This is a recording of the keynote talk I gave at the Trenton Computer Festival on March 29, 2025. The theme of the festival was Fun With Technology and I talked about how Make and Maker Faire have been dedicated to people who have fun with technology.
One of the key ideas I talked about is that boredom is on the rise in America and elsewhere. Despite our having smartphones and all kinds of technology, a number of people report that they are bored at home, at work, and at school. One reason is that their experience of technology is mostly passive. They do what consumers do. They don’t create or make.
I find makers so fascinating because they are not bored and neither are they boring. They are active and engaged. They know that the best antidote to boredom is to just do something. As I say, do something, preferably with others who are present doing something. It’s what makes life fun.
We need to get more people doing things they would enjoy doing, like makers.
Note: I slightly edited this talk to remove some references to the slides I used in the talk.
Transcript
Larry: So this year we decided on a theme of Fun With Technology. And what immediately came to mind when I think of that is the Maker Faires – and there’s a tremendous Maker Faire that used to be in Queens, New York, and as we’ve heard today there’s a maker fair coming up next week in Philadelphia, and I was not aware that there’s also one, I think in Sussex County, I would love to catch that one as well. So these are, amazing, again, like experiences for tech enthusiasts. I think everybody here would really appreciate and enjoy these. And so I went about trying to find who was the inspiration behind the Maker Faires, and I knew about Make magazine, who probably a lot of you know about that as well.
And I found out that the inspiration behind those is Dale Dougherty. I really didn’t know whether Dale Dougherty would be willing to travel across the country and be with us here at TCF. But here he is and I will, without further ado, introduce our keynote speaker Dale Dougherty.
Dale: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. But let me ask you, are you having fun with technology? Come on. All right. So I hope this is fun. There are plenty of business uses of technology and I wanted to find the playful uses, the fun uses and to talk about that today.
Thank you Larry for having me here. Larry took me on a tour of the STEM building and there’s a machine shop in there. And I came across this machine, Light Machines lathe. But it reminded me in 1984, what I’d probably consider my first tech job in any way, was to write a manual for the Light Machines Company that was just starting in Nashua, New Hampshire.
They had a CNC machine controlled by an Apple II. Okay. I’m telling you that I wrote the manual. I knew nothing about computers or CNC machines, but I learned what I could. And, not everybody likes documentation. It’s like cleaning up after animals in a parade. But I liked it. And I had just met Tim O’Reilly and, through the eighties and nineties, we built a publishing company, publishing computer manuals. We wrote some of the early ones ourselves and we got experts in to do it, and we edited them. But really all of it started here in writing this manual, and I had no idea that actually I would later connect those things like CNC machines and digital interfaces to physical machines.
Adam Savage, I’ll reintroduce later, says two things make us human: we use tools and tell stories. And I like to think I’m probably better at telling stories than I am at using tools, but I really like the stories of how people use tools to make things. And sometimes the people who make things aren’t very good at telling their own story. I have to pull it out of them. I have to work it and ask lots of questions.
So I found a role in life, if you will. But I think what you might ask, “What is the problem you’re trying to solve in doing make or anything?” And I think one of the answers personally, I’m probably easily bored and I don’t like to be bored and I’d like to find people who are not bored. That was the maker community, the kind of people that I saw as I started the magazine.
Today boredom is a bigger problem than ever. More people are bored, which is sad. They have the best computing in the palm of their hand that they could ever have. They have access to all kinds of entertainment, and even kids are bored, perhaps even worse than adults. And despite having their phones – I would say they probably are preoccupied rather than bored – but they don’t realize maybe how bored they are. But one of the things I really got interested in is just, why?
This is a chart by Ted Gioia. We were talking about this at dinner last night. Some of the computing that you grew up with, you had to be the author of that. You had to be the driver of it. And even as we talked about like, Usenet news groups or things like that, you had to go find them and you had to look for them. Then eventually we got a search engine and we began to look for things. But what Ted’s writing about is, increasingly people are online and it’s a completely passive experience. An algorithm is determining what you see next, right? Not your own interest.
