Maker mindset
Through the practice of making, we develop what we once called a “can-do” mindset that encourages us to act, take control of our lives, and develop our own capabilities. Making engages us fully and deeply as human beings, and it satisfies our creative souls. Maybe making can change the world, but first it changes us.
The Maker Movement is a cultural shift that is leading to a creative flourishing of art and science, technology and craft, a hands-on renaissance that is producing new tools and new ways of thinking.
Humans are tool-makers, inventors and innovators, storytellers, tinkerers, and role-players. We are makers who are free to imagine, free to play, and free to make.
Makers are self-directed learners, able to figure out one way or another how to learn what they need to know. They learn to use tools and technology to create new things. They are willing to take risks, trying to do something that others have not done or creating something that they have not seen before. They are persistent, overcoming frustration, and resilient, trying again when they experience failure. Makers are resourceful, developing the ability to make do with what is available or exploring alternatives that might be cheaper or better for the environment. Makers are good at improvising: they are able to do things that have no instructions. Makers are generally open and generous, willing to share their work and their expertise, often helping others in the recognition that they have benefited themselves from such help.
Makers believe in their own individual agency to act and create change in their own lives and their community.
- Perhaps the most important thing for adults is that play can be entirely under your own control. You do what you want to do. There are no committees that have to decide, no hierarchy to navigate for approval, no external conditions placed on your own interests. Control is in your own hands.
- Free to Make: How the Maker Movement is Changing Our Schools, Our Jobs, and Our Minds (Dougherty, Dale)
Deci
Leadbeater
In his 2004 essay “The Pro-Am Revolution,” Leadbeater describes the rise of a new social hybrid he calls the pro-am, for professional-amateur.
Illich
People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others.
The balance of learning is determined by the ratio of two kinds of knowledge in a society. The first is a result of the creative action of people on their environment, and the second represents the result of man’s “trivialization” by his manufactured milieu. Their first kind of knowledge is derived from the primary involvement of people with each other and from their use of convivial tools; the second accrues to them as a result of purposeful and programmed training to which they are subjected.
