Play Making Exchanges
 

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Making
Exchanges

As we develop new tools and technologies, we will need new venues to help us connect around our innovations. These Making Exchanges will help us learn new tools, share skills, and solve problems with other like minds. They will be the basis for optional communities that support these new ideas.

We started to wonder how technology itself would shift the way we learn or create new opportunities to share skills. As tools assimilate more of our simple tasks, how will this change the concepts we need to learn? As our communities find new tools to create things together, how will this change interactions?

a  / Making Education

There are skills books just can’t teach. We really need to use tools and materials to understand how they work. But what will a making education look like in the future?

We think the recent explosion in camera technologies will create new styles of learning. Imagine a depth camera tracking our movements as a professional gives you guidance. Or seeing your hands super-imposed on a screen as you learn new motions.

We wondered how new sensors and new social elements could shape our learning environments. Could you use cameras to track your hands as you learn to knit? Could you use lasers to guide new interactions? Could you learn the nuances of a skill from master craftspeople? We designed the Master’s Archive to understand how mastery might be passed between student and teacher.
Play Master's Archive 0:51

Early Evidence:

Scratch a tool developed at the MIT Media Lab that teaches children how to program using visual cues and hiding confusing syntax.

DIY.org a community for young kids to share skills and tackle challenges for recognition.

b  / Long Tail Trading

Today, most marketplaces thrive where there is scale. Factories in a few regions supply goods for the whole world. We are wondering how new tools will shift this scenario. Could they allow us to assemble things closer to home? Or could these tools create a strong, connected community of makers that reduce our interest in mass manufactured products?

We wondered how manufacturing could create product platforms. And how we might better shape products to our needs as they’re made locally. Could this shift make space for local crafts people? Would this align local purchasing to local jobs? We envisioned what a completely mobile manufacturing solution might look like to explore this idea.
Play Trailer Town 0:44

Early Evidence:

CustomMade a market place that allows people connect with makers to design and create custom products.

Etsy an online market place mostly of crafts and handmade goods.

MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms is exploring ways to create big structures out of small, interlocking components

Self Assembling Objects Skyler Tibbits at MIT's School of Architecture is exploring how objects might contain the information to assemble themselves.

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Outer Skills