And so that’s a real challenge in our culture today. But I think anybody in this audience, the reason you’re here, you know the antidote to boredom, which is do something. Just do something. But even better, do something with others. And especially today, do something with others present.
Just do something. Do something with others. Do something with others present. Do something with others present who are doing something.
This is what I found, like looking through Make and seeing people, enthusiasts, once you find something you wanna do, you begin to meet other people who do it. And that was the early computer clubs and user groups. People had similar interests and they connect. And that might be the secret to life in a way, is just finding other people who do stuff that you like to do.
We just celebrated our 20th anniversary issue of Make. So I started in 2005. I’m really proud. It’s a print magazine for God’s sake, and we’ve managed to keep it going. It’s a quarterly, it’s about 125 pages, and I’ll go through some of it, but I’m also proud of Maker Faire. I started the year afterwards and I had just met so many interesting people, these makers, and I thought, “Could we bring them together and would they enjoy talking about their project? Would people like to hear about their project and ask questions?”
And I did it in a small version, in 2005 we started, and then it grew in a crazy way and we’ve spread it around the world. I’ll mention again, in your area here, we have Maker Faire Philadelphia coming up next Sunday. And in October Rick is back there with the Sussex County Maker Faire. I think the whole idea was to bring together people who were doing things and let them do it. Not talk about it, but do it. Show-and-tell implies talking about it but I’m really proud of this. It’s spread around the world in very interesting ways. And it taught me that making has always been around. I gave it a word, but it is really satisfying for people to see that. That is in Singapore. And this one I really like this one. This was in Tokyo.
Maker Faire is so hard to explain to people ’cause it is a lot of things. It’s all these kind of wonderful things. And when you see it, you’re like, who would know that all these things are in our community? They’re all around you. I don’t program this stuff. I figure out where to put it, how much power they need, and make sure that someone with a theremin is not next to the crafters. But it all comes from somewhere and people do it because they love to do it. They’re amateurs. Largely that’s the definition of amateur is to love to do something. And I always felt, whether it was open source or the early web, things I’ve been involved with, always the first to arrive were the people that loved doing things, that enjoyed it. They didn’t know if there was money in it or if they were gonna build a business, but they had an idea and they wanted to build it. And I think that’s the spirit of the Maker movement.
Larry mentioned Queens. Up till 2018, we had almost 10 years I think, of Maker Faire at at the New York Hall of Science. Really hard to find a place in New York to do it, but we had really great time there. And the Unisphere is there, and we did Diet Coke and Mentos in front of the Unisphere, which is really pretty amazing.
Isaac Asimov visited the 1964 World’s Faire and they asked him to predict the world he would see in 50 years. Which is, we’re past that point, but still his observations were quite interesting. He said electroluminescent panels will be in common use, right? Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Fair enough. Robots will be neither common nor good.
And he said only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though manned expedition will be in the works. Very true. And the world will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being.
And we may be coming on that era, but he got one thing wrong, which I think is sad. All the high school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology and will be trained to perfection in the use of computer languages. You weren’t even close, which is too bad.
But here’s his point. That he said mankind (predicting) will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, the disease spreading more widely each year, growing in intensity. Yeah, it is true, sadly, right? And he gave a little bit of an out. The lucky few, he called them, who could be involved in creative work of any sort, will be the true elite of mankind for they alone will do more than serve the machine.
And I would like to argue that it doesn’t have to be the lucky few. It doesn’t have to be a small group of elites that control technology or use technology or enjoy technology. And that’s a bit where I’m coming at this. But I think his insight in some ways, says most of us will see ourselves as users, and few of us will see ourselves as makers.
So I hope we can change that. That’s been my goal since I started this and discovered that it resonated with people. People come up to me and say, “I like to make things,” and it’s wonderful.
Maker Faire is family oriented. So we had lots of kids there. Five minutes in, they have big eyes. They wanna know how do they get to do this stuff? That enthusiasm the makers have connects to the kids really well and they wanna know, how did you learn to do that? How do I get started doing that? If they went to a soccer game or they went to a music concert, it’d be easy to answer those questions of, what will you play soccer? There’s a community league or there’s music lessons down the street to learn the guitar. But to be a maker, it wasn’t that easy. And previous generations maybe had a parent who had a shed or a garage and they brought the kid in. I’d always run into those stories, but a lot of kids don’t have that.
