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!

It took his passing at the great old age of 94 this week for me to find out about the man who invented Super Glue.  It’s so useful and ubiquitous now that we take it completely for granted, but super glue was once an accident, a spark, and an enabler of incredible new things.

Harry Coover was working as a chemist for Eastman Kodak and he discovered it during his research for materials to make clear plastic gun sights for World War II.
One of the compounds he tested, cyanoacrylate, was in­cred­ibly durable but had one annoying drawback. “The damn problem was everything was sticking to everything else,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2005. “We had a hard time using it in molds.”
In 1951, Dr. Coover (who went on to hold more than 400 patents and become a VP at Eastman Kodak) was testing a heat-resistant polymer for use in aircraft windshields when he remembered his encounter with cyanoacrylate.  When a colleague permanently bonded the lenses of an expensive optical instrument with a droplet of the liquid, Dr. Coover had an epiphany.  He found that the compound solidified after coming into contact with trace amounts of moisture, creating an extremely strong polymer layer between two surfaces.
“It suddenly struck me that what we had was not a casting material but a super glue.”

Since it was released on the market in 1958, it has become probably the most common repairing glue in the world – just imagine how much stuff it’s helped to keep out of landfill, how many toys it’s brought back to life, shoes its kept going and even how many wounds and bone fractures it’s helped to heal.

One of its most amazing applications of super glue is as a coagulant to help stop bleeding and as a tissue adhesive, and this is the one that Harry Coover was most proud of.  First used in the Vietnam War to temporarily patch the internal organs of injured soldiers until conventional surgery could be performed, tissue adhesives are now used worldwide for a variety of sutureless surgical applications.

Isn’t it amazing that it started as an accident? A thought… a spark?

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!

Last summer, after Jim trekked to the North pole with the help of his sugru hacked ski poles, we realised that sugru was now being used in 6 of the 7 continents on earth. (How amazing is that?!) Who could resist then, asking if any of you had any friends on the last continent that would enjoy sugru?

It was a longshot and we didn’t really expect anyone to come forward but… 2 people did! Gus and Christian had friends in McMurdo Station, which is one of the main research stations, where 1000 of the approx 5000 people in Antarctica live. Imagine our excitement – Antarctica is of course one of the most difficult places on earth for humans to survive, and by definition the community there has to be self-sufficient – when something breaks or doesn’t work very well – not only do you not want to go buy a new one – but that option just isn’t there!  In October we sent sugru to Gus and Christians friends. We haven’t had hacking reports from them yet… but recently another hacker got in touch.

John has just come back from the WAIS camp (West Antarctic Ice Sheet 79*28′S,112*05′W ) which is about 600 miles from Mcmurdo Station, 600 miles from the South Pole and about 100 miles from Byrd Station in Western Antarctica.  After 5 years of drilling, he and his team have just finished drilling the second deepest ice core bore hole in the world (!!!) – here’s a picture of the last piece of ice retrieved from their bore hole.  It came from 3,331.538 metres down.  Guess how old it is?

My mind was blown!  It’s 90,000 – 110,000 years old.

And well, the reason John got in touch was not only to tell us about the unbelievable awesomeness that they had just achieved, but also to tell us about the hacks and repairs he did with sugru while he was there! Here’s John with Francie, one of the cooks at the camp – her paring knife loosened from the handle and he used sugru to repair it.  And he also repaired his glasses and his watch…

Well, now we can proudly say that there are truly awesome sugru users on every continent on Earth.  John – you’re a legend!

If a creative project grows beyond your laptop or desk, and needs cash to get out into the world, it’s often really tricky to find the funds get it further. Fantastic ideas can go unused and unrealised, and awesome ideas can be filed away…when they should be out there solving problems, inspiring people and making the world a better place.
The frustrating thing is that sometimes, it takes a surprisingly small amount of money to get something started….or even done! Creative folk are pretty resourceful and even a little bit of dosh can go a really really long way.

