Brit Morin: The Future of the Maker Movement

The maker movement, though, is what's more exciting to me. And this is something that will continue to get bigger and bigger every year. Like you saw in that Google search graph. It's about everything from kind of the analog world of making and creativity, traditional arts like Letterpress, which are coming back, but also all the benefits that technology is bringing to how we're making and creating. We're able to open source our designs so that others can freely download them and access them. There are online learning platforms, not just from Brit company, but from others as well, where people are able to get educated if they don't live near a college, university, or any type of workshop that offers classes. 3D rendering is so cool right now. This is a new startup called Modzi that launched. You can literally take a picture of any room in your house and they'll 3D render it and show you what real furniture looks like in that room. They're importing products from like, West Elm and Crate and Barrel and letting you swap things in and out. So from an interior designer's perspective, this is a new way to think about creativity. Smart devices, of course, and machines that are helping us learn things faster. This is a favorite example of mine. It's called the G tar. It's an iPhone connected guitar, and it literally shows you the chords from an app on your phone that you should be playing. So it teaches you how to play the guitar just from looking at your phone. Crowdfunding, of course, is what's enabling all of these small entrepreneurs and startups to actually get started. We've seen some amazing new products launched because of Kickstarter and Indiegogo. There's only more of that to come. 3D printers, which has not yet gone mainstream for sure. They're still very expensive. Quality isn't there yet, but they are getting way better. People are using them to create human tissue and bone, to create all kinds of food. I'm an advisor for a company that's actually using 3D printers to create real clothing and textiles through a process called electronic spinning. And in the future, imagine going into your closet, downloading a blouse design from J. Crew, pressing print, and having it export for you in a glass machine. This is a real future that's literally years in front of us. So what does this mean? This is all just a few years out. We're in this moment before when inkjet printers were only able to be found at Kinko's, and we're in that moment with 3D printers right now and a lot of the maker movement. But soon we're all going to have access to these devices. They're going to be just a couple hundred bucks. We're going to have them on our desktops, in our kitchens. They're going to be the way that we produce and manufacture on our own. And so what implications could that have? It's something I'm thinking a lot about. Maker spaces right now are the FedEx and Kinkos of the world. It's where people are going to use these machines and devices. I think these will continue to be popular for the next two years until we see those price points fall. The cost of prototyping because of these makerspaces has gone down significantly. You used to have to prototype things in China for like tens of thousands of dollars. This is the dodo case. It's an iPad case. You guys might have seen it before. Literally, it was made in just a couple weeks for about $1,000. Apple saw it, decided to pick it up in their online store. Sold like a million dollars of product within its first month. So all for just 1000 bucks and a guy who's tinkering with a laser cutter. I'm really excited about customization. Think about the idea that if we have this long tail manufacturing or you're able to make stuff on your own, you can add your name to things, you can add colors that you like, you can scan your body and make things perfectly fit you the way you want it to. Customization is going to be a really big option for us in the future, but it does open us up to copyright issues. Think of this a lot like the music industry for all able to download and open source files. What does that mean? Does the designer who made the J. Crew blouse get credit when you download it? Does he get paid? Can I illegally send that file to someone else? It's going to get really interesting with the way that digital files are transferred for product designs. The whole nation, like I mentioned, the White House is behind this, is incredibly excited about steam, science, technology, engineering, art and math. And I say steam because art is included in that and the White House is starting to use that term as well. But we're seeing kids, especially those in their early preteen years, really embrace this. I mentor a group of 12 year olds who actually know more about CAD design than me, and it kind of freaks me out. And they also speak Mandarin. So the future generations are definitely in this. But of course, it all comes back to play. Regardless of how this affects our economy or different industries. I hope that people will also just take time to participate in creativity in their daily life. One exciting note to end on is that with all of these changes with the maker movement, people are predicting that self manufacturing in homes could equate to a $55 billion industry by the year 2020. That's just five years away. This is on top of kind of the arts and crafts industry that already exists. So this industry is only getting bigger. It's getting bigger very quickly, so pay attention.