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!

A few weeks ago a super cool sugru user called Eimear sent me an image of a sugru repair she’d just done for one of her students, Foridha, whose wheelchair joy-stick controller kept breaking. Eimear hoped the repair would make a big difference for Foridha’s mobility. She was full of hope and joy, the way you are after you repair something important. The only thing was, I had a sneaking suspicion it was too tough a job for sugru by itself. So I said that if by any chance it didn’t last, to come back to us and ask for help, because sometimes it can take a few tries to crack a tough one like this.

Sure enough, a few days later Eimear emailed back. Thanks Eimear – so glad you did
James was taking the community emails that day, and he noticed the postcode – Foridha and Eimear were only down the road!
So James and Ben jumped on their bikes to give them a hand.

This hack reminded us of the potential to help others by hacking and repairing. You know how to do it, so keep an eye out for who might need your help!

We’re delighted to be taking part in the latest Open MAKE event in San Francisco organised by the Exploratorium, MAKE Magazine and Pixar Animation Studios – happening at the Exploratorium tomorrow, Saturday March 17th from 10am – 2pm.

Open MAKE is a monthly program highlighting the tools, techniques, and ingenuity of local Makers. Visitors are invited to participate in tinkering and making activities inside the Tinkering Studio, where Makers from around the Bay Area will share their work. Tomorrow’s event will focus on tools, and local sugru guru @KentKB will be there representing sugru, demonstrating some of his hacks and giving away free samples to those who deserve them

There will be also talks from these 6 awesome makers:
* Tim Hunkin, artist, engineer and cartoonist – his talk is not to be missed!
* Moxie specializes in needle-felting wool to make it do strange and seemingly impossible things.
* Chef Elizabeth Falkner, of Citizen Cake fame, is an expert at using kitchen tools and stretching the boundaries of what pâtisserie can accomplish!
* David Lang and Eric Stackpole have started a community of tinkerers, engineers, and programmers to build an OpenROV, a remotely operated vehicle to go hunting for treasure at the bottom of abandoned mines.
* Benjamin Cowden builds delightfully quirky machines that accomplish human behaviors, like kissing or licking a lollipop.

So if you’re in the Bay Area, pop along, it’s gonna be awesome!

PS The Exploratorium Store has now started stocking sugru too

Some IKEA products rock, but with over 12,000 products on their books, the world’s largest furniture retailer can’t think of everything. We thought we’d help out a little.

We have, of course, been inspired by the rest of the IKEA hacking movement. People have been improving and reinventing their furniture and lighting long before us. Check out the various different IKEA hacking communities on the interwebs – IKEA Hackers, Platform21 = Hacking IKEA and the IKEA hackers on instructables.

The biggest challenge in any creative process is to embrace failure. Lots of you teachers, lecturers and group leaders want to foster a hands-on creative process in your students. You want them working fast, failing fast, and learning even faster. Improving a design or invention with constant real-life testing.

We know that sugru is a great material for prototyping ideas and testing stuff out so we thought we would set up sugru PROJECTS, it’s a simple idea where we give second level schools, colleges and universities (anywhere in the world) free sugru to run great projects.

If you run a course just send us a project brief that uses sugru as a prototyping material and we will send you enough free sugru to run the project with your students.
We’re not quite sure what’s going to happen but we know its going to be exciting.

How to:
• Submit your brief on this handy google form by December 16, 2011.
• We’ll supply sugru to the best proposals we get
• You report back the results of your project, we publish the most interesting processes and inventions on the sugru blog
• You and your students get recognition for being kick-ass designers / inventors

To set the ball rolling, we set ourselves the challenge of inventing a way to roll an egg down the stairs without it breaking !!!

This is a friends 1987 2.5L Porsche 944 Turbo. A beautiful car, however, the previous owner had mounted a mobile phone holder to the dash and when he removed it, left a series of prominent holes in the leather trim.

Always up for a challenge, James offered to repair the holes using sugru – and he’s uploaded a step-by-step on Instructables – so if you have this problem, go check it out.

The crucial part in this case was colour matching. Use your 7 Steps Booklet to figure out the closest match and then tweak yourself. In this case he used green, orange, black and white and achieved a surprisingly good match.

See the full step-by-step on Instructables, along with a bunch of other nice car related repairs including repairing a key fob, mounting an aeriel and protecting your car from scratches.

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

A fantastic new show opens today at the V&A Museum in London.
It’s called the Power of Making and it’s one of the most exciting shows we’ve seen in a long time.

The show is designed to celebrate significant feats of making from around the world and to encourage debate – what is the power of making? is making important today? why?

We’re living in a time where, on one hand, schools are questioning whether they should continue to teach making skills such as woodwork, metalwork, ceramics and glass blowing which are expensive to teach and often have health and safety risks associated (who needs those skills nowadays anyway?), and, on the other hand, enthusiasm for making as a way of life is going through the roof, as demonstrated by communities like instructables, make magazine and sugru.

Now that lots of us no longer need to be able to make things (factories can do that, right?), there’s a huge resurgence in people wanting to get their hands dirty, understand how things work, take control, design, adapt, customise, fabricate and construct everything from clothes to computers to cars.

The exhibition features 100 achievements in making including a few pictured here, Professor Dava Newman’s Bio Suit, Thomas Heatherwicks ‘Spun’ chair, a traditionally made brewery barrel by Alastair Simms, the Makerbot home 3d-printer and, very happily, sugru!
Anyone who’s interested in things and how they’re made, from industry to craft, from high to low tech, age-old to futuristic really shouldn’t miss this show.

We’re super proud that sugru was selected as one of the 100 featured achievements, and a selection of hacks inspired by the sugru community are exhibited in the show which is open from September 6th until January 2nd.  This show get’s 10 stars from us – go see it!

This is one of the most exciting projects ever!
Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

Imagine – all the designs and instructions available for free to build all the machines you need to build your own farm or village! The 50 machines in the set include an open source bulldozer, dairy milker, generator, 3d printer, and my favourite – the microtractor!
This isn’t a concept – it’s real – watch the video!

Global Village Construction Set in 2 Minutes from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

“The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.”

Chris Anderson, curator of TED says “Your project is amazing. Thrilling, actually…It’s people like you who really give me hope for the future.”
WELL SAID!
Oh and if you agree these guys are doing amazing and important work, think about becoming a true fan. (I just did)

Our friends at Do the Green Thing, working with animators Claire Lever and Steven Boot have made this awesome little movie starring sugru to inspire more people to get fixing and repairing.
Is it just us or does it feel a little bit magic?