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 really excited about this new Magazine and website due to launch later this week:

Makeshift from Makeshift on Vimeo.

“Makeshift is a quarterly magazine and multimedia website about creativity in unlikely places, from the favelas of Rio to the alleys of Delhi. These are environments where resources may be scarce, but where ingenuity is used incessantly for survival, enterprise, and a self-expression. Makeshift is about people, the things they make, and the context they make them in.
Much of our coverage will involve remote emerging markets, but we recognize that creativity is hidden everywhere. We want to place you, our readers, in locations you will likely never get to see and reveal street-level ingenuity you might not expect. We want to show the minutiae of how massive areas function, thrive, and simply survive. We want to reveal the complex inner workings below surface understanding.”

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)

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!

It’s not always easy to explain to the uninitiated what hacking is, is it?… what is it? and why are you so happy about it?

Here at sugru, we think of a hack as ‘a clever solution to an everyday problem’.  (Maybe useful for explaining to newbies?) When you’re a hacker, you don’t really think about it, it’s just your approach. But it feels important too… and the reasons we do it are complex and fascinating.

Something common to most great hacking is a dread of waste: waste of energy, waste of time, waste of money, waste of materials, waste of effort, waste of opportunity…

We love solving a problem in an unexpected way with the minimum of resources.
Creating a solution with stuff lying around comes naturally.

Pete, who had the studio upstairs from ours until recently is a modelmaker with a very lovely and messy workshop, his stool often gets very dusty and dirty.  Here’s how he welcomed me to sit down one day without getting my ass all dusty:

Here’s how our local veg shop stops all the bags from lifting off, and customers from stabbing themselves with the hooks:

Saving a large item with a small and humble intervention and with very little effort or money is also a thrill.

One of the most joyous hack messages we get are from those of you who’ve had the pleasure of keeping a large appliance going for another few years with the help of some ingenuity and a little piece of sugru.
Dishwashers, fridges, freezers, microwaves and ovens – broken white goods are a crime of bad design, planned obsolescene, and cheap manufacturing. Navah in Germany repaired her fridge “It has a notch to let it know the door is closed. Otherwise it beeps and doesn’t stop. The mechanism is not very reliable and so I fixed it by making the bump larger. Beep-free nights as a result (the hack with scotch tape didn’t work great).”

Keith has kept his fridge freezer going with a little remodeling: “The plastic flip up door to my little freezer was broken.  One of the posts had broken off.  As a result, the freezer would fill with ice and frost very rapidly.  I made a new post out of sugru, and it worked great!  It’s still flexible, even in the cold freezer.”

We’re encouraged to think of appliances as semi-disposable, only good for a few years. So as far as waste-beating hacks go, there are few that are more satisfying than keeping them working as hard and as long as they should for the immense amounts of energy, materials and effort it took to create them. The added bonus is to do it with a humble little blob.

Why else do we hack? I’d love to hear your reasons. The first two posts in this series here: Why we hack no.1: to beat the throwaway mindset and Why we hack no.2: to make our stuff work better.

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!

A few weeks ago, I read about Eri Gentry and her friends in San Francisco. Their story got me into inspiration overdrive. They believe that the inventions and innovations to solve the world’s big problems will come not just from big companies and universities, but from creative and curious people working off their own back, in their own time, on their own ideas.
Listen up, this is really brilliant.

At the start of the recession, when lots of Biotech Companies in her local area were going belly up, Eri Gentry went shopping – she bought over $1m worth of lab equipment for $30,000 and got the kit set up and working in her garage. She invited her friends to use it, and then they invited their friends and pretty soon they had a full blown community using the lab in her garage experimenting and learning about bio technology. They call it BioCurious – and members include people that want to start their own bio-tech venture, graduates out of work, and generally curious and keen amateur biologists. They join as members, and have open access then to all the facilities and the support of the founders and community then, listen to what they have to say in this video they made to raise funding for their first years overheads on Kickstarter:

I guess a big part of why this gets me so excited is that I spent a few years myself learning and doing materials science after I had the idea for sugru. I’d studied biology at school and always loved doing scientific experiments then, but after that I went to art college and left science far behind in favour of drawing and making amusing (to me now) bikes. I had no idea that after graduating in product design years later that I would find myself in a white coat for the best part of 3 years – not a good look for me by the way!
We started our business with a small government grant, so we realised pretty much from the word go that contracting laboratory work out wasn’t realistic. Luckily for us, silicone chemistry formulation doesn’t require big bits of kit like bio tech so we were able to set up our first lab for less than £5000. After a few fun days training in the basics of laboratory work I was able to get started into formulation experiments.
Ok, it has to be said that I had a lot of help from two amazing scientists Ian and Steve, who had recently retired from top jobs in the silicone industry. Big credit to these great guys for believing in me and my dream by the way! Over the next few years, we worked together through the development of the basic chemistry and patenting, until later with a little more funding behind us we were able to start collaborating with university laboratories, specialist testing companies, science students and steadily investing in our own lab as well, until a few years ago when Tom, our now resident official materials scientist took over most of the science from me (I love it so I’m never giving all of it up!) – and then we were able to refine sugru into the great product it is today (not perfect of course though and the R&D is and I hope always will be ongoing).
Looking back I have such happy memories of this time (you know how your brain tricks you into forgetting all those hard days when nothing was going right?! Well thank god for that! ha ha). I just wish I took more pictures. Here are two I could find that make me smile !

