Table of Contents

• A small print magazine stands out

  • A print revival

  • Bringing People Together

• Maker Faire Rome - Tech Humanism

• Mushrooms play music

A small print magazine stands out

As you know, this year we celebrated the 20th anniversary of Make: magazine. We take pride that we are still producing a print magazine this long and that we have such a loyal audience. (Thank you to all our subscribers, especially.) While newsstands have been shrinking, they are still around in places like Barnes & Noble. I love seeing Make: on a newsstand, as in the 2022 photo above, with a cover about combat robots vying for attention with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Top Gun: Maverick.

Make: is still around for several reasons. From its inception, the newsstand price of Make: was much higher than other magazines. I hoped that those who valued Make: would pay for it and that we could rely mostly on subscribers rather than advertisers. (Many magazines have a low cover price to increase circulation so that they can charge advertisers more to reach more people.) I also thought of Make: as a collectible, something readers might want to keep because much of its content is evergreen. As with seeing Make: on newsstands, I enjoy seeing a shelf of our magazines in someone’s home or office.

Make: magazine serves a niche audience. It’s not for everybody but if you’re a maker, it’s for you! That’s probably the main reason Make: is able to succeed today on its own terms.

A print revival

Brian Morrissey, in his newsletter The Rebooting, talks about the revival of print media and makes the following prediction:

It’s not that he thinks print newspapers or large circulation print magazines are making a comeback. It’s that there’s room for niche magazines and for a strategy that avoids algorithm-driven media platforms.

Bringing People Together

Morrissey talks about the importance of events, saying that “congregation remains a pivotal role” for media brands. He adds that “the hedge against the dystopian vision of AI is to build brands with the credibility to gather people together.” That’s why Maker Faire is as important as Make: magazine, connecting to people in-person as well as in print. We also have a mission — to make more makers — that carries us beyond traditional media.

I recall a letter we once received from a reader telling us in detail about his experience reading the magazine. First, he had to wait for it to arrive but then when it did, he set aside several hours and sat down in his shop. He said that by the time he was done with the magazine, his mind was full of project ideas and things he wanted to do.

If the magazine inspires makers like him to do their own projects, we wanted Maker Faire to be the place where makers could exhibit those projects and share them with others. Not everybody does that, but we keep trying to find more people who do.

Maker Faire Rome - Tech Humanism

Maker Faire Rome is coming up, from October 17–19. Here’s the wrap-up video from last year’s Maker Faire.

For this year, the Maker Faire Rome team sent us a write-up on “the technological humanism of Maker Faire Rome” for this year’s event. Some of us speculated that the text seemed written by AI, but we found out that Ursula Paia of the Maker Faire Rome team said: “The voice and arguments are entirely my own. The piece grew out of a positioning exercise for Maker Faire Rome.” AI was used to improve her translation from the Italian to English. Ursula added: “I had been analysing how the term innovation is associated with Maker Faire Rome, and I wanted to articulate a perspective grounded in technological humanism. It also served as an indirect response to comments Elon Musk made a few months ago portraying empathy as a weakness.”

Here they are some of the key points:

1. While a segment of Silicon Valley envisions an economy detached from society and driven solely by disembodied efficiency, Maker Faire Rome presents a European model of inclusive innovation: schools collaborating with universities and multinationals, families engaging with researchers, institutions working alongside visionaries.

2. Maker Faire Rome is a living manifesto of a new idea of technology: not machines replacing humans, but tools that enhance human capabilities.

3. Maker Faire is also the meeting point between making and storytelling. Explaining a project requires clarity and empathy. It takes action, but also narration.

4. The stories that emerge from Maker Faire are powerful because they are rooted in everyday life: a teacher creating a STEM lab for neurodivergent children; a mother building inclusive dolls; a retired man automating a school greenhouse; a group of girls founding a carpentry and robotics workshop. Stories that speak of Italy, but also of a future in which technology is an ally to humanity.

5. Perhaps the most important lesson Maker Faire Rome teaches is this: innovation is never neutral. It can serve the community or remain self-referential. It can exclude or include. It can concentrate in a few hubs or spread through a network of grassroots laboratories. Maker Faire Rome demonstrates that another model is not only possible — it already exists — where collective intelligence is the true driver of change.

I like the positioning that Maker Faire and the Maker Movement as a whole explore the humanistic potential for technology, which can benefit us all. Not everybody thinks that way about technology.

Mushrooms play music

Jon Ross and Andy Kidd, a pair of Manchester (UK) musicians, have turned mushrooms and plants into musicians. They’ve invented a bionic robotic arm that allows the mushrooms to play music. Now whether you like their taste in music, that’s a whole other thing.

Make Things is a weekly newsletter for the Maker community from Make:. This newsletter lives on the web at makethings.make.co

I’d love to hear from you if you have ideas, projects or news items about the maker community. Email me - [email protected].