This summer, SparkTruck is gearing up for its second road trip across the country, bringing hands-on learning back to to schools in their mobile makerspace. Want them to visit your town? Fill out an “Arrange a Visit” form now until June 18!
We think of the maker movement as a modern phenomena propelled by the internet, growth of makerspaces, and increasingly affordable digital technology. But making, of course, is anything but new. It’s part of what it means to be human. Dutch lutier Jan van Cappelle’s career as a maker began when he read a novel by Leonard de Vries called The Boys of the Hobby Club. Written under Nazi occupation and published in 1947, it’s essentially the story of a group of boys creating a makerspace before such a word existed. The book, which sadly is not available in English, had a lasting impact on Jan. “De Vries showed that you can make something yourself, in collaboration with others, instead of buying it of-the-rack.
Detroit is a modern wonder. You’d be hard pressed to find an American city that rose so high and fell so far. At the height of its stature as the Motor City in 1950s, Detroit had a population of about 2 million. White flight to suburbs, the decline of the automobile industry, and resulting loss of the city’s tax base and crumbling infrastructure have whittled the city’s population down to about 750,000. But Detroit is far from out. Cheap rents, readily available real estate, and an ingrained culture of making are contributing to a grass roots renaissance that’s truly exciting to behold. The city is being reborn in real time. Our friends at Dark Rye created an inspiring video about the remaking of Detroit that focuses on Nick Britsky and i3Detroit.
This is the second in a series of posts called Making Makerspaces, a distillation of the information gathered for a series of How to Make a Makerspace workshops produced by Artisan’s Asylum and MAKE. These posts will appear on a more-or-less weekly basis, and will focus on mission-critical topics related to founding and running creative manufacturing space. Today, we’ll be discussing common types of expenses and income that makerspaces around the world experience on a regular basis in order to help you create a business model for a space of your own. In the process of identifying these expenses and income, we’ll review examples from several well-established spaces across the U.S. for reference.
Amidst the flurry of excitement that was Maker Faire earlier this month, one thing that got overlooked in my own NYC backyard was the Grand re-opening of north Brooklyn’s community hackerspace Alpha One Labs. Thankfully PC Mag’s Chris Snyder & Edward Schneckloth stopped by to interview founder Sean Auriti and member Robert DeLanghe
Ron Bean has a fascinating post on Milwaukee Makerspace’s wiki about his project to plumb in the hackerspace’s water cooler. In addition to the obligatory refrigerator full of soda (or sometimes empty of soda, depending on whether anyone’s filled it recently), we also have a water cooler that takes the big 5gal water bottles. They […]
This is the first in a series of posts documenting how to start a makerspace of your own in your local community. This post is focused on the one question almost everyone asks when starting a space – how do you get insurance for your makerspace? We’ll start with a quick introduction to the series, and then jump into the meat of the question.
