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WNYC’s New Tech City spoke with Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, about the Maker Movement and its impact on American manufacturing. Anderson’s new book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, argues that this new movement may reinvigorate the U.S. manufacturing industry. The World Maker Faire took place recently and gave “makers” an opportunity to show-off their designs. In his interview with New Tech City Anderson talked about his thoughts about the World Maker Faire and how it is “just the physical incarnation of what is already a mass phenomenon.” He explained that billion-dollar-volume companies like Etsy and Kickstarter are showing marketplaces for maker products.
Anderson added, “ I think what defines the maker movement — as opposed to the tinkerers and the hobbyists that came before — is two things. One is they’re the web generation. The web generation means they instinctively share. They do things in the open in public and they do things together, they collaborate. They use the web’s innovation model from open source to informal collaboration to build on each other’s work to innovate even more quickly. The second is that their ideas start on screens. The fact that they start digital — and that means they can be prototyped with a single copy on your desktop or uploaded and made in the millions by the biggest factories in the world.”
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