The Makery Pops-Up In The Grassroots: Guerrilla MakerSpace Flowers In Hyperlocal-Community Places With AdHoc Workshops

Itinerant Techie-Visionaries Gypsy Making With “Instant” Hacking Labs, Tinker Dens & DigiFaberies To Empower Explorers In The Art/Sci Of Workshopping The Future On The Block & In The Nabes.

In covering 3DP here in the City, I had already met two of the four founders of The Makery—in contexts different from their street-level Pop-Up MakerSpace initiative. About which I only subsequently learned…and quickly came to admire as co-conspirators in our 3DP “make something (awesome) happen” space.

Here are the four founders of The Makery, profiled for your better understanding (because these folks are doing significant things in our segment and you should know them):

Jaymes Dec was one of our expert confabbers at our “3DP & Kids” Roundtable in September—as part of 3DP Media’s NY3DP Summits. (See my Vlog coverage of 3DP & Kids—complete with a video of the entire session—HERE.) LREI’s Elisabeth Irwin High School in the Village hosted us. Little Red’s Saber Khan was our Local Champion—and Roundtable Moderator—and he recruited Jaymes to our dynamite panel of ed-tech gurus. Jaymes is also Technology Integrator, FabLab Administrator at Marymount School of New York. (Marymount is the home to the only officially sanctioned “FabLab” in New York City {of four in New York State}.)

Jon Santiago is a guru of all things Maker and was there at the Creation of the Fab Lab movement. He was a student at MIT and part of the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) when the Center more or less invented Fab Labbery in 2007. For more on Fab Labs,  you can find a very-rich Fab Lab FAQ HERE. Jon and I have been dialoguing about mobile makeries for the last few months. Besides his co-founder role at The Makery, he is also a principal in HTINK. This organization is “an educational services cooperative (based on the Mondragon model) focused on spreading technical learning and creative problem solving skills to as many people as possible.”

Hsing Wei was The Makery founder in place—and empowering!—at another of that org’s pop-ups on the Lower East Side. I caught up with her during this more-or-less week-long Makery session on First Street  in the LES on Saturday, 7 December. This Vlog contains an interview I video’d with Hsing about The Makery’s initiatives HERE. This 12-minute exchange is a terrific profile of the organization: Hsing is well spoken and well-versed in the philosophy and practice of “making” as political, economic and social action. Here is Hsing’s The Makery profile: “Hsing Wei is an interaction designer, convener, and tinkerist. She enjoys developing technology-enriched experiences that solve problems, connect communities, and enable novel ways of interacting with the world. After wandering the halls of Penn, MIT, and Harvard, she has been on the start up team of various creative games and digital learning initiatives, such as Quest to Learn and EDesign Lab, which seek to integrate emerging digital contexts, center on students as creators, and extend learning outside of classroom walls.”

And, I have yet to meet Corbett Beder, the fourth The Makery founder. But, here’s his The Makery profile: “Corbett was the Senior Director of R&D at Vision Education & Media, an academic enrichment organization that provided after school programs and curriculum development in science and technology. For the past eight years, his projects have included teaching digital video, game design, and LEGO Robotics throughout the New York and New Jersey area. He has worked as a consultant for the NYC DOE on a number of innovative technology programs.” 

As you can see, these innovators and pro-active “soft-agitators” at The Makery are good folks to know. They’re making much of (3DP) importance happen…

C’mon Back!

LAND

 

 

 

 

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