Four Digi-Fab and 3D Printing visionaries built The Makery — “instant” hacking labs, itinerant tinker dens and deployable digi-faberies. This quartet continues “popping-up” 3DP-informed maker places to empower local explorers in the art/science of workshopping the 3D printed future in the ‘Hood, on the Block and in the Nabes.
These four co-founders are Corbett Beder, Jaymes Dec, Jon Santiago and Hsing Wei. And they have accomplished much with their innovative brand of 3D printing education at the community level. Here’s how the four Digi-Fab/3DP-education innovators describe their Makery initiative:
“The Makery is a pop-up Makerspace — part shop, part workshop, part exploratorium. A movable and temporary venue where youths and adults are encouraged to be curious, to tinker, to experiment and “to make” with technology. The Makery is a portable playground, a place where communities can gather to play with the creative power of digital design and fabrication, physical computing, engineering, art and coding.”
Here is some of what The Makery has planned for this summer in NYC:
July 21 – 23rd: Join The Makery for a 3-Day Workshop. It will be an opportunity to explore the world of Arduino programming through building an interactive robot car or doll.
July 27 – Aug 1: We’ll be transforming a bodega in the East Village
Aug 10 – Aug 17: We’ll be transforming an historic 3-story house on Governors Island
In covering 3DP here in the City, I had already met two of the four founders of The Makery—in contexts different from their street-level Pop-Up Makerspace initiative. About which I only subsequently learned…and quickly came to admire as co-conspirators in our 3DP “make something (awesome) happen” space of New York City.
Here are the four founders of The Makery, profiled for your better understanding (because these folks are doing significant things in our segment and you should know them — and how they’ve managed to profoundly influence the Maker Movement in New York City and State):
Jaymes Dec was one of our expert confabbers at our “3DP & Kids” Roundtable in September 2013 — as part of 3DP Media’s NY3DP Summits. (See my Vlog coverage of 3DP & Kids—complete with a video of the entire session—HERE.) LREI’s Elisabeth Irwin High School in the Village hosted us. Little Red’s Saber Khan was our Local Champion — and Roundtable Moderator — and he recruited Jaymes to our dynamite panel of ed-tech gurus. Jaymes is also Technology Integrator, FabLab Administrator at Marymount School of New York. (Marymount is the home to the only officially sanctioned “FabLab” in New York City {of four in New York State}.)
Jon Santiago is a guru of all things Maker and was there at the Creation of the Fab Lab movement. He was a student at MIT and part of the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) when the Center more or less invented Fab Labbery in 2007. For more on Fab Labs, you can find a very-rich Fab Lab FAQ HERE. Jon and I dialogued about mobile makeries at the end of 2013. Besides his co-founder role at The Makery, he is also a principal in HTINK. This organization is “an educational services cooperative (based on the Mondragon model) focused on spreading technical learning and creative problem solving skills to as many people as possible.”
Hsing Wei was The Makery founder in place — and empowering! — at another of that org’s pop-ups on the Lower East Side at the end of 2013. I caught up with her during this more-or-less week-long Makery session on First Street in the LES (Lower East Side) on Saturday, 7 December. My Vlog contains an interview I video’d with Hsing about The Makery’s initiatives HERE. This 12-minute exchange is a terrific profile of the organization: Hsing is well spoken and well versed in the philosophy and practice of “making” as political, economic and social action. Here is Hsing’s The Makery profile: “Hsing Wei is an interaction designer, convener, and tinkerist. She enjoys developing technology-enriched experiences that solve problems, connect communities, and enable novel ways of interacting with the world. After wandering the halls of Penn, MIT, and Harvard, she has been on the start up team of various creative games and digital learning initiatives, such as Quest to Learn and EDesign Lab, which seek to integrate emerging digital contexts, center on students as creators, and extend learning outside of classroom walls.”
I have yet to meet Corbett Beder, the fourth The Makery founders. But, here’s his Makery profile: “Corbett was the Senior Director of R&D at Vision Education & Media, an academic enrichment organization that provided after school programs and curriculum development in science and technology. For the past eight years, his projects have included teaching digital video, game design, and LEGO Robotics throughout the New York and New Jersey area. He has worked as a consultant for the NYC Department of Energy on a number of innovative technology programs.”
As you can see, these innovators and pro-active “soft-agitators” at The Makery are good folks to know. They’re making much of (3DP) importance happen…
