We’ve just arrived here in San Francisco and we’re setting up our booth – woohoo!
With so much going on back at base, only 3 of us have been able to come from London (Me, James and Roger) , and with 100,000 people expected over the weekend – we’ll need help!

If you’re in the area and you know your stuff about sugru and would like to hang out with us on the booth, demo’ing, chatting about hacks and talking through peoples ideas and projects over the weekend, we’ve love to have you
The people that come by the booth are really awesome and the atmosphere is amazing… You can help us for a full day, or for a few hours, whatever suits you best. We can pay you with lots of sugru, a t-shirt, a pass for you and friend and lots of fun or in regular cash either – it’s all cool to us, just let us know! It’s starting tomorrow – so we need to get our skates on! Email james@sugru.com as soon as you can if you’re up for it!

We’ve just arrived here in San Francisco and we’re setting up our booth (woohoo!… more on that in a second post in a minute) but first – the line up this year looks incredible! so I pulled out my top 10 things happening this weekend I’m determined not to miss so you can get excited too!

Citizen Science and Space Exploration
If you want to fly in space, or just fly an experiment, this is for you. Low-cost suborbital spacecraft will revolutionize space science and exploration. With Edward Wright, Chairman of the United States Rocket Academy. Make: Education Stage, Saturday, 1PM

Raspberry Pi: How a $35 Computer Will Give Students an Appetite for Science
Raspberry Pi maker Eben Upton leads live session showcasing how easy it is to program the low-cost mini-computer, and shares insights into its development and impact on future engineers and innovation. Make: Demo Stage, Sunday 11AM

DIY Chocolate: Break Away from the Bar
Learn to make chocolate from cacao beans, sugar, and a food processor. Karen Solomon, author of Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It, will teach the simple satisfaction of roasting, grinding, and flavoring your own DIY dark, chocolatey confection. Maker Square Stage, Saturday 11AM

sugru – us of course!
We’ve brought lots of sugru and we’ll be demo’ing and playing around with it all weekend, we’ve also brought loads of different hacks inspired by the sugru community and are there to help you talk through your projects and ideas and how sugru can help! All day at booth #56 in the Expo Hall and at the Make: Projects stage Saturday and Sunday 4PM

World Record Paper Airplane
The Sultan of Oman, the builders of the next generation of space vehicles, and Fry’s Electronics all come together in one man’s dream to be the best paper airplane designer in the world. John Collins, The Paper Airplane Guy shows off the plane. Make: Center Stage, Saturday 11.30AM

littlebits electronics
A super cool little open-source library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnets for prototyping and play. Designed and recently launched by Ayah Bdeir – littlebits speed up putting projects together and taking them apart again, thus making electronics easier and more playful. Make: Education Stage, Sunday 3PM

Organic Beekeeping: Saving the Honey Bee One Bee at a Time
Organic Beekeeping in an Urban Environment presents many challenges. Find out how each one of us can make a difference by utilizing our maker skills to create a safe haven for the honey bee. Maker Square Stage, Saturday 2PM

Democratizing Access To The Tools of Innovation
A hundred dollars a month now gives you access to the tools of the Industrial Revolution for the first time in 250 years. Mark Hatch, CEO of the amazing Techshop, will show examples of makers who are changing the world with access to machines, some training, and a shared workspace. Make: Center Stage, Saturday 3.30PM

Dave Eggers – A Modest Proposal: Bringing Makers to Market
Dave Eggers, founder of one of the most genius things ever – the pirate store at 826 Valencia – and longtime fan of the Maker Movement, will share ideas and some sketches for bringing a Maker’s market to the centre of San Francisco.

The Story Behind DIY.org
DIY.org is an online community for maker kids. Co-Founder Isaiah Saxon will share the back story – from Encyclopedia Pictura’s animation work, to Trout Gulch, to the feature film DIY in 3d, to the formation of DIY.org Make: Centre Stage, Sunday 1.30PM

Can’t wait !! If you’re not in the area, enjoy the links and think about coming next year maybe! And if you’re coming – make sure to come by and say hi – we’re at booth 56 in the Expo Hall, if you hadn’t planned on coming but are considering it now, check out my second post in a minute – we need help and have passes!

