The Maker Movement Didn't End—It Evolved into the 'Infrastructure' Supporting Global Manufacturing Over 20 Years

Overall Summary:
This video looks back at the 20-year history of the Maker Movement, which began around 2005, and answers the question, 'Did the Maker Movement really end?'

In the early 2000s, creating prototypes for electronic devices required expensive design software, circuit board manufacturing, and molds, making it extremely difficult for individuals to attempt hardware development. However, starting with the emergence of Arduino, RepRap, and Make Magazine, open-source philosophy and digital fabrication technology spread, and communities like Fab Lab and Maker Faire developed. Furthermore, the success of MakerBot and Kickstarter created an environment where individuals could create prototypes, raise funds, and attempt to commercialize products, causing the Maker Movement to grow into a global craze.

Around 2014, the U.S. government also supported the Maker Movement as an industrial policy, and its influence spread to China, Japan, and Europe. On the other hand, due to the deteriorating profitability of makerspaces, MakerBot's departure from open source, mass production failures in crowdfunding, and the bankruptcies of TechShop and Maker Media, iconic companies and organizations disappeared one after another after 2017, leading to the assessment that 'the Maker Movement is over.'

However, the author argues that it was only the superficial phenomenon of the movement that ended, and that it essentially evolved into 'infrastructure.' As a result of circuit board manufacturing services, free design software, low-cost 3D printers, crowdfunding, and knowledge sharing via GitHub and YouTube becoming established as social foundations, an environment where individuals can develop hardware at low cost has become the norm.

While this infrastructure has realized social contributions such as decentralized production of medical supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic and the spread of low-cost 3D-printed prosthetic hands, it is also used for purposes regardless of good or evil, such as the manufacturing of FPV drones used on the battlefield. What is important is not the technology itself, but the people who use it.

In conclusion, the Maker Movement did not 'die'; its achievements were incorporated into manufacturing environments around the world and transformed into an inconspicuous social infrastructure. The low-cost prototyping environments and open-source culture that many people take for granted today are the legacy of the Maker Movement built over these 20 years.

The Real Reason Individuals Can Now Make Hardware [The Maker Movement]

Full Transcript:
Back in 2000, the cost of making a single prototype gadget was an amount an individual could not afford. Circuit boards, molds, design software—the total easily exceeded 1 million yen. Therefore, even for prototypes, making things was the work of companies and factories. But now, if you have an idea, you can realize it for around 10,000 yen. It is an era where individuals can make prototypes with pocket money. Where did this difference come from?
The answer is the 'Maker Movement.' In the 2000s, engineers, artists, researchers, and garage and bedroom inventors around the world broke down the walls to making things one by one. Spaces to share machines were born, mechanisms to gather money for individual dreams were born, design software that anyone could use was born, and circuit board ordering services that delivered the next day were born.

That movement suddenly came to an end in 2017. About 10 years have passed since then, and the Maker Movement is dead. Some media and commentators wrote that. But is that true? If so, why is there still an environment where individuals can make things so cheaply? Did the movement really die, or did it change into something else? We will answer that question while tracing the 20-year history from 2005.

The budding of the Maker Movement dates back to 2005. Once, in the small town of Ivrea in northern Italy, there was a garage and design school on the verge of closing. The Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. In 2005, a circuit board was born from that school building. 'Arduino,' developed by five developers including university faculty. The price was about 30 dollars. In a word, it is a small computer board that made it possible for anyone to do electronics projects. Until then, introductory electronics required specialized equipment costing tens of thousands of yen or more and a development environment that was difficult to decipher. Arduino broke that wall. The way to write code was simple, and even artists and designers could handle it. Precisely because it was decided that the school would close, the design data was released as open source.

