TechShop RDU to Close

Our friends and sponsor since our first event, TechShop RDU, are closing their doors on Saturday April 20.  Below is an email that I sent out to our mailing list.  I encourage you to share your fond memories of TechShop in the comments.  A "wake" is even planned for Saturday night.

The Maker Culture in North Carolina is an unstoppable force of creativity and that is especially true in the Triangle region: Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.  This concentration of talented and intelligent people is one of the reasons that the community workshop, TechShop, opened its doors in 2009 as TechShop Durham.  TechShop RDU is closing its doors on Saturday, April 20.

TechShop in Raleigh/Durham was a bold experiment.  It was a bold experiment whose driving force, Scott Saxon, answered the question of "should we?" with a pioneering rallying call of "OF COURSE WE SHOULD!"

TechShop RDU was a rallying point for all of the Triangle Makerati and it holds a very dear place in my heart.  Maker Faire North Carolina was created in the halls of TechShop in October of 2009.  We were born from a conversation: "Should we have a Maker Faire like those people in Rhode Island?"  My answer?  "OF COURSE WE SHOULD!" and now, four years later, we are planning our fourth epic event.

The pioneering spirit is vital to Makers.  It is our lifeblood.  Makers will make.  Doers will do. We Makers always answer the question of "why?" with "because I can!" and never back down from a challenge.

TechShop RDU didn't fail.  TechShop RDU sparked a fire in the Makers of North Carolina the likes of which I've never seen.  It launched projects, products, careers, and grand ideas.

It is up to our community to carry that momentum on to the next build, the next iteration: version 2.0.  One of you on this mailing list will be the founder of a new hackerspace, makerspace, or community workshop because, as I'll always say, Makers Gonna Make.

Sincerely,
Jon Danforth
Founder, Maker Faire North Carolina (created at TechShop RDU)

Tinkering and Maker Culture on the Rise

Allow me to exercise one of my new-found writing talents harvested from @FakeAPStylebook: Big Ups to the Wall Street Journal's Andy Jordan for pointing me to this article by Justin Lahart.  Mr. Lahart eloquently describes the blossoming Maker movement.  When you spend your days at work and devote your evenings to your various projects it's easy to miss the size of the trend.

Mr. Lahart has interviewed luminaries from many (US) hackerspaces, clubs, and universities and provides us with a forest-level view of what many of us might think is a small niche.

For the local slant and for some more on the rise of the tinkerer class read Marc Maximov's article in The Independent published back in September.  Mr. Maximov goes beyond the somewhat vanilla content in Mr. Lahart's article and attempts to determine the all-important why of the movement.

"It's been suggested that the developed world's modern, passive lifestyle—in which we're fixated on computer screens and tethered to our desks—squelches our instinctual drive to make things with our hands and contributes to depression." Maximov

Maximov also cites Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford as someone urging the case for working with your hands: something real.  Crawford's book digs far deeper and does an excellent job of reasoning that, essentially, to know you must do.