between $25,000 and $250,000 Mr Pettis sells his, which can create nearly any three-dimensional form of 4sq in or smaller, for a mere $750.
Users of MakerBots simply create or download a 3D computer file using one of several programs, then set the machine to work. The MakerBot takes spools of spaghetti-like plastic, heats it to 2000C and squirts it out in the desired shape. Already the MakerBot has been used to make missing parts for electronics and the casing for new flashlights.
“It changes the way you live,” says Mr Pettis, “from being a mindless consumer to being a creative participant in the marketplace.”
After just two months Mr Pettis (pictured) has sold 60 printers, half of them to clients outside the US. “We originally had the idea that we were going to revolutionise American manufacturing, but it’s global,” he says.
Maker Faire
The biggest annual festival for the community is the Maker Faire, held at the San Mateo County Expo Center in the heart of Silicon Valley. At this year’s Faire, held one weekend last month, more than 65,000 people admired interactive sound sculptures, handmade carnival rides and fountains made from Diet Coke and Mentos.
Indeed, in March the UK held its first Maker Faire in Newcastle, in the UK. According to the organiser, Ian Simmons, science communications director at the Newcastle Centre for Life, about 5,000 people attended the event. “It’s really coming up in the UK,” he says.
At the Maker Faire in San Mateo, Mr Pettis was set up in a warehouse mostly occupied by the crew from TechShop, a well-appointed community workshop founded two years ago by Jim Newton in nearby Menlo Park.
For $100 a month, tinkerers are given access to plasma cutters, welding tools and industrial lathes.
Members have created everything from homemade electrical scooters inspired by the Segway to remote-controlled video-conferencing robots.
Mr Newton says TechShop is a second home for aspiring inventors in need of a community. “They come to TechShop because they have the drive to be a maker but they can’t afford the tools themselves,” he says. “You always can find people to talk to about your project.”
TechShop is also a growing business. Mr Newton is finalising a $2.5m round of investment in the private company, and has opened franchises in North Carolina and in Oregon. The company declined to discuss its revenues.
The DIY community even has its own method of commerce. While most of the wares produced by makers never see the inside of retail stores – small volumes make wide distribution impractical – there are ways to consume a bit of the culture.
Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade goods, based in New York, has become the community’s Ebay. Makers and non-makers alike can buy anything from a handmade rechargeable light-seeking robot ($55) to a hand-carved footstool in the shape of an elephant’s foot ($280).
Most often it is the maker doing the selling, and buyers are encouraged to get to know the craftsman.
“It’s a different way of shopping,” says Adam Brown of Etsy. “You meet the people and hear the stories behind the items.” Etsy is not yet profitable but he says it is on the path to making money soon.
But isn’t there something incongruous in a profit-seeking marketplace for specialised goods that are supposed to be the antidote to big box shopping? Herein lies the paradox of the DIY tech ethos: much as it would like to escape the confines of the throwaway economy, it cannot exist too far outside consumer culture.
Mr Wilhelm of Instructables does not see a conflict. The DIY movement, he says, “is not anti-capitalist...It’s a backlash against mass market. It’s not like everyone who does DIY is a communist.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Comments