In the same year, Adrian Bowyer of the University of Bath in the UK launched a project for a 3D printer that could make its own parts. That was 'RepRap.' The material cost was about 350 euros, which was about 53,000 yen at the exchange rate at the time. Commercial 3D printers at the time cost at least 3 million yen even for the cheapest ones. Bowyer said, 'Self-replicating universal manufacturing machines could be industrial destroyers. To prevent the expansion of wealth inequality, they should be given to everyone.' The reason he made it open source was not technical, but ideological.

And in February 2005, a magazine was launched in the United States. Its name is 'Make: Magazine.' The founder, Dale Dougherty, called this magazine the 'Martha Stewart of geeks.' Martha Stewart is a businesswoman famous for her American cooking and lifestyle programs. In other words, it meant media that enriches the lives of technology lovers. The greatest achievement Make: Magazine accomplished was not the introduction of technology. It was sending the word 'Maker' out into the world. DIY enthusiasts, electronics hobbyists, robot creators. It gave a common identity to people who existed separately. By doing so, it visualized it as a single movement.

Arduino, RepRap, Make: Magazine. It was no coincidence that three births overlapped in the same year. In the background was the serious hollowing out of American manufacturing. The number of manufacturing employees in the U.S., which was 17.3 million in 2000, had decreased to 11.5 million by 2010. Nearly 6 million people lost their jobs in just 10 years. The spirit of the Maker Movement, which is to make things with your own hands, is inseparable from this sense of loss.

In parallel with this flow, another movement had been quietly growing since the early 2000s. Its starting point was a class called 'How to Make (Almost) Anything' taught by MIT physicist Neil Gershenfeld in 1998. About 12 people took the class. However, to Gershenfeld's later surprise, it wasn't just engineering students who gathered. There were also students aiming to be artists, architects, and designers. Gershenfeld recalls: The students answered questions I hadn't asked. That was, 'It's not to make things you can buy in a store, but to make things you can't buy in a store.'

From this class, in 2001, a place called 'Fab Lab' was born. A Fab Lab is a digital workshop that anyone can use, equipped with equipment such as laser cutters, 3D printers, and CNC machine tools. Initially, MIT intended to set up only one Fab Lab. However, the Fab Lab philosophy of openly sharing design data spread across borders. Currently, there are over 2,000 Fab Labs in the world.

In 2006, the first 'Maker Faire' was held in San Mateo, California. According to the official announcement, there were about 20,000 visitors and over 100 exhibitors. The festival for people who make things with their hands spread rapidly, and by 2016, it was held 191 times in 38 countries around the world, with a total of over 1.4 million visitors.

The rapid growth of this movement was also influenced by the social environment at the time. After the 2008 Lehman Shock, a paradoxical phenomenon occurred in the United States, where the unemployment rate reached 10%. According to surveys, the rate of new business startups in 2009 was 17% higher than three years prior. For people who lost their jobs, making things themselves was both an option and a survival strategy.

In January 2009, a startup called 'MakerBot' was founded in New York. The price of the first 3D printer kit developed, the 'Cupcake CNC,' was 750 dollars, about 74,000 yen at the exchange rate at the time. The first production run of 20 units sold out immediately. Since then, it has grown rapidly and leaped to become a symbolic existence of the Maker Movement. The fact that individuals could model three-dimensional objects at home shook the very meaning of manufacturing.

In April of the same year, 2009, three young people launched a crowdfunding service called 'Kickstarter.' However, this idea was actually born in 2001. Perry Chen, a musician living in New Orleans, gave up on calling an Austrian DJ duo to a jazz festival because he couldn't raise the funds. If the audience promised to buy tickets in advance and enough funds were collected, the show would be held, and if not, no one would be charged. The idea was born then, but Chen said he couldn't bring himself to start a startup. After keeping the idea alive for 8 years, he moved to New York in 2005, met Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler, and it finally took shape. Kickstarter dramatically changed the possibilities for hardware.