We’re out and about around London a lot this week, here are 3 events with a DIY approach that we’ll be taking part in, and that you might like to come to.

We’ll be doing a workshop at the [Re]design stand at 100% Design this Thursday 22nd September 1-3pm. That’s at Stand A64, 100% Design at Earls Court.

We’re thrilled to be invited to speak at This Happened… this Friday 23rd at the London Metropolitan University (Goulsten Street Building) at 7pm along with four other speakers including Adrian Hon from Six to Start and Amy Pliszka of Bees Beside Us – a collection of expandable living spaces designed for urban bees using natural, biodegradable materials.  The talks are about the ‘making it happen’ part of projects or businesses, and I’ll be talking about some of the lessons learned along the way to inventing sugru and getting it out into the world.

Tickets are free and available on a first come first served basis, register here.

Part lecture, part hacking and making workshop. Chris Sanderson of The Future Laboratory examines how open-sourced software, FabLabs and 3D printing are fostering a new hacker culture in which everyone can become the creator of their own products or brands. We’ve been invited to show you how sugru can help you unleash your inner hacker, and there’ll be some sugru for you to take home as well.  Technology Will Save Us want us all to be able to build and repair technology – at this event on Saturday they’ll show you how to build a circuit with a conductive dough.

Living and Designing in the DIY Age is at the V&A on Saturday 24 September 2011 at 2pm.  Ticket prices: £12 or £5 concessions. Book online at the V&A website or contact the V&A on +44 (0)20 7942 2211

This Sunday, along with a bunch of other Entrepreneurs, we’ve been invited to take part in Green Day at Kinsale Arts Week.  It sounds like it’s going to be a pretty interesting event.

I’m planning to show some exciting examples of how the DIY movement and sugru users in particular are taking action in their own lives to live more sustainably by taking a practical, can-do and creative approach to life.
For us, the DIY movement is not just about the immediate repairs, it’s a signal of a fast-growing can-do approach to problems at all levels – from a small repair to the science of climate change.  We’re lucky enough that lots of you who use sugru for small things in your everyday lives, are in touch with us – and so we know that among us are scientists doing super interesting and important work, web developers and designers creating tools and experiences that make life easier and more fun for us all, teachers working with the next generation of can-do’ers and all kinds of other inspiring stories too.  The spirit of the DIY movement and the sugru community is one of not waiting for others to provide solutions, but a willingness to try and getting stuck in.

Bill Liao and Sean O’ Sullivan will be there to speak about tackling climate change with reforestation and sustainable transport technology.

Oh, and it won’t be just talking – we’ll be getting stuck in too, so anyone who’s been wanting to give sugru a try, but hasn’t yet – do come along. We’re hosting a Toy Hospital at 2pm at the Temperance Hall in Kinsale before the talks.

Bring along any toys you have that are in need of a little TLC and we’ll give you free sugru and a helping hand to repair them there and then.  There’ll also be packs to buy in case you’ve been waiting for your chance! The talks start at 3.30, at the amphitheatre in Kinsale College.  Hope to see you there!

Phew! It’s taken me about a week to recover, and I take that as a sign of it’s supreme awesomeness.  The Bay Area Maker Faire is the largest DIY festival in the world.  Not the ‘repaint the kitchen’ kind of DIY but the ‘take control of your life and enjoy doing all kinds of stuff for yourself that people normally think you can’t do for yourself’ kind of DIY.  It’s mecca for us!

A bit of background for newbies – MF is created by Make Magazine, it’s now in it’s 6th year, has about 80,000 visitors over 2 days, and has already spawned several smaller Maker Faires in other cities and more and more community organised mini Maker Faires every year too (one in Seattle this wkd!).