Anyway, the point is not about me or sugru at all, but how incredibly excited I am for BioCurious and all the others like them, and what’s starting to look like a movement of citizen science. I can’t wait for the day when we hear of a groundbreaking cure or fuel or something and it’s come from a community lab like this. It’s going to happen.

At lunchtime today James and I had the pleasure of meeting a lively bunch of therapists at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital here in London.

For anyone that isn’t familiar with the role of an Occupational Therapist – which is most people I’d imagine – well, hmm, how can I explain!
Their job is really varied and includes much more than this, but one aspect is that they take on the challenge to help people with unique needs after suffering an accident or illness to regain their independence. They are mega creative problem solvers. As you can imagine – all kinds of everyday situations are different after you’ve had an injury so items often need to be adapted to make them easier to use, or even possible to use…and sometimes new things need to be designed from scratch.
A OT ‘making’ challenge might go like this: a keen tennis player suffers an accident and no longer has the use of one of her arms, how can you help her continue to play tennis? With materials readily available to you that are not very expensive?
Surely one of the job description requirements must be ‘hacker’ / ‘inventor’ !

Today we gave this energetic team a nice supply of sugru. Another tool for them to put in their armoury.

We learned that OTs use lots of low-melting-point thermoplastics that can be moulded after immersing in warm water….they’re pretty awesome materials…And here are two lovely simple hacks we chatted about with the team: pop rivets on a back brace softened by Robert, and a tap made more comfortable by Jason.

It’s instinctive to more and more of us, if something doesn’t work properly, it needs improving !
I mean, why would you live with niggles and annoyances when you can do a better job?
And if you can imagine a better design, why not just go ahead and make it?
Plus. There’s the post-hack basking in the glory of your cleverness and handiness.

The more people that improve and redesign their own stuff, the more other people can see their ideas and improvements, and eventually designers and manufacturers will start to take notice and the improvements that we make may start to influence the next generation of products, so maybe it’ll contribute to crowdsourcing design insights. That would be awesome!
Even more exciting than that though, is spreading the culture of problem solving, of taking action and improving. If we think like that about the stuff we live with, there’s a good chance we’ll be in a problem solving / improving frame of mind and can apply that to bigger and more important problems too.

Here are some cool design-improving hacks that people have done recently:
Gunnar from Germany made his ipod shuffle work better: “I hate the fact that you can only use the bad apple earphones with the ipod shuffle because the controls for the mp3player are built into the headphones cable. Since i wanted to use my normal headphones, i resoldered the apple headphones and insulated the wires using sugru. Now i can plug anything to it and still use the apple controls”

I’m guessing the second headphones was to eliminate wires between ipod and headphones – which is an awesome project! – but I don’t know for sure – Gunnar is that right?

David in Seattle made his camera work better: “I’ve always had a hard time turning on my Canon S90 camera because the power button is the same size and shape as the function button so you have to really look at it to know which one you are pressing.” Nice one David!

Marcel from the Netherlands improved his car straps to protect his car: “I hacked my tie down straps on the side flanks to protect my car roof while strapping tight my kayak. You can be as careful as possible but the metal fasteners will sometimes scrape the paint off your car and damage it.”

Cay improved the design of her tent pegs! “I like to travel light so I don’t carry a hammer to drive them home. My solution is to put a soft sugru top on my tent pegs – much easier on my hands ”

Now that there are more and more of us saving and improving stuff with sugru (yay), it feels like a good time to reconnect here on the blog with the reasons why we do it.

At the heart of why we invented sugru is to give us a way to stand up to and beat the throwaway mindset, the attitude that assumes we should be replacing and ‘updating’ our stuff even when it’s working well or even perfectly. Clearly, the damage to the environment is shocking, but the other thing that’s not so often spoken about that is damaged by this mindset is more fundamental, and goes deep too. It might sound silly but I think the level of respect and appreciation we have for our things, and what they allow us to do, plays an important role in the richness of our experience of the world and how we connect with it.
It’s the ride on the bike you’ve owned for years, that you’ve maintained and improved when it needed it. It’s the 70’s handbag you found at the back of your Mum’s wardrobe, that whenever you use it you imagine her using it when she was your age. It’s the baby chair that’s been passed round the cousins, and is now into it’s second generation of the family, that you sat in when you were a kid and now you’re feeding your own in it.
Our lives are somehow punctuated by the things we live with, and they live longer than we do in the end. They help tell the stories of who we were, and who we are now… to others but even more so to ourselves.

Old thermos repurposed as an awesome vase by Sander in Estonia.

As any maker and hacker knows, the connection you feel to something you’ve made or modified goes deep. There’s the thrill of the idea, and the achievement in having made it work, but on top of that there’s a bloody great satisfaction in having done it yourself. The more things in the world with this quality of connection, the better.

I know I’m preaching to the converted here and of course sugru is only a tiny part of achieving this but I’m betting we’ll see a direct correlation between the number of people making, hacking and DIYing, and the eventual marginalisation of the consumerist throwaway mindset. Of course it’s a long long term thing, but seeing the attitude and energy that the sugru users have already to extending the life of their things and making them better for them, I’m feeling positive.