What proved that to the world was 2012. The 'Pebble' smartwatch, designed by Eric Migicovsky, broke its 100,000 dollar goal in two hours. In the end, it raised 10.26 million dollars, about 830 million yen, from 68,929 people. This was three years before the Apple Watch was released. In the same year, 19-year-old Palmer Luckey launched a project for the 'Oculus Rift' VR headset on Kickstarter. It raised 2.43 million dollars, about 190 million yen. In 2014, it was acquired by Facebook for about 2 billion dollars, about 204 billion yen at the rate at the time. A garage prototype became a 200 billion yen company in less than two years. These were the events that made the story that individuals could make hardware definitive.

In 2012, former Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson published his book 'MAKERS.' He argued that the fusion of digital fabrication and the internet would trigger a third industrial revolution, returning manufacturing to the hands of individuals. That same year, Anderson left Wired to focus on running 3D Robotics, a drone company he founded. A few years later, the company itself would come to embody the limitations of that optimistic prediction.

The peak of the frenzy arrived on June 18, 2014.
President Barack Obama hosted the first-ever White House Maker Faire.
Over 100 students, entrepreneurs, and engineers from 25 states were invited, and 33 projects were exhibited.
On the spot, President Obama declared, 'Today's DIY is tomorrow's Made in America.' The President declared that day the National Day of Making.
More than 150 universities announced the introduction of maker education, and 125 libraries announced the establishment of makerspaces.
It was the moment the maker movement was officially connected to American industrial policy.

And this wave did not stop within the United States.
With a national president positioning the maker movement as a pillar of manufacturing revitalization, individual craftsmanship began to appear on the agendas of policymakers around the world.
I will touch upon the impact overseas in a later chapter.

However, the peak was also the beginning of a bubble.
The number of makerspaces worldwide expanded about 14-fold between 2006 and 2016, reaching approximately 1,400 by early 2016.
Attracted by grants and corporate sponsors, facilities without sustainable business models sprang up everywhere.
A 2015 survey found that only 34% of makerspaces were profitable.

The negative impact also reached startups. One of them, the transformation of MakerBot, most clearly reflected the cracks within the maker movement.
In September 2012, MakerBot stopped releasing open-source designs for its new products.
Co-founder Zach Smith, who had been ousted from the company in April of that year, wrote on his blog:
'The departure from open source is, to me, the ultimate betrayal.'

In 2013, 3D printer giant Stratasys acquired MakerBot.
The acquisition price was $403 million, or approximately 39.5 billion yen at the time.
However, the new products launched after the acquisition had serious quality issues, leading to a massive number of returns.
Between 2014 and 2015, Stratasys recorded approximately $450 million, or about 51.8 billion yen, in losses related to MakerBot. This was a loss exceeding the acquisition price.

A 'valley of death' also appeared in crowdfunding.
Even if one could raise funds with a prototype, different capabilities were required to mass-produce and deliver it, and many startups underestimated this.
Coolest Cooler, which raised $13.28 million (about 1.37 billion yen) on Kickstarter in 2014, went out of business without being able to deliver products to more than 20,000 of its 62,642 backers due to underestimating manufacturing costs.
There are even more extreme examples. The ultra-compact drone ZANO, developed by a Welsh company, delivered only four units to its 12,074 backers.
An investigation report released later revealed a fundamental lack of manufacturing capability.

3D Robotics, led by Chris Anderson, who popularized the maker movement, also hit a structural wall.
Despite raising a total of about $100 million (about 11.5 billion yen) in VC funding and employing 350 people, the Solo drone launched in 2015 did not perform well.
Competitor DJI from China sold significantly cheaper drones, and there was nothing they could do. Anderson later said:
'Hardware development wasn't nearly as hard as I expected. The speed at which China adopts technology is truly phenomenal.'
In 2016, 3D Robotics withdrew from consumer hardware.

