To some, the very idea might seem like an unresolvable paradox, but the more I think about it, the more I think there is room to think of oneself as a "maker" even when working in a non-physical medium. Namely, I think there is such a thing as a digital maker.
In a previous post, I explored the nature and motivation behind the maker movement - in my analysis, the soul of making lives in the idea of craft, creativity, and the impetus to engage directly with challenges, rather than buying a solution off the rack. The more I think about it, the more I think that working in a digital space can still provide those experiences.
The realization first struck me when I dived into the work of re-designing the look the The Reflecting
Pool. I was frustrated with the templates and level of customization available to me with blogging sites out of the box; after wrestling with the front-end interface, I bit the bullet and started to teach myself HTML (for the second time) and CSS (for the first time - the last time I learned HTML, style sheets weren't yet a thing). And even though all of the products I produced were physically intangible, I still felt the same sense of accomplishment. I could manipulate the code and see the result. I was forced to tinker and tweak and work around bugs and syntax problems, and in the end I built something that I value and which I'll continue to try to craft with time.
In many ways, this post is an invitation from those of you out there that think of yourselves as makers to articulate what that identity means to you. Is it possible to be a maker in a medium that doesn't allow for tactile manipulation? I would argue that it is. App designers are the makers of the digital age, and if we feel the need to exclude them from the movement, then the only way to be a maker is to leave behind all vestiges of technology, and the makers will have to go out into the woods and start engineering their own tools from sticks and stones.
Just sayin'.
Showing posts with label makers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label makers. Show all posts
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Maker's Mark: Protest Against the Efficiency Society
Being "a maker" is a badge that many wear with tremendous pride; along with being "a disruptor" and "an innovator", I'd be willing to bet that "maker" is one of the fastest growing social media descriptors people apply to themselves. The appellation is has become so prolific that many people refer to the identification as a movement - the Maker movement.
So what does it mean to be a maker?
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The bins of goodies in our school's maker space |
As far as I can tell, a maker is someone who physically produces something - i.e. "makes" something, whether that something is a craft project like home-made coasters or super fancy drag-racing box cars. Advocacy for the maker movement is tremendous, particularly in progressive educational circles. I've heard speakers on NPR advocating for the creation of "maker spaces", in some cases as a way to save school media centers as interactive spaces both for information and objects.
The most puzzling thing to me about the head of steam that coalesced behind this maker idea is that 99% of the things that seem to fall into this category are hobbies and crafts that have existed for decades. There is nothing new about this whole emerging cultural meme, except perhaps for the idea that people that make things and interact with objects in a tactile way should be lauded; that "making" should be a point of pride.
The romanticism of the maker movement is, I think, an outgrowth of a broader cultural trend that we all struggle against - the disempowering nature of overwhelming access to information. It's natural to lose the enchantment of building a cool box car when google can show you 500 other peoples' models that put more time and energy into it than you did; we live in an age where the natural pool of comparison for any endeavor has become global in scope. The natural consequence of that for many has been a shift into a life mode totally focused around knowledge processing (understanding things that other people have done), rather than knowledge creation (understanding things by first-hand interaction with phenomena).
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students working on a functional decomposition of a bicycle |
I don't think that's a bad thing. We've outsourced so much of our life experience to the information processing power of the efficiency society, working on the assumption that doing so will leave time in our lives for other, more meaningful pursuits. Has it been the case for those of you out there that have lived through the emergence of the modern information age that your life has become more meaningful? I'd be willing to bet that the answer is no.
The maker movement is an expression in the Zeitgeist of this intangible sense of loss we've collectively experienced; a realization that what makes our life meaningful isn't connection to a vast and powerful apparatus of data analysis, but the thousands of small discoveries that populate a life of curiosity and engagement with the present.
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