Building a do-it-yourself culture
Author believes we all start out as born makers
If you talk to certain people about DIY culture, they’ll raise their eyebrows with suspicion, or perhaps fear — as if what you’re describing is an all-or-nothing proposition. The thinking goes that once you accept the premise that there’s pleasure to be had from making things by hand, you’ll be forced into investing in pedal-powered refrigerators and whittling your own cutlery out of driftwood.
Full disclosure: Mark Frauenfelder has whittled a wooden spoon or two. He also once escaped big-city life by relocating from Los Angeles to the South Pacific, where he scraped coconut meat by hand. But he recognizes that not everyone will jump into this kind of life quite as fearlessly as he has.
“You have to find the amount of DIY that works for you,” he says over the phone. “If you’re having a good time, then that’s the right amount. But if it feels like something stressful, you’re kind of defeating the purpose of what it’s all about. Who needs another chore or hassle in their life?”
In addition to making stuff by hand, Frauenfelder is also a multi-faceted writer and editor. In 1988, he cofounded a zine called bOING bOING, which eventually became a widely read technology blog. (At one point, it was said to be the most popular blog in the world.) He went on to work as an editor at Wired magazine, and in 2005 became editorin-chief of Make, a bimonthly print magazine devoted to DIY culture.
He’s also the author of several books, including an illustrated history of the computer, Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World and, most recently, a collection of father-daughter DIY craft ideas called Maker Dad (New Harvest).
Next week, Frauenfelder will bring his philosophy of making to the Stanley A. Milner branch of the EPL. Starting on Monday night, he’ll be hosting three events, including a public lecture and leading creative workshops in the Makerspace. Full details are available at epl.ca/ make with mark.
Each of Frauenfelder’s events in town is intended for all ages. That’s in large part because he believes children are natural-born makers. He likes to tap into that enthusiasm while it’s still fresh — and before it gets pounded out of them by, among other things, the public school system.
“What (kids are) taught is that making mistakes leads to bad grades,” Frauenfelder says. “No one wants bad grades, so they end up thinking that mistakes are something to be avoided. How do you avoid mistakes? By not trying new things.”
And that fear of doing something wrong only gets reinforced when those kids grow up and get jobs. “People want to stay in that narrowly defined path, where they’re confident of their narrow scope of skills, rather than looking at mistakes as teachers.”
In fact, “mistakes are excellent teachers. That’s where people do most of their learning.”
Frauenfelder is a public face of a much larger movement. In recent years, communities have formed around reconnecting themselves to the idea of building things by hand. For Frauenfelder, socalled modern makers aren’t just interested in one project, but are “broad-spectrum enthusiasts” who “want to be an active participant in the human-made and human-designed world around them.”
The rise of the Internet has contributed to this, obviously. But Frauenfelder believes that modern makers have actively worked to lower the barriers to entry, in a spirit of benevolence that didn’t exist before.
“The makers themselves have become interested in making tools, systems and organizations for other people to easily become makers. That’s a pretty profound event in the world of making.
“What we’re seeing is the end of the advantage that organizations usually had. You think of Sony making something: they required an R & D department, prototyping, manufacturing, marketing, sales and distribution. There are (now) low-cost, DIY alternatives to all of those things.”
Freed from the brute machinery of capitalism, today’s enthusiast makers see no need to hoard patents, or to develop only those products that might turn a profit. Instead, they are able to pursue the noble task of Creating the Coolest Possible Thing.
I ask Frauenfelder whether there were any DIY projects he’s still itching to try out. Sure enough, he tells me how neat it would be to develop small-electronics cases made of polymer clay — and before long he’s switched into full maker mode, daydreaming about the logistics required to build a mini guitar amp that way.
The trial and error, he reminds me, would be part of the fun.
“It takes a bunch of prototypes before you get to something that feels good. And that’s another thing I learned: don’t expect the first one to be the final one. The first one just helps you determine whether something works at all. Then, once you get it working, you figure out how to improve it. It takes several iterations to get out all the bugs.”