Comment by legerdemain
2 months ago
A different take: joining one of these spaces (in the bay area) has exposed me to a weird and unpleasant underbelly of society that I barely knew existed. It's like the worst of Reddit, but in real life. People who want you to work on their projects "for the exposure," crypto scammers and people who are very naive and enthusiastic about crypto, depressed unemployable people, people who secretly live on the lobby couches, elderly people just watching videos all day, get-rich-quick people, people who are always "starting to learn" for years at a time, it's quite an array.
Maker spaces declined over time. When I first started going to TechShop, it was people making nozzles for X-Prize rockets, Stanford grad students who needed better machine tools, Burning Man people making props, steampunks making props, and very serious model railroaders making model locomotives. Four milling machines in use all the time, CNC mills, plasma cutters, water jet cutters - heavy equipment. All the usual woodworking stuff. A paint shop with proper ventilation. Autodesk Inventor on all the computers. Lots of very smart people with interesting skill sets. The serious maker spaces were descended from the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT.[1]
By the time the maker movement collapsed, it was people grinding out crap to sell on Etsy, "hand made" on a CNC laser cutter. High school students doing the maker thing to get it on their college resume. Printing trinkets with a 3D printer. Classes for teenagers where everybody built kits. Arts and crafts at the advanced kindergarten paper folding level.
[1] https://cba.mit.edu/
Yup, your second paragraph describes the place I'm talking about pretty accurately. Nothing wrong with Etsy trinkets in isolation, but not if that's the limit of what the tools are used for.
Interesting.
I've had the urge/idea to start a maker space in the Los Angeles area on and off for years. My motivation isn't as much as a source for social engagement as much as starting to lay out a path to retirement that will have me busy at a lower level of intensity. My work does have me engaging with thousands of people every year through trade shows and sometimes a dozen trips every year both nationally and internationally.
I own enough equipment to start a very nice maker space with nearly zero cost to outfit the place. What you and the other poster have said is, however, of concern. Have generalized maker spaces died off or turned into something unappealing?
I've had varying ideas about this over the years. I was a mentor for our local FRC (high school robotics) team for about five years. I enjoyed that very much. Yes, my kids were involved. I tried to re-enter that world and was faced with, well, stupid obstacles that very much telegraphed that, at least here, these teams have turned into unappealing political/ideological nightmares --rather than the "let's build cool robots!" feeling from the pre-pandemic era.
One thought was to create a maker space with specific focal activities. Three that come to mind are robotics, auto racing and RC flight. I wonder if that type of focus might mitigate the Etsy crowd effect you mentioned. I have nearly zero interest in having a bunch of people use my Haas CNC machines to mass produce crap for Etsy. One way to mitigate this might be to attach a cost to using the equipment for making anything to sell anywhere. For example, using a Haas VF-2 might cost $200 per hour plus consumables, etc. Not sure if that would work. You could also limit this sort of production-level work to a certain schedule and, maybe, it can only be done by or with staff. Not sure.
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