Maker Assembly
A collaborative project to build a critical community around making. We bring people together to learn about diverse making cultures, support new grassroots activity, and cast a critical eye over the conventional stories of making: its past and future, its politics and impact.
Current
Maker Assembly is a gathering of makers, and a critical conversation about maker culture: its past, present and future. Through events, networks, editorial and more, we aim to catalyse a more informed reflective debate about making today: what it means to be a maker, the role of making in a contemporary industrial/consumer society, the responsibility of makers to the environment, and the diverse kinds of making that can happen when you look to different classes of maker, communities and cultures.
It’s co-ordinated by by a network of collaborators, with core funding support from the Comino Foundation. We’ve also been supported by the British Council, the V&A, and Lighthouse.
From 2015–17 our main activity was organising a series of events around the UK, in London, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh (and with local partners, in Belfast).
In 2018, we’re looking to distribute the network further, and work with more local partners to support diverse activities across the country.
All the info is on the Maker Assembly website. A few other bits I’ve written from around the web:
- I posted some thoughts on what a gathering of makers might look like on this blog, back in 2015
- I wrote up my thoughts on the first Maker Assembly on the Lighthouse website.
- I interviewed one of our speakers, Dean Brown, about the roots of the Maker Movement in the writings of John Ruskin.
- And another, Annabella Pollen, about the role of making in the postwar utopian youth organisation, Kindred of the Kibbo Kift.
Photo by Dan Sumption