I was amazed yesterday that a Do It Yourself (DIY) maestro, whose fine water rockets have racked up hundreds of dollars of collateral damage, had never heard of the Maker Faire. That wasn’t the worst of it. My friend did not know about the huge ground swell of DIY innovation sweeping our country, and creating jobs as it grows. Maybe we should all be making jobs not finding them.
For those who don’t know, there is a bunch of people inventing the serious and the seriously frivolous in this country. Creating for the sake of creating, these folks are producing whole new types of products, from clothing with built in lighting, to giant machine tools for making architectural woodwork. These hobbies are turning into businesses. The groups and online communities that track this resurgence of grass roots DIY invention are numerous.
- Maker Faire
- Make Magazine
- Craft
- Instructables
- Spark Fun Electronics
- ReadyMade
- Shapeways
- TechShop
- Curbly
- Hack a Day
- Parallax
Time magazine recently wrote on The Future Of Work. I don’t think it is a bad thing that work, as we have known it, is fading away. Maybe it is time we all blaze our own new path to a profession made for us by us? After all, this is the country that turned something as useless as a Monster Truck into an industry. If we can do useless things like no other country can, just think of what we can do to change every facet of our way of life, usefully, for the better. Maybe that better life is just around the corner waiting for us to make it? And if that something is a monster truck, or a monster scooter or whatever, hey it very well could be a living!
