Praxis Makes Parfait
Looking at Making through the lens of Portland
Maker Culture
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Interactive Screen
th
August 14 2009
Banff New Media Institute

Why are makers making?
● Has consumer culture lost a certain cachet?
● Has the internet let like minds find each other?
● Is the DIY aesthetic more popular in any way?
● Is this a way of socializing?
● Is this a way of showing off?
● Are we doing it for money? For beer?
● Is there a need to interpret the world through
the critical lens of tactile experience? Or what?
● Is this uniquely a PDX experience?

Approach
● This presentation will be example based –
showing examples of Maker activity in and
about Portland Oregon.
● Will share projects I contributed to - and
projects of friends - all of us participating in the
Maker community of Portland Oregon.
● I don't have answers as to 'why' we do this - so
maybe you can provide them?

Donald Delmar Davis – Dorkbot Lab
● Hosted at Pacific Northwest College of Art
● Lectures, lessons and hacking on Electronics

Urban Edibles

Marc Powell's Food Genome Project

Amber Case – Cyborg Camp
● Unconference about the future of the
relationship between humans and technology
● Cyborg Anthropology, post sapiens philosophy

Ward Cunningham - Cybords

David Frech - muForth
● muforth.nimblemachines.com

Calagator.org
● So many geek events in PDX that we got
together to write a calendar to track 'em... hmm.

Matthew Stadler - Suddenly.org

WhereCamp PDX

Commonalities
● Portland seems to be a hugely social geek town
● The social geek seems to be a new phenomena
● Cross disciplinary interests
● A lot of food related interests
● A lot of technology to 'support' other interests
● Tend to be smaller faster fun projects
● Tends to be a way people socialize
● People are learning hard core skills - fast

Shape of physical space
● Lots of co-working spaces
● Everybody around one big table
● Often each working on their own projects
● Simply sharing proximity and conversation
● Often highly wired via twitter
● Often peeps are not spending a lot of $$$
● Often peeps have a lot of free time
● Often just not happy with consuming media
● Often trying to rope peeps into activities

Paige Saez - Makerlab Sundays
● Skill share, food, conversation, music, art
● Powerpoint Karaoke, Software Hacking

Makerlab – Isoluminant Images

Makerlab – Whereis Project

Makerlab – ImageWiki / ImaWik
Project

A bewildering blurring of boundaries
● Recreating patterns that we use at work,
scheduling, planning, coordinating, technology
● Groups I've seen are more balanced, men
women, sexual orientations, age and race
● Musicians, programmers, artists, electronics
hobbyists, experts and amateurs
● For profit and open source interests
● Artistic and Pragmatic technical interests
● Tending to be largely secular for some reason?
● Are people more comfortable now on stage?

Is it the tools that make us make?
● http://barcamp.org Social engineering practices
● http://wk.com - Portland Incubator Experiment
● http://sparkfun.com
● http://processing.org
● http://etsy.com
● http://arduino.cc
● http://openframeworks.cc
● http://github.com
● http://portlandtechshop.com
● http://makezine.com … and the list goes on ...

Why are Makers making?