Chicago Tribune Notices Make:

Most of our readers are no doubt familiar with Make:, but it’s nice to see it getting noticed by mainstream media. The Chicago Tribune just ran an enthusiastic article. But more importantly, they got it right:

Aimed at legions of passionate tinkerers, the surprisingly successful magazine teaches hobbyists how to do cool things with, well, things.

The real significance of Make:, at least from a Radar point of view, is not just that it is bringing the hacker ethic to a wider audience, but that it signals a new malleability in the physical world, a world that is increasingly infused with computing. While Make: draws inspiration from earlier generations of hands-on magazines (like Popular Mechanics in the 30s, 40s and 50s, when it was still more about things to do rather than things to buy), it is also deeply rooted in the computer industry.

Software and stuff (or bits and atoms as Neil Gershenfeld prefers to say) are becoming entangled along several dimensions, creating the perfect storm that has set the stage for Make:

  1. So many devices that were formerly mechanical are now electronic, and controlled by software. This software is, of course, hackable.
  2. Consumer electronic devices have become so cheap (and so quickly obsolete) that there is a huge surplus of materials that can be experimented on with little or no cost.
  3. There’s a new generation of freely available tools for not just software development but also fabrication. CAD/CAM software used to be expensive. Now you can get tools like sketchup for free.
  4. Even sophisticated computer-controlled manufacturing tools like laser-etchers, water-jet cutters, CNC milling machines, and 3D printers are coming down in cost — to about the cost of typesetters just before desktop publishing took off.
  5. A new culture of popular fabricated art, perhaps best exemplified by Burning Man, has taken hold.

I believe that we’re on the front-end of an explosion of new technologies and business opportunities — personal fabrication, smart objects, file sharing for stuff not just songs, sensor networks that feed Web 2.0 applications without any conscious human intervention, 3D virtual worlds that overlap increasingly with the “real” world — that can already be seen in the explorations of the alpha geeks whose exploits are chronicled in the pages of Make: (and many of whom you can meet in person at the Maker Faire coming up in May.)

Of course, don’t think that Make: is just about electronics or software-related hardware hacking projects. The compass that guides Make: is interesting people having fun with technology, and the joy they have in learning and sharing. And it mines a century of great how-to projects from the mechanical age as well as the electronics age. What other technology magazine would teach you how to make a trebuchet AND how to hack an old VCR into a programmable cat feeder?

The other nice thing about the Chicago Tribune article was the ink that it gave to Dale Dougherty, the founder and publisher of Make:. Dale has been a quiet force in so many technology revolutions — O’Reilly’s original book publishing program, the commercialization of the web, XML, Web 2.0, and now the Maker revolution. He hasn’t gotten a fraction of the credit he deserves. I was thinking of this recently when I read another article in the popular press, this one from the NY Times about consumer advocacy blogs. It gave a nice write up to Gina Trapani’s LifeHacker, but traced the term “life hacking” only back as far as Danny O’Brien. Of course, Dale was the one who started the popular rehabilitation of the term “hacks” with the Hacks series that he started four years ago for O’Reilly (and has now taken over publishing responsibility for once again, along with the new hackszine blog.)

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