Parts and Crafts

If you’re unfamiliar with Make magazine, Craft Magazine, or the ”maker movement”, have a look at those links. It’s a vaguely defined movement/social network which is essentially, whether it intends to or not, finding the commonalities between radical DIY culture, the open-source movement, and the grand tradition of engineers making potato guns and blowing stuff up in their backyards.

Recently Instructables instituted a pay-for-features model that has upset a lot of people. Basically all of the content on Instructables remains free and open to the public (I see it in writing everywhere that non-paying members can’t view certain types of images, but I haven’t actually found this to be the case – I can’t figure out whether we’re grandfathered in for a little while or whether they’ve changed policy in response to community outcry…) but certain features that make it particularly useful to particular types of people now cost money. Every instructable consists of a set of steps in a how-to. For free, anyone can view all of the steps in the howto, but in order to view them all on one page, or print them out, one has to pay to be a “pro” member. A lot of people feel like this is against the spirit of the website, which bills itself as “the world’s largest show and tell”. A lot of people feel like it’s absolutely not-okay to take content that they have produced to be freely distributed and to hide some of it and use it to make money. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the newly limited features are most useful to people who can least afford to pay for them – people who have dialup internet access or who have to access the site at school or the public library. Whenever I decide to work through an instructable, I bring my laptop to my workspace and click through the steps – it barely occurs to me that this way of using the site depends on me having a laptop and high-speed, wireless internet.

Instructable authors have the ability to take down their instructables or to reorganize them so that they’re maximally useful under the new web design, so, ultimately, the community does get to decide if this payment model is against the spirit of the community. If it is, enough content producers will take down their instructables, and either Instructables.com will apologize for messing up and begin the long-slow process of regaining community trust.

But they might not! I think that they probably won’t, that most instructable authors will shrug and figure that the site is still “good enough” and still the best resource of its type for information sharing. I further think that this will be really upsetting and a big surprise to the set of people who are going to take down their materials and find a free way to distribute them. Instructables.com and its supporters have said a bunch of different things in response to community criticism of their new policy, but they boil down to two things – “Yeah, we agree this sucks, but we’re broke and we have to pay our team.” and “Instructables always already was a for-profit entity, what’s the big?”

The people that I know who have in the past been most excited about Instructables.com don’t really identify or accept either of those two arguments – people who are really committed to a certain kind of DIY-inspired attitude towards life that considers money to be, more or less, a last resort for solving problems, anarchists and communists, squatters and dumpster-divers, folks who collect, cook, and distribute food for Food Not Bombs, free-open-source software hackers who freely give their own time every day to software projects that they think the world should have access to, and I think that they took it for granted, maybe, that the Instructables.com team and community was “their people”, took it for granted that people who wanted to make a tool to help people share project ideas over the internet would also have some other set of ideals – for my social circle’s case, took it for granted that people who wanted to make a tool to help people share project ideas over the internet would also be anti-institutionalists, against the forms and structures of really-existing-capitalism, and would have devoted a lot of time and thought to thinking about what’s right and what’s wrong with contemporary economic, political, and educational structures.

These are the ideals that brought some set of people to the DIY movement and inspired them to take Instructables seriously as something other than a fun hobby for engineers. But they aren’t the only ideals that might bring someone to take part in Instructables.com or share his or her projects or make his or her own whatever. Some people are inspired to take Instructables.com seriously, for instance, on the totally reasonable ideological premise that it is fine and good for engineers to have fun hobbies.

Recently a friend of mine asked me, in the course of articulating a critique of Make Magazine, how many people I know who subscribed to the publication and how many of them had ever completed a project from it. I had to admit that, while I was pretty sure I’d done a few of the simpler projects with kids in science classes, I couldn’t think of anyone else who’d ever done so, and that I’d never worked through any of the projects on my own outside of the teaching context.

Make was a rallying cry when it came out, and lots of us saw it in the newsstands and thought “wow! cool! I can make stuff! this is so amazing!” Mike Nagle and I subscribed pretty much immediately – we were teaching science classes together at the time – and were really excited, both because there was this publication which described a process-based way of learning about engineering and tinkering, but also because it seemed to exist interconnectedly with our social circle – we knew someone who had hung out with pretty much all of the principles in the movement – in some cases we’d hung out with them. This is fun – despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve only had one conversation with ladyada, I still think of her as Limor, and routinely have interactions where I’m talking with someone about DIY electronics and I refer to “Limor’s kit” or “Limor’s site” and am met with a blank stare by people who know all about “ladyada” and “adafruit”. I think that this is weird. Mike Nagle has talked with me a bit about going to the Maker Faire and realizing, afterwards, that now he’d met all of the principles of the “maker movement”, and that there weren’t very many. We had a leg-up, of course, for being involved socially – we spent some time at the small engineering school near Toscanini’s – but, even so, Nagle (who is significantly more social and networky than I am) shouldn’t be able to say that he’s met all of “leaders” of the maker movement. There should be too many leaders for anyone to have met most of them, or, better, there shouldn’t be any leaders at all. Hero’s, maybe, but not leaders.

Make is a beautiful magazine. It’s nice and big and colorful and well-designed and it’s pleasant to look at. I feel hip when I’m reading it at the cafe. This is potentially the right design move for mainstreaming the idea of DIY, but I think it also turns Make into an authority – it doesn’t feel like something that I could contribute to. And the style of project presentation – a very precise list of tools and materials and step by step manipulation of said objects – makes the projects themselves seem official, completed, precise and perfect – something which is a little bit intimidating to me since I feel like I know just-enough about electronics and engineering to tinker, but not quite enough to know under what circumstances its really important that a resistor-value be precise or when a certain material was chosen for its properties or because the author happened to have it on hand or because it was cheap.

This, incidentally, is something that we’re trying to be really conscious of in presenting projects at Parts and Crafts, and something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit as I mentally go over the process of making a make-your-own lightsaber! kit. When we did the lightsaber workshop I had a bunch of different kinds of piping and adhesive and resistors of different values and a couple of different methods of diffusing the light. I tried to make sure to articulate my ideas about these different construction materials and methods – “theoretically you need a resister for each LED because you can’t be sure that they’re drawing current evenly, so minor differences between the individual LEDS might cause them to burn out quickly, one by one, but in our practice this doesn’t seem to be the case..” and “I found that having a wider pipe and sanding it a lot and making sure that the LEDS are pointed up instead of out made for the best, most-diffuse, even-looking blade, but you could also play with wax paper, and putting hot glue over the individual LEDs and having more than one tube… all of which change how it looks differently.”

These kinds of digressions and explications of reasoning muck up the presentation a bit, and make the projects a little bit more confusing, but they do so in order to make the process less intimidating and the guide less authoritative. I think that, considering Make to be part of the DIY movement, it could benefit from a step or two away from precise directions in the direction of awkward explanations – “directions” versus “instructions”. Ultimately DIY is supposed to be about empowering individuals to meet their own needs – moving my dependence away from a centralized commodity producer to a centralized information provider certainly does make me less dependent, but it’s only a step in the right direction. One dsn’t just need to “do it” by one’s self – we need to be able to “understand it”, individually or together.