That’s why it’s such brilliant news that there are more and more independent micro-funding projects starting that aim to help at just this moment. Kickstarter is obviously becoming completely legendary, and KIVA has built an incredible engine raising micro-loans for entrepreneurs in developing countries by leveraging the power of the ‘small but many’ donation model. My favourite though is the Awesome Foundation, a sort of viral un-organisation started in 2009 by Tim Hwang and his friends in Boston. His aim is to further the interest of awesome in the universe.

The premise is deliberately simple and informal: 10 people in a town or neighbourhood form a local AF chapter, applicants fill out a simple online form, and once a month the 10 micro-trustees each put $100 of their own pocket money into a pot and award a micro-grant of $1000 to the most awesome project that month (no strings attached). So simple and awesome is this idea that in the space of 18 months with just word of mouth, the Awesome Foundation has spread from Boston to now have self-initiated, self-managing, self-promoting chapters in 14 cities on 3 continents, and it’s spreading fast!

Awesome awardee projects can be anything at all – the idea is that everyone knows awesome when they see it
So far AF has funded a ton of truly awesome projects including invisible instruments in Boston, a bio-bus in New York, audio tours of the changing San Francisco Bay and community cooking of otherwise wasted food in London.

I’m thrilled to be one of the 10 micro-trustees in the first London chapter after going bananas when I first read a tweet about AF about a year ago. Here in London, we started up in June last year and we award projects every 2 months instead of monthly (£‘s not $‘s!). We decided to build it around an event in the back or upstairs of a pub where 3-5 shortlisted awesome projects present their idea, and the most awesome gets the cash. Anyone can attend, it’s a buzzing atmosphere and every time it’s drawn an inspiring crowd. We’ve funded a project to get the stars back in the London sky (ok well LED ones anyway), and a production run of awesome screenprints so the Hoxton Street Monster Supplies Store can begin to support their creative writing workshops from the sales in their store.

Applications are open for our March award here until midnight next Monday the 28th Feb. If you or someone you know is based in London and has an awesome idea that they want to make into an awesome reality, we’d love to hear from you!

We launched white sugru last month after you guys begged for it As you might have guessed, the loudest group shouting for white sugru were apple-y people. Macs, it turns out, often need a little tlc to keep them in good shape – so we made a video inspired by your loving repairs (you know who you are), which we see again and again in your photos. Tell any of your mac buddies that don’t have some!

Personally, orange is still my favourite for apple repairs though!

A big part of why I invented sugru is my fascination with how life is changing all the time. I love change, it creates space to imagine and it’s often during change that there’s so much opportunity for improvement.
Most product design doesn’t account for how fast we’re all changing and how fast the world is changing – which is why we need to be hackers to cope well!

Buildings seem to be much more adaptable than products, or at least it is much more common to be a hacker of buildings than of things – it’s almost one of the first things most people say when they buy a house! “Yes it’s lovely but we’re going to knock that wall” / Yes it’s great but OMG those carpets, they have to come out! – it’s completely normal to change and adapt buildings to your own needs. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to say the same for products too

One of my very favourite books is a book by the amazingly awesome Stuart Brand called How Buildings Learn: What happens after they’re built.

Back in the 90’s, the BBC commissioned him to make a 6 part series of the ideas in the book, and it is an absolute beauty. 6 × 30 minute programmes of insight into why we love some buildings and not others, why some buildings last and not others, and what kind of building stimulates creativity to happen there… it’s packed full of fantastic case-studies and examples.

For me, this series proclaims the hacker manifesto super eloquently – we should design for adaptability, keep things cheap and honest, and above all understand that what makes us love things and buildings is character developed through use and over time rather than the most spectacular or beautiful thing a clever designer or architect can draw up.

Watch the series!

Isn’t this beautiful?

It reminds me of this hack from Dave in Calgary who really hates that last bit left in the end of the bottle that can’t be used. By wetting the bottle openings and forming sugru around them, he made a double ended adaptor to allow the old bottle to drain nicely into the new one. Lovely!