Why The Maker Movement Matters To Your Business

Chris Anderson has found success in what's known as the Maker movement, and he's sure that encouraging the freedom to tinker at work will deliver rewards for any company.

It all started with a lawn sprinkler and a grandfather who couldn't leave well enough alone.

The grandfather, a German machinist who built a career in Hollywood movie studios, also built (and patented) an automatic lawn sprinkler system. He passed both his story and his love of building things on to his grandson, Chris Anderson, who included both in his most recent book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (Crown Business, 2014). The book looks at those people driven to make things in the "real world" -- that is, the world of atoms rather than bits -- and how things have changed for those people since the days of Anderson's grandfather.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, was the first to talk extensively about the difference between those who deal in atoms and those who make their living with bits. At the time he was writing, atoms seemed the medium of the old world: The future would be written in bits.

In an interview with InformationWeek, Anderson discussed the ways in which the tide has turned to bring atoms back to an even footing with their digital counterparts. "3D printing is sort of the ebb and flow between atoms and bits. The world is atoms, we scan it and turn it into bits, and then through 3D printing we can turn it back into atoms," he said. "We can seamlessly move from the physical world to the digital world, from atoms to bits, and the core of this new industrial revolution which is the combination of the physical and virtual, rather than the purely digital realm of the Web."

[ Want to hear directly from Chris Anderson on why IT should care about drones? See Anderson in person at the InformationWeek Conference April 27 in Las Vegas. Register now. ]

The return to atoms represents a huge change in the public's relationship to building things that they can touch. These changes -- in the technology available to manipulate atoms and the skill required to use it -- mirror the changes that accompanied the introduction of the personal computer in the late 1970s and the development of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s. Dramatically less specialized knowledge is required to begin seeing minimally acceptable results from technology that is much simpler to use than its industrial antecedents.

Chris Anderson, founder and CEO of 3D Robotics. (Image: "Etech05 Chris" by James Duncan Davidson from Portland, USA, via Flickr licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

In our interview, Anderson said, "It's now possible to work with hardware -- electronics and physical materials -- the way you work with software. The desktop tools are for everyone."

One of the lessons Anderson writes about in his book is that the new world of manipulating atoms means that you no longer need to own sophisticated production systems in order to produce sophisticated objects. "Desktop prototyping" and the spirit of physical experimentation that accompanies access to the prototyping tools are wrapped up in the Maker Movement -- a movement that Anderson describes in his book as having three transformative characteristics:

People using digital desktop tools to create designs for new products and prototype them ("digital DIY").

A cultural norm to share those designs and collaborate with others in online communities.

The use of common design file standards that allow people, if they desire, to send their designs to commercial manufacturing services to be produced in any number, just as easily as they can fabricate them on their desktop. This radically foreshortens the path from idea to entrepreneurship, just as the web did in software, information, and content.

These characteristics, and the difference between the industrial world they describe and the industrial world of his grandfather, are the foundation of the stories Anderson tells in his book -- stories that he illustrates with examples from 3D Robotics, the company that he co-founded and now runs.

Next Page: Taking 3D Robotics from concept to company.

Curtis Franklin Jr. is Senior Editor at Dark Reading. In this role he focuses on product and technology coverage for the publication. In addition he works on audio and video programming for Dark Reading and contributes to activities at Interop ITX, Black Hat, INsecurity, and ... View Full Bio

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