And so I began really — the idea in around 2010 — of developing makerspaces and getting those into schools so that kids have the opportunity to do that. Adults too. And Rick gave a great presentation on the FUBAR. And because that thing I said earlier, make something and do it with others is really important. But getting this around the kids, I think is transformative for them.
So this is my first issue of Make, really 20 years ago, literally. And so I had been working at O’Reilly and had a book series called Hacks and one of the titles, it was TiVo Hacks, if you remember the TiVo DVR machine. The kind of hackers looked at it and said, “Oh, it’s a Linux box. I can get inside and replace the hard drive and upgrade it to this and do that.” And I thought that’s interesting, we’re gonna start hacking consumer equipment and do things like that. Consumer electronic equipment anyway. And it just led me down that road to start thinking. I was doing the books, could I do a magazine on it?
Here’s how you can do this yourself
Because there are a lot of good ideas out there. And what I really wanted to do is a magazine about projects. Things to build. Wired magazine might talk about the future of technology or some great company doing this or that. I wanted to show the work. You might go back to the manuals that we wrote, the documentation is, “here’s how you can do this yourself.”
So we looked for projects that were fun and you could replicate. So our first project really was this one here. I’ll show you in a deeper one of this kite aerial photography, but we had how to make a magnetic stripe card reader. How to read what’s on the back of your credit card or hotel room card key, just interesting things like that.
And in the first issue I had the revelation that I’m gonna call our readers makers. It’s Make makers, not Read readers. That kind of took off in its own way that I was trying to distinguish. I said earlier about the difference between being a user of technology and being a maker of technology. And kite aerial photography really struck me as the kind of thing that I was looking for in projects. It was the idea of building a rig, putting a camera on it, attaching it to a kite, flying the kite, then taking pictures in the air.
But there’s a lot more to this. Cris Benton was a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, and he originally did it to get perspectives of buildings from about a couple hundred feet in the air. You couldn’t do it from a plane looking down. And he couldn’t do it from a ladder ’cause it would only be six or eight feet tall. So he started that. And he had used digital cameras and it was expensive to do it.
So we convinced him to do one that was a disposable camera. And we built a rig out of Popsicle sticks. But there’s a little ping pong ball in the corner there, and he called it his silly putty viscous timer. He had to set a trigger in silly putty and it gave him about 20 seconds to get the kite in the air. And it would release, the ping pong ball would drop, the shutter would go off, and he’d get his picture.
So it is that kind of ingenuity, like cleverness. In many ways I have looked back at a time, Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, which started in the beginning of the 20th century, but though different, they’re still around. But I love the ones from the fifties and earlier. It was like hacking a pig trough and building a Martin’s nest. There’s a wide range of interesting things. And so I looked at those and the form factor of Make magazine follows those magazines as well.
But here’s Popular Mechanics, 1961, right?
I don’t know how safe this sidewalk car actually is. The headline I really liked was “Scientists on the Brink of Hell.” I didn’t really figure out what that one was, not too subtle is it? What is it, 35 cents? It’s full of lots of things. At the bottom there is make your own printed circuits, and there it is.
I actually found this years later after we had done a magazine article on making your own printed circuit boards, and this one starts off exactly what I think the promise is. This seems like it’s hard but you can do it. Like we can explain for you how to do that and you could follow and do that.
I think this open invitation for people to just learn something and it’s fun to do that and be able to do it. There’s all these different things, like the cars coming in two years, and we had a 3D-printed car issue. The most famous one on these Popular Science was always the flying car, which this may be or may not be. But still have those coming in a year now.
My favorite cover of Make magazine we ever did was Spy Versus Spy. We had a surveillance issue of spy tech. It wasn’t that serious so much, but we contacted Mad Magazine and they gave us permission. I think we sent them the idea and they did the drawing. I just love that.
