An interview on Making with
An interview on Making with
Making is dreaming up ideas and then building real things. I associate making with creating physical, tangible things, more-so than purely digital ones. Making is usually creative, a mix of art and engineering. Making is often amateur, in the best sense of the word.
Makers are curious people who love to create. They are often risk-takers who don’t back down from a project due to lack of knowledge of how they’ll get it done. Makers are thrilled by the idea of learning new skill to fuel their process.
Making is an expression of our creativity, problem solving skills, and, craftsmanship in a very human way. It is important because it can make us and others happy, can help solve real problems for which there are no commercial solutions — such as highly specific assistive devices for people in need. Making as a community can also bring people together in wonderful ways.
I’m very excited by makers who build things to help others, such as Steve Hoefer’s sonar glove, which can help people with reduced vision or blindness navigate their environment like a bat.
Making is such a natural, human thing, and I feel it helps tie together math, art, fabrication, science, computer programming, engineering, and craft in tangible ways. Math, for example, on its own can feel disconnected from reality until you want to use it to help build a thing. Holding that object you created in your hand is tremendous reinforcement of the importance of all of those disciplines.
I honestly don’t know. I haven’t seen it change a community, so much as become its own community of makers. Hopefully, they bring their skills and passions back to their own communities.
Making may solve some of our big problems in education, by increasing participation and achievement in the STEAM disciplines. This in turn could lead to all kinds of large scale problem solving in the future.