SHiFT 2010: Maker Households

Ton Zijlstra — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:28:00 +0200

Last week the SHiFT conference took place in Portugal. FabLab and personal production were a large part of the program, as you can read in a previous posting.

My talk ‘Maker Households’ was the closing key-note of the SHiFT conference last Saturday. This posting gives you the slides (with text) and the video of my talk (made by Siert Wijnia with his iPhone. Thanks!). The video starts about a minute after the beginning of my presentation.

This is the text that goes before the start of the video: I am here today to do two things: Pedro and his team asked me to try and bring everything that happened in the past 2 days together under one notion: ‘Maker Households’. And the second thing I want to do is to talk to you about how we can start looking at DIY not just as a skill or skillset, but also as a literacy. So we can live in these what I call ‘Maker Households’.

But to be able to do both of those things I need to take a somewhat winding detour. I need to discuss internet and mobile communications with you, what is great about it, and what is problematic about it. And I also need to first talk to you about the state of the world we live in.

Because only then you will see why I think DIY as a literacy, or Maker Households, is not just an exciting thing, but also may well be our only feasible way forward.

So let’s start with the detour leading up to this story that I created over the past two days. And the detour starts with something you are probably familiar with. In the past 15 yrs we mainstreamed 2 new infrastructures and connected people in the furthest regions of our globe to it: Internet, and mobile communications. These infrastructures are unique compared to any other infrastructure that went before. First of all. Conventional infrastructures basically always connect two geographic locations. Your bathroom to the sea..

Now hit play :)

Ton Zijlstra on Maker Households – SHiFT 2010 from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.

Closing key-note of the SHiFT 2010 Conference

These are the slides (with the text below the slides)

Maker Households

View more documents from Ton Zijlstra.

A great illustration of my talk, made by Bauke Schildt / @bschildt

FabLab.nl: SHiFT 2010: Maker Households

SHiFT 2010: Maker Households