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3. The use of common design fi le standards that allow anyone, if they desire, to send their
designs to commercial manufacturing services and to be produced in any number, just as
easily as they can fabricate them on their desktop. This radically foreshortens the path from
idea to entrepreneurship, just as the Web did in software, information, and content
(Anderson
2012
, p. 21).
Anderson's triad of characteristics is focused on the impact of digital creation
tools and the spread of common standards, all of which are crucial for the rise of
a mode of production that is diffuse rather than concentrated. Taking his list as a
starting point, we would argue for the inclusion of several environmental factors
as well: the recent explosion in electronic waste and cheaply available high-tech-
nology surplus, a growing environmental consciousness and desire for sustainable
material goods, and the growth of institutions that support Making and/or thrive
on it. Perhaps the most well known of these, MAKE magazine and the affi liated
small and large Maker Faires across the globe, have highlighted the explosive
growth of home- and garage-based activities that combine art, technology, craft,
and science. Local Maker spaces and fab labs, along with an explosion in Maker-
oriented education and summer camps, are creating safe places for making across
all ages and socioeconomic classes. At the same time, the platforms for experi-
menting with robotics, microcontrollers, wireless networks, and other high-tech
tools are rapidly democratizing: dropping in price, increasing in capability, and
becoming much more accessible to hobbyists and young Makers through more
abstracted programming languages and simplifi ed electronics platforms. Taken
altogether, these conditions and practices can be seen as a “third industrial revolu-
tion” (Anderson
2010
,
2012
).
There has also been an explosion of new technologies that radically augment the
industrial production capabilities of the individual or small group. Chris Anderson
calls particular attention to the rapid growth of 3D printer technology as the basis
for this new industrial revolution. The sales of 3D printers for personal use increased
over 35,000 % between 2007 (66 printers sold) and 2011 (23,265 printers sold),
2
and there has also been an explosion of homemade 3D printers, spearheaded by the
RepRap project [Fig.
11.1
]. We would expand the set of home fabrication technolo-
gies to include laser cutters, CNC mills, and other industrial fabrication machinery
that is rapidly becoming available at the hobbyist scale. With the proliferation of
home fabrication technology, the production loop from concept to prototype to
product can take place in a single garage or community hacker space, without
employing the large-scale industrial machineries that were previously necessary to
develop a new technology. The third industrial revolution takes the technological
capabilities of industrial society and blends them with the individualized modes of
production of preindustrial society to create a distributed set of local practices that
simultaneously subvert and rely upon the economies of scale developed during the
modern era.
2
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-10-24/personal-3-d-printer-sales-jump-35-000-
