An interview on Making with

Jesse Genet

Founder & CEO, Lumi

About Jesse

Jesse Genet is the Founder and CEO of Lumi. Lumi helps you customize any object or surface by shipping made-on-demand printing tools like rubber stamps, silkscreens and decals directly to your doorstep. Lumi products are available online at Lumi.com and their printing kits are also available in over 1500 stores worldwide. Now 27, Genet has been an entrepreneur since 16 when she started her first company, printing t-shirts, in her parents Michigan basement. She studied Product Design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and lives and works out of downtown Los Angeles.

What is Making?

Making is taking the time to learn how something actually works. Almost any activity involving your hands, even something like cooking, can be making if you take the time to understand the science behind what you’re doing. 

Who are Makers?

Makers want to understand how the world around them works. They don’t want consume products and services. They want to hack and experiment to make the world better than it is today.

Why is Making important?

Making is important because the future will only be more innovative if we have people who deeply tinker and experiment everyday to make it that way. Nothing happens automatically.

What is an exciting example of Making and why?

One of the most exciting examples of Making are the maker spaces being built in cities around the world. These are spaces filled with equipment like laser cutters, 3d printers and often wood and metal working equipment as well. Anyone can get a membership for roughly the price of belonging to a gym and start prototyping and building their own product ideas, it’s thrilling.

How is Making transforming education?

Educators and students are no longer tinkering alone inside classrooms, but have access to a global network of other teachers and students making inspirational projects. It’s the global community coupled with inexpensive accessible technologies like arduino and raspberry pi that have the potential to really transform education.

How can Making change my community?

In my opinion, making can change communities when families and groups decide to spend their free time tinkering and doing hands on activities instead of the normal routine of watching TV and internet surfing. It’s hard to overstate the impact that interacting and learning together can have on a community.

How does Making solve big problems?

New technology and innovation are too often considered ‘givens’ of the future, but the uncomfortable truth is that we won’t have any new technologies in the future if people don’t experiment and tinker with new ideas now. Innovation takes time and it takes a lot of people working on hard problems. This is what excites me most about the Maker Movement, it encourages more people to throw their hat in the ring and experiment with new technologies and ideas.