Like the air we breathe. Maker economics, the stories within the story

By Karim Asry, Espacio Open, and Leyla Jafarmadar, Happylab

How important is the air we breathe for the economy? What macro or microeconomics indicators capture the real value it has for our prosperity, our societies? Hard to say taking in account most of our metrics were made in the 20th century and complexity has been on the rise for quite some time, with no sign of deceleration. All this time, oxygen-filled air has been taken for granted, and even if air quality is now a public health issue, we don’t need numbers that link directly the necessity of air to breathe as a precondition for our economy to stay sharp and competitive. We take that for granted.

With the end of an era for many 19th and 20th century models, our societies are still assuming we will have learn to have a fruitful and constant dialogue with the unknown, reinventing once and again production models, jobs, career paths and life trajectories until we find the new ones.

And new eras usually need new forms of oxygen. If there’s one certainty about what’s coming, is that learning to learn, unlearn and relearn is a basic skill to survive in the 21st century markets. Our schools, our training programmes and new informal networks that share knowledge, tools and expertise in Fab Labs, Hackerspaces and Makerspaces are conforming a net that has the potential to make lifelong learning something natural, local and universal. The objective is to spread hundreds, perhaps thousands, perhaps millions of stories like the ones we’ll mention in the following all over the European Union.

Let’s go back in time to year 2006, for instance, a time when neither 3D printers or drones were something anyone, except a privileged few, had access to. Concepts like Internet of Things (IOT) we more present in science fiction than in real life. That same year, a spanish telecommunications engineer named David Cuartielles gave a conference in his hometown, Zaragoza to a total audience of 8 persons, about Arduino, the new project he had co-founded, an open source electronics platform. Arduino is today one of the building blocks of maker culture, a tool that allowed millions of persons to create projects, products, and services with electronics. Two students who showed at the conference, Alicia Sin and David Gascón, immediately started using Arduino to build their own startup, Libelium, nowadays an award-winning spanish SME that sells its IOT sensors to several Fortune 500 companies.

Early access matters, specially when technology moves as fast as today. The before mentioned 3D printers and drones lowered their prices from several tens of thousands of euros to a few hundreds per unit thanks to the work of Arduino, with 100 employees, and its millions of contributors all over the planet.

One of the early stars of the online community that used Arduino to make low-cost 3d printers, the RepRap Project, was a young economics student from Czech Republic, Josef Prusa. Nowadays he is the CEO of Prusa Research, one of the fastest growing tech companies in Central Europe according to Deloitte, with 250 employees and 6.000 3D printers worldwide sold every month, even though the company shares all its design online as open source. Community sometimes is a better competitive advantage than patents, specially when the product cycle ends faster than the average paperwork to obtain one.

But let’s not focus only on the big stories. The rise of distributed design, Fab Labs and open source communities has plenty of smaller success cases all over the European Union. That same year we went back to before, 2006, Karim Jafarmadar and Roland Stelzer were in Vienna trying to figure out their own robotic autonomous sailing system. They needed machines to achieve their prototypes and as soon as they realised the huge potential of having a workshop where you could make almost anything, they opened the doors. The first person to show up was an artist in need of a laser cutter.

That project would later evolve into Happylab, member of the Fab Lab Network, with three locations spread between Vienna, Salzburg and Berlin, 10 employees and 2.000 members who pay between 9 and and 49 euros per month to have access to this collective workshop that has seen many entrepreneurs flourish.

Together with his wife, a violin maker, Johannes Kurz developed at Happylab a foldable CNC-milled stand for wooden stringed instrument, Kajoku. “We had the opportunity to implement our ideas and we even got a patent on the instrument stand. Meanwhile, we also have a wholesaler of our instrument stands and spiked boards, which delivers to 60 countries worldwide and our own online shop. What I learned is that it is important to believe in your ideas and try to implement them”, Kurz explains.

Magdalena Muszyska, also from Vienna, is a fashion designer that went to Happylab with a precise idea to make on a 3d printer. “I did a bootcamp there and at the end used mostly lasercutting” she recalls. “This technology is seriously underestimated in fashion at the moment. It opens new possibilities to experiment and play with textiles. It has inspired me to develop an only lasercutted and self assembled line and an open-source database to apply laser for textile manipulation”, she adds.

The main idea behind these words you’re reading is that event-based learning is a hard-to-measure reality, but that doesn’t make it less real or less important than other things that are necessary for Europe to keep its central role as a testbed for better futures. Workshops change lives, events like Maker Faire or other Do It Yourself festivals connect technology, design, people, vocations in a way that new possibilities can emerge.

Therefore, individuals that are positively contaminated can become the best persons they can be: entrepreneurs, artists or social innovators, profiles that all levels of government want to attract and retain with their talent-based economy strategies. Our challenge for the years to come is precisely to find ways to track all this meaningful stories at the same time, and highlight the importance of maker culture, Fab Labs, open source communities and distributed design as previous conditions for many economic-related success stories to happen. Like the air we breathe.