Making Makers

”The hand is the window on to the mind” Immanuel Kant The Maker Movement is a contemporary culture or subculture that constitutes a technologybased extension of DIY culture. An international coming-together and celebration of grassroots innovation and individuals’ determination to create at both a local and global level, it espouses a sharing philosophy that encourages the creation of “instructables”. Instructables are educational tutorials or instruction manuals, which, in the main, lack anypaedagogical framework and would benefit from the application of a formal teaching and learning approach. Since 2006 regular Maker events have been held internationally. On July 27, the team from the Model Making, Design and Digital Effects programme in IADT participated in Dublin’s Mini Maker Faire, reaching out to the growing Maker community in Ireland and beyond. For this, I designed and built a unique roto-casting machine(for casting hollow objects) and created an ‘instructable’, going beyond the usual instruction manual and including all elements of the process to create an ‘etymology’ of a professional Maker’s creative process, illustrating visually the design process, research methods employed, unforeseen challenges and solutions and the crafts employed. Final year students on our model making, design and digital effects programme at IADT will in the academic year 2013--2014 create an ‘instructable’ also, not as an manual but as a selfreflective exercise. In my paper, I propose to give a short history of the international Maker Movement and IADT’s participation in Dublin’s Mini Maker Faire 2013; I will explore the movement and its potential, within the teaching environment, with reference to teaching aids I have developed and the reflective journals our students will create; and, lastly, I will discuss the multifarious possibilities that the Maker movement offers for collaboration across the education sector, the wider community and industry.