And there’s something in that I think. I see this in Japan more than in the US, but tech in Japan is often a hybridization of pop culture and technology. Their robots all have costumes. It might be a sumo robot, a samurai robot, and whatever it is. In contrast to China, which hasn’t had a lot of popular culture. They’re very good at building things, but they don’t have that fusion going on where you put a funny face on something.
There was a an interesting talk earlier today on what were those drones doing over New Jersey? We really helped kick off a drone movement. I had the the author of the kit photography saying to me many years later, “Oh, if drones had been around, maybe I would’ve never gotten into kites.” ‘Cause he could have done all of that as well.
An interesting thing is Chris Anderson, you might know was a Wired magazine editor at the time, started a drone company and he needed people that knew a lot about drones living in the Bay Area, he thought he would find someone at Berkeley or someone at Stanford, someone who had a lot of technical training. Instead, he found Jordan Munoz in Tijuana who had just graduated from high school, but he knew more about drones than anyone else he could find. And I just love that basic story.
I will say that, we continued to follow drones, not so much as a hobbyist thing, but I did a story last year, I think on Ukraine and the maker movement in Ukraine and how, obviously they’re using a lot of drones in warfare. But they have to do things to modify and create those things. And I had one guy that works in the military go over and visit and he said: “That’s gonna be the drone capital of the world after the war.” I’m sorry, it’s war oriented, when they dropped something from a drone it created noise. So that person, the target would look up and say, I hear it. So they had to devise ways to create silent but deadly payloads.
The first 3D printing. 3D printing the patent for it is 1984, but it’s really makers through, first of all through the RepRap project and then through Makerbot. This is what the beauty of enthusiasts, they didn’t know what they would do with a 3D printer, but that’s why they built 3D printers, so they could figure it out. What could we make if we had 3D printing? And so that’s Bre Pettis and some others there were part of that original MakerBot team, which was very successful and also exploded.
This is Adafruit’s Limor Fried, one of the breakout stories, just creating an electronics company in Manhattan. She’s an MIT graduate, but she could design and make almost anything. Pretty amazing.
I don’t know if you follow this, but probably some of the makerspaces here during Covid. I did a series, I called it Plan C, because hospitals could not get medical equipment like face shields and face masks. And in fact, the administrators were telling them you have to do it without that. And so makerspaces started making them. I did a kind of a video series on it called a Plan C. When there’s a problem, plan A is the government solves it. Plan B is you look to corporate America. Plan A and B weren’t working very well. So we turned to plan C, which is get citizens involved in doing this. We had people that had never done any medical equipment design. Even gowns like hospital gowns needed to be made. And we had makerspaces that were sometimes shut down, but they set up as factories to produce these things.
This example here was a doctor and his son who converted scuba gear into a mask. And so amazing capability that the Maker movement showed. Designs could go anywhere, but you had to make them locally. Like in East Tennessee or Chicago. In Chicago, DePaul University closed for Covid, but students and faculty took home the 3D printers. When the need came for face shields and things, people started making them.
They called up the hospital and said, “Hey, we’ve got a bunch of 3D masks for you.” “We can’t take ’em. They’re not approved.” So they began calling doctors and nurses, and the doctor said, “If you bring it to my house, it could walk in with me and I’ll use it.” So the DePaul University guys connected with bike messengers who were also out of work, and they would come by, pick up 3D masks and drop ’em off at the home of the ER physician or the ER nurse. And that’s how they solved that problem.
This is another favorite, just Adam Savage who’s, been a kind of a fixture Maker Faire in the Bay Area. And he’s the more popular and public face of do this at home. Adam will give what we call a Sunday Sermon. This was 2023, we’re on Mare Island, which is our new location for Maker Faire. And he comes in on the electric giraffe and then he stands up there and he gives his talk to thousands of people. So it’s pretty awesome.
Asimov made another prediction, which was, “much effort will be put into designing of vehicles with robot brains.” And obviously he’s pretty right about that, but I wanna tell you a maker story.
It’s really my favorite maker story. This is Damon McMillan, and he had an idea of building an autonomous boat, one that could be put in the water and pointed somewhere, and would travel there. So this is his chalkboard; here’s his parts list, his drawings, he’s gonna build it in his garage.