Then, in November 2017, TechShop, which had expanded to 10 locations across the U.S., closed all its stores simultaneously and filed for bankruptcy.
Eleven years after its founding in 2006. At its peak, each location had over 100 million yen worth of equipment.
CEO Dan Woods issued the following statement:
'A network of makerspaces run by a for-profit company is unsustainable without external subsidies from cities, corporations, or foundations.'
Membership fees of about 10,000 to 20,000 yen per month could not cover the maintenance costs of expensive equipment and rent.

And on June 7, 2019, the very person who gave the movement its name fell.
Maker Media, which popularized the word 'maker,' laid off all 22 employees and ceased operations.
However, the light that had spread across the world could not be easily extinguished.
The following month, founder Dale Dougherty established a new company called Make Community with his own funds, rehired 15 of the 22 laid-off employees, and revived the brand.
He said, 'I want this to be not just a revival, but a catalyst to take it to the next level.'

As the movement born in the U.S. became connected to policy, each country received this trend in different contexts. The impact was most direct in China.
On January 4, 2015, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang chose a makerspace in Shenzhen as his first inspection site of the new year.
The manager of the Chaihuo Makerspace, which was visited, recalled:
'Overnight, the words "maker" and "makerspace" became known throughout China.'

In March of the same year, Premier Li set 'mass entrepreneurship and innovation' as a pillar of the economy in his government work report.
The background included an economic slowdown where GDP growth had fallen to its lowest level in 25 years, and employment issues for university graduates. The policy's effect was explosive, and the distortions were also significant.

The number of makerspaces in China, which was about 15 in 2013, ballooned to over 5,500 by the end of 2015, according to government figures.
However, a makerspace manager in Shenzhen testified in an interview:
'We called ourselves a makerspace to respond to the government's call. In reality, we only had three 3D printers.'
In reality, they were incubators or accelerators.

A PR manager at DFRobot, a startup in Shanghai, China, told the same media outlet:
'Most of them are only thinking about "getting money from the government."'
2018, when grants dried up, was a tough year for makers and makerspaces.
Many facilities closed. I hear it was even worse in Shenzhen.

Meanwhile, the Shenzhen manufacturing ecosystem, regardless of the rise and fall of policies, became an essential infrastructure for makers around the world.
If you order parts, they arrive the next day, and PCB prototypes are in your hands in a few days.
'This speed cannot be achieved anywhere other than Shenzhen,' hardware developers in Asia say in unison.

In Japan, FabLabs were born in Kamakura and Tsukuba in May 2011 with private capital. Both were the first FabLabs in Japan and East Asia.
It was the moment the experiment Gershenfeld started at MIT in 1998 took root across the Pacific.

In 2014, DMM.com opened DMM.make AKIBA in Akihabara.
Investing a total of about 500 million yen and equipped with over 150 pieces of development equipment, the facility became a hub for Japan's leading hardware startups.
However, it closed completely on April 30, 2024. Like TechShop, the difficulty of covering the maintenance costs of large facilities with membership fees was a common challenge in both Japan and the U.S.

In Europe, Repair Cafes began in Amsterdam in 2009. It is a community where people bring broken items to the neighborhood and volunteers repair them. In May 2024, the Council of the EU gave final approval to the 'Right to Repair' directive. The U.S. aimed for entrepreneurship and innovation, China expanded rapidly as a national policy, and Japan connected it to its manufacturing culture. And in Europe, it was linked to the philosophy of a circular economy. The acts of making, repairing, and sharing took root with different meanings and forms in each society.

Let's pause here and organize what has changed between 2005 and 2026. First, regarding the manufacturing of electronic circuit boards. Before 2005, when an individual ordered boards from a manufacturer, the minimum lot was 10 or more, the cost was over 10,000 yen per order, and the delivery time was several weeks. In 2026, the Shenzhen board maker JLCPCB manufactures and ships to the world in as little as 24 hours for about 300 yen for 5 boards, just by uploading a file on the web. As for design software, professional software that once cost over 800,000 yen was mainstream, but now the free open-source software KiCad covers most of its functