the maker movement comes to denmark

last week, i went to the made celebration, a maker exhibition put on by roskilde festival in a cool old warehouse building in roskilde. it's pretty cool that the maker movement has come to denmark and tho' it's a bit more techy in its danish incarnation than i had thought about it before, it was very interesting.

3D printers were a big part of it and there were several stands where people were printing all sorts of things. this little 3D printer was in the maker spirit itself, as it was in a kind of handmade box set-up. it seems the price of these things is coming down. i suppose soon we'll all have one.

this maker fest had a very wide conception of the maker movement. this booth was promoting some really creative uses of minecraft, the computer game. some danish municipalities have even been using it for involving citizens in the planning of new housing developments and such. building various suggestions and ideas in minecraft before building them in reality. pretty cool thinking.

this was more my conception of the maker movement...a station where people could use sewing machines to repair or sew something new.

the same area included tools and soldering irons, so people could also repair electronics and such.

and here was a traveling bike repair shop, where you could use the tools to repair your bicycle.

this workshop area gave me the idea that husband should have a day or two each week where people could come and share his workshop. he'd get so much of talking with them about what they were working on and they'd get a space in which to make or fix things, which they might not otherwise have.

at this stand, you could make a transfer for a t-shirt or bag. it was kind of a plastic material that you could melt onto the fabric. it was so busy, we didn't try it, but i'll admit this was more along the lines of the maker movement as i saw it before i attended the event.

i think because it's denmark and because there were municipalities involved, there were a lot of community-minded stands - shared workspaces, places where you could use tools and spent time in a public space with other makers. pretty cool and i got lots of inspiration for our local kulturhus.

it was a rainy day outside, but someone had even tried to come up with a concept for a kind of modern sweat lodge, so many ideas were being tried out at the event.

we didn't go to the workshop part of it, but there were workshops and someone made this table. with husband's perfectionist eye, i think it's a good thing he wasn't with me. but it would be a perfectly good table in the garden, don't you think?