The maker movement is emerging just as we’re shooting past many of our planetary boundaries. I like to think that this arrival is wonderful, arriving just in time, since we need more skilled, creative, enthusiastic people who are willing to wrangle material reality. I’m psyched to see what happens with more skilled makers in the world who can, say, help take on energy and climate challenges after building up their energy literacy along their hardware design and coding skills. For sure there’s an outsized focus on tech, and not nearly enough on the intended results. We now have far more agency in designing, hacking, repairing our material world than ever. We have a deeper understanding of our environments. We can share any of our ideas broadly. Creating makerspaces in communities is just the beginning. Building justice and sustainability in these spaces requires intention. Even with smaller community projects like the ones on DIYsustainability.org, it takes effort to bring people together from diverse backgrounds. It takes patience to understand the problem you’re hoping to solve. This is all part of a human-centered design process. I come from the sustainable design world, so there’s a lot of overlap with prototyping and fabrication, and a lot of knowledge that makers could benefit from. I think something radical happens when you slow down to deeply understand a problem that someone else is facing - when you shift from making for yourself to designing for others. Replacing capitalism is a whole other question and I agree with /u/bilalghalib and /u/nadeemtron on their notes. I don’t think the maker movement is putting forth an entirely new economic model. It’s creating new entrepreneurs, and there are also a lot of people exploring what might happen if designs were open sourced and shared. Projects like Open Source Beehives, the e-NABLE prosthetic community, or the energy innovation hacks on Instructables are all part of an optimistic subculture where people are giving their blueprints and insights away to be duplicated or improved upon. It’s early days, but worth watching. I’m curious how these projects can scale, survive economically, and how their creators can maintain credit for their work.