It feels like in the beginning it was quite technology/electronics focused, but every year it’s encompassing more and more kinds of making and doing (now including stuff from growing food to music to astronomy) and for me, that’s what makes it reign over all other festivals.  It’s now really becoming about an approach to life, a place learn and get inspired through trying out, and a symbol of the phenomenal growth in the number of people looking to play a more active role in things and improve them – from where their food comes from to how their schools work.

We loved being part of it again this year, and thank you to all the lovely sugru users locally who helped us out on the booth! Our photos from the weekend are on flickr and facebook.  Apart from the awesomeness of meeting lots of familiar faces and new friendly faces on the sugru booth, there were a bunch of things there that left me wide-eyed, buzzing and blabbing to anyone that would listen, too much for one blogpost, so this is the first of a few posts!

Gever Tully’s talk on the thinking behind Brightworks – an extraordinary school

Gever (Tinkering School, Fifty Dangerous things you should let your children do) talked through the plan for Brightworks, a new school that he and Bryan Welch are opening in September this year, and the learnings and thinking behind it. It blew me away. Brightworks reimagines the idea of school as the intellectual and creative heart of the neighbourhood.  It does away with tests, grades and segmenting by subject, and instead proposes a structure they call ‘an arc’ that allows students of different ages (from 6 to 12) and abilities to learn by addressing a central theme from multiple perspectives together over a cycle that lasts a number of weeks.

Working in teams grouped by the students’ particular interests and choices, they address the theme through self-devised guided projects.  A structure of three phases – exploration, expression and exposition – is used to focus on fostering curiosity, independent thought, and working with others as well as everything else needed to address the subject, skills like reading, calculating, science, engineering, music, drawing, building or whatever else is relevant.

This is a prototype school initially, and will start with around 30 children. To realise the project, it’s necessary for it to be a fee-paying model at the beginning as Brightworks have chosen to get it up and running and learn how well it works rather than go the slow and painful (and unlikely) route of convincing the authorities to adopt it from the outset.  They are committed however to it being a diverse group so there is assistance available for up to half of the families.  One of the most inspiring things for me is that they’re just going ahead and doing it, without worrying about lots of official stuff, because they believe in it so much, and then they can see from there how to improve it, grow it, make it fairer, more official etc. in time. I wish them all the luck in the world and I really look forward to seeing where this goes!
You can watch Gever’s talk from Maker Faire here (26 mins), and read more at www.sfbrightworks.org

PS More Maker Faire best bits to come over the next week or so!

…is on this weekend – and we’re gonna be there!

If you’re in San Francisco, you really can’t let yourself miss the Maker Faire.  It’s a weekend that’s insanely packed full of really inspiring stuff – Makers, Crafters, Musicians, and enough awesome demos and talks (literally hundreds of them) to make your brain swell.  To name a tiny few:

* Google’s Self-Driving Cars, Centre Stage, Sebastian Thrun, Saturday 12pm

* Bring on the Tinkering! Learning from Kids who Make, Innovation Stage, Steve Davee, 11.30am

* The New Race to the Moon: Building a Private Lunar Mission, Bob Richards, Saturday 1pm

* The World’s Simplest Longboard, Make Live Stage, Mark Frauenfelder, Saturday 2pm

* Keeping Urban Livestock, and Butchery Demonstrations at the Food Maker Pavilion.

The spectrum of interests covered is mind-melting – check out the full schedule here.

Team sugru will be there in the main Expo Hall at booth 68 with lots of free sugru samples to give away, and full packs for you to buy as well.  We may also bring some discount codes for future web purchases (…said she with a glint in her eye).  Anyway, if you’re there, we’d love to meet you – come and say hi!

We’re also looking for a few people to work on the booth with us again this year, so if you’re in the area and up for it, get in touch asap!