This is what it looks like when he finally gets it in the water. It’s basically solar panels on top of a small boat. And he said: “I built the Seacharger in my garage. Not for money or competition, but simply as a challenge.” And I just think that reflects the maker mind. Can I do this? Can I figure it out? I don’t know but I’ll try.
So he said what started as a year long project turned into 30 months of mistakes, compromises, and do-overs, right? So that’s, you got this wonderful idea. You put it on the chalkboard and it’s really hard to do, but that’s part of the challenge.
And he brought it to Maker Faire in the Bay Area. And then the next weekend, he put Seacharger in the ocean at Half Moon Bay, which is on California coast, and he set it on a course for Hawaii, right? Pretty amazing. And so 41 days after launch, he says, “I’m standing on the shore on the big island with my wife, parents, brother and reporter, and I catch the first glimpse of the solar panels in the sun.”
So it makes it. And this is the money shot. He says “I’m here with my family, I’ve been telling them I’m doing this, and why are you spending all this time in the garage? You’re crazy.” Here, look how sheepish she looks, like this is — I did it. I did it, right?
So it’s just an amazing story, but it doesn’t end here. He got all the way to Hawaii and he thinks, I’m not gonna pack this up and send it back to California. I’m gonna program it to go to New Zealand. So he puts it back in the water. But after 105 days at sea, the rudder stopped responding. The Seacharger traveled an impressive 6,480 nautical miles. And he was able to see where it was all the time, but then at some point he just didn’t get any signals and it was gone. So this is the story we did in Make on it that he wrote a little boat that could.
And I called him up to talk to him about it once and he told me this story. Because that’s not the end of the story either. His mother of all people starts nagging him. There’s all those cargo ships in the ocean. They might see your boat now. A crazy idea. But it’s your mother? You want to please her.
So you call up a cargo ship line and you get someone and they start talking to each other and they find it. Incidentally, just yesterday, the boat was picked up by a container ship on the way to New Zealand.
Do something. All these wonderful things happen to you. It was then put into a New Zealand maritime museum on display for many months. You know, what a wonderful thing that starts with a couple ideas in the garage and an Arduino and some GPS and other sensors.
You can’t tell a kid about agency. They have to experience it.
I think this maker stuff speaks to a kind of intelligence. There’s all kinds of intelligences, but one to solve problems or create products that are valued in one or more cultural contexts. I believe sometimes we only focus on the business side of things and often we need people discovering those other contexts.
For kids particularly, curiosity, agency, resiliency are the kinds of things that I see they can develop through practice in makerspaces. You can’t tell a kid about agency. They have to experience it. They have to feel it, they have to believe that they can do things.
When they see other people doing things like at Maker Faire, they begin to see it’s possible for them. So I think that the arc of Make is like, technology’s making it easier for more people to do things that previously only an elite few could do. And I think AI’s going to be another layer of that. We have something on our website, a group of guys who were at Maker Faire last year from Berkeley, and they’ve created an AI interface to CAD. So you just describe the object you want and give it a prompt, and it comes back with that object in 3D with a bunch of sliders down the side, which you could adjust it, make it larger, make this, that. Fascinating. Fascinating. Imagine the people that can’t learn even TinkerCad can start there and see what they want.
We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.
Marshall McLuhan
And I love this Marshall McLuhan quote, we use and tools the tools we use begin to shape our own capabilities and how we see ourselves. When I go back to those early things of just being a user is not the same as having the mind of a maker.
We have the InMoov robot where our next issue of Make is on humanoid robots. I did the story on Gael Langvin, a Frenchman who is really more of an artist — you might say a designer more than a technologist — but he’s created this open source robot. And he’s recently created skin, a silicone skin for the robot’s face, and there’s 17 motors in the face, and he is using AI. He’s giving that information in a prompt and saying, when you respond to something you might use these motors to create an expression of sadness or happiness or anything like that.
There’s this phrase, the things we make look like us and show something about us.
So thank you for being with me today. And I’d just like you to think, what can we do with all the energy and interest, and especially with kids, to give them more opportunities to make things and create more of this in our culture and society? I’m really happy to talk to you today, and thank you very much.
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