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Fig. 11.2 ( Left ) A urine powered generator developed by 14-year-old Duro-Aina Adebola,
Akindele Abiola, Faleke Oluwatoyin, and 15-year-old Bello Eniola. Shown at Maker Faire Africa
in 2012 ( http://makerfaireafrica.com/2012/11/06/a-urine-powered-generator/ ) (Picture under a
Creative Commons Attribution License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ ) . ( Right ) A
machine for processing sisal into rope by Alex Odira Odundo at Maker Faire 2010 ( http://www.
matchamaker.info/maker15.php ) (Picture under a Creative Commons 3.0 license: https://creative-
commons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ )
goal or to address a particular local need. In many cases, Making is motivated by a
need to repair something broken or to modify something to better suit the needs of the
Maker. Still other Makers are participating in crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter
and IndieGoGo and start-up accelerators like Haxlr8r to transform their handcrafted
vision into a small business. There is also a growing discourse around DIY in non-
Western contexts, especially with the rise of Maker Faires in China and Africa in
recent years. Many of the projects on display at Maker Faire Africa refl ect a marriage
of the playful and the pragmatic, such as the urine powered generator (Fig. 11.2 , left),
or the Sisal Processing Machine of Alex Odira Odundo (Fig. 11.2 , right) that is
reminiscent of the Spinning Jenny, one of the earliest and most important inventions
of the fi rst Industrial revolution. The diversity of the works on display makes a strong
argument for utilitarian and pleasure-oriented motivations coexisting.
Finally, we have found that many Makers are motivated by a desire for self-
expression. Making is often deeply enmeshed with other ideological positions such
as a critique of consumer cultures of mass production (in the case of many Steampunk
Makers (Tanenbaum et al. 2012 ), a desire for radical self-reliance (in the case of
many makers within the Burning Man community 3 ), or a commitment to sustainable
practices of repair and reuse. Making is, in many ways, a political act: by repairing
rather than replacing broken items and by creating material goods within home
workshops and maker spaces, Makers are opting out of the supply chains and
industrial processes that underlie the economies of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. We therefore consider expressiveness to be a third signifi cant motivation
for Maker practice.
3 http://www.burningman.com/preparation/event_survival/radical_self_reliance.html#.
UkXbRsZ498E
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