* 1 day paid work demo’ing sugru and meeting lovely visitors to the sugru booth

* A 2-day pass to the Maker Faire so you have the second full day to just soak up the show

* Lots of sugru and a Hack Things Better t-shirt for you

We’re looking for people for both Saturday and Sunday, just get in touch with James here at sugru for more info: james@sugru.com It’s gonna be great!

We’re off to Dublin this weekend to take part in a new festival that sounds amazing.  It’s called Mindfield International Festival of Ideas, and will take over Merrion Square for the weekend.

The lineup looks fantastic! It includes a booker prize winner, debates on social entrepreneurship, climate change, political reform, the culture of gaming, a hackerspace tent, great food, and lots of free hands-on making workshops for young people – that’s where we’ll be.

On Saturday and Sunday from 1.30pm, we’ll be in the young people’s area chatting with people about sugru and the joys of hacking and repairing in general, and I’ll also be taking part in a few discussions in the Ignition tent in the evenings which I’m really looking forward to!

The promo stuff promises inspiration, controversy and laughter – I can’t wait! Although some of the more high profile events are ticketed at €10, the young people’s area and many of the talks and debates are free – come along, we’d love to meet you!

The Maker Faire season is here at last!
First out of the block is Newcastle here in the UK – this weekend, the 12th and 13th March at the Centre for Life.  This faire is smallish if you compare it to the Mama Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area one in May, but it’s largish if you compare it to something else. They’re expecting a decent 5000 or so makers to turn up from all over the UK and hang out for the weekend. Come and join us!

We had a great laugh there last year and made some cool new friends, like Indie Biotech, the lovely soldering teachers, and arch-photographer and customiser @lloydyp.  The lineup is longer this year, and now includes some of the most active UK based Instructablers, the new project funding site getitmade, and some cool foodie looking people called DIY Pie, so it looks like it’s gonna be even cooler! We’re getting excited putting together all our stuff for the stand …

We decided to mix it up this year, and bring you some other rocking repair stuff as well as sugru. Say hello to the HACKquarium Repairium – the traveling roadshow spreading the joy of a life of repairing.

Come along and mend your socks and moth-eaten scarves with Woolfiller, learn a modern twist on the ancient Japanese ceramic repair technique called Kintsugi, and hack your stuff better with sugru for free on the day, and get your mits on kits of all of the above to take home!

Come and play!

We are about as excited as we’ve ever been in our lives this week. Why? We’re going to Bay Area Maker Faire! It’s on this weekend and, well, this has always been a dream for us. We’re pinching ourselves…

If you’re in the San Francisco area, come and see us! We’ll be in the MakerSHED, and we’ll have a demo / hacking workshop area with lots of sugru for you to try out there and then. Dig out those things waiting to be hacked and repaired and bring them along – we’ll give you enough sugru to do your project there and then. We may even have a few prizes for best hacks

And, well, how could we refuse an amazing opportunity to work with the supreme hackers at our favourite magazine in the world…. we’ve worked round the clock recently to make a limited number of packs for MAKE (on top of the sugru stock we’re building for sugru.com) that you’ll be able to buy from MakerSHED at the Faire.

VOLUNTEERS WANTED Come help us out at the sugru stall
The crowds will be huge, so we’re looking people to join us in our hacking area to show the masses how sugru works. If you’d like to help people hack and make with sugru over the weekend, and meet other sugru fans, we have a few free MF passes for volunteers – email me at jane@sugru.com if you’d like to help — even for just a few hours! We’d love to meet you

(Finally, as you can see from our timeline, we’re getting DARN CLOSE now. That means more exciting announcements soon.)

The big weekend in the UK maker calendar is nearly here! This is the second year for the UK Maker Faire which is a baby of the big beast in California every year, and it’s on this weekend March 13-14 at the Centre for Life in the middle of Newcastle.
We’ll be there !
Got a project that could use some sugru? Something broken waiting for a fix? Or a badly needed hack?
There’ll be a limited amount of free sugru available for hacking over the weekend, so email us at hacks@sugru.com, tell us what you’d like to hack / repair / make and we’ll book you in!