The Maker's Ultimate Tools (Revisited)
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In 2006, Saul Griffith had fjust gotten his PhD from MIT, out of Neil Gershenfeld’s Center for Bits and Atoms where Fab Labs got their start. We asked him to write an article for the third issue of Make: titled “The Maker’s Ultimate Tools.” We didn’t want the budget version; we wanted the ultimate — what would buy if you could buy the best. I remember the page spread especially because it was bright red.
As part of Make’s 20th anniversary, we asked Griffith to look back at this 2006 article and update it. Griffith’s main observation is that all the tools have become more affordable and “it’s a great time to be alive and making things.”
It’s more about a home workshop than a school makerspace but still Griffith has a lot to say that might interest anyone running a makerspace. Here’s a PDF of the new version of the article from new issue of Make: 93 — ninety issues later.
In 2011, Griffith of Otherlab and I were awarded a DARPA grant to develop a makerspace program for high schools. Here’s how the program was described:
The Makerspace program aims to build literacy in design, science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics, by combining what O’Reilly Media, MAKE magazine, and Otherlab have learned about the maker community. We wish to do this with as much engagement as possible with the broader maker community to leverage the fantastic energy and talents of everyone doing beautiful things.
Our emphasis will be threefold:
Self-directed learning (building your own project as a better motivator to engage in engineering).
Lower the cost of building and realizing dream projects through lower cost tools (software and hardware.)
Making making more social and engaging.
We worked with 16 Bay Area high schools to set up makerspaces. One of the outcomes from the grant was the Makerspace Playbook, which was published in 2012. The goal was to provide a guide to setting up a makerspace and how to organize the equipment and activities in a school setting. The Makerspace Playbook has been available as a resource on the MakerEd.org site. In 2023, we published it on Gitbook so that it can be edited or customized to your own purposes. (We wrote about it here in the newsletter.)
(Link to Makerspace Playbook on Gitbook here)
Share your thoughts on the tools you like and why you like them in the tools. It’s always interesting to hear managers of makerspaces talk about their equipment: the tools they love the most are usually the ones that get the most use and don’t breakdown.
Road Trip
I’ll be heading to the Miami Maker Faire this week at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. I’ll be giving a talk on “The Case For Maker Education” on Saturday, May 2.
Then later next week, I’ll be in Indianapolis for CrossRoads 2025, a thought leadership conference hosted by Infosys Foundation USA. I will moderate a panel titled “Nurturing the Maker-Mindset and Creativity with AI.”
If you are at this conference, I hope to meet you in person.
That’s a dope throwback! Saul really nailed it with the ultimate tools concept. It’s wild to see how far the Maker movement has come since then. Makes you wonder what the next big thing will be!