When DIY culture met web culture it exploded into the networked era with the rapidly evolving Maker movement from the mid 2000s, infusing the spirit of self-building with the power of emerging technologies. Whilst Makers as a whole have no single cause or goal, massive communities have formed around the principles of empowerment via tech. These include purely online communities, physical hackerspaces and so-called Fab Labs.
In order to get a picture of some of the most exciting Maker initiatives across the spectrum, from high- to very low-tech, who better to ask than Daniel Charny? In 2012 Charny co-founded the open design platform Fixperts, which pairs the knowledge of designers with those who need help fixing everyday problems. Morevoer, in 2011 Charny curated the now-legendary exhibition Power of Making at the V&A, where he integrated a Maker space into the museum – finding another way to unite knowledge with initiative to produce agency. For uncube he has chosen four of his favourite DIY projects and explained what makes them important.
Maker Faire Africa
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Billed as “the greatest show-and-tell on earth”, Maker Faires are a hybrid of science and craft gatherings, one of the Maker community’s most important events for movers and shakers. Created by the Make magazine team to “celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset”, its evolution has behaved more like a movement than a franchise. Independent satellites have developed their own strands, such as the exemplary entrepreneurial Maker Faire Africa organisation, whose vision is to take ingenuity, invention and innovation as routes to empowerment and new socio-economic forms of manufacturing across that continent.
Sanitary Pad Machine
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The “low-cost sanitary pad movement”, as described by the inventor of these machines, is a DIY story with social and cultural significance. In 1998 an uneducated Indian man named Arunachalam Muruganantham began the four-year process of inventing a machine that would allow women anywhere to produce their own sanitary pads cheaply and easily. Given that roughly 70 percent of all reproductive diseases in India are cause by poor menstrual hygiene and that only around 10 percent of Indian women use sanitary products, Muruganantham’s project has been as much an awareness-raising campaign as an invention. The low-cost machines are now operated in more than 1,300 villages, often by women. The economies that develop, sometimes barter-based, create a closer relationship between makers, sellers and users.
Project Daniel
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Project Daniel is an inspiring user-focused application of digitech that provides the technology for amputees to 3D print their own arms, hands and fingers. Born out of the “help one, help many” philosophy, it began as a one-off project called Robohand, that a South African carpenter, Richard Van As, created for himself after he lost four fingers in an accident. Then the nonprofit group Not Impossible Labs picked up on his idea and helped introduce it to other communities. It has turned into an outreach programme to become one of the world’s first 3D printing prosthetic lab and training facilities, making the technology cheap and accessible enough to actually benefit those who need it most. The initiative is named after Daniel Omar, a double amputee in South Sudan who was the first recipient of one of the prosthetic arms.
Daniel Charny is a creative director, curator and design educator. He is co-founder and director of From Now On, whose clients include the British Council, Design Museum, Heatherwick Studio and Cathedral Group. Founding curator of Aram Gallery, he has also curated major design shows including Power of Making at the V&A, which was their most visited free exhibition since 1950 and included one of the first programmed maker-spaces in a museum context. Charny has been involved in design education for 20 years including as Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art and is currently Professor of Design at Kingston University. Since 2012 he is co-founder and director of Fixperts, an open design creative platform, now active in 16 countries.
WikiHouse
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This clever jigsaw-puzzle construction system inspired by traditional Korean architecture was initially presented at the Gwangju Biennale in 2011 by a group of designers and engineers. Their WikiHouse prototype was set to start a disruptive debate and challenge landowners, urban planners and policy makers to think about alternatives mass-produced housing. WikiHouse has since become an ongoing experiment in opening the potential of digital technology to change how buildings are designed and constructed on a global scale. A user can download a building plan from the website, customise the design with SketchUp, and then cut the pattern from plywood using a CNC router. The frame is said to be easy to assemble by anyone in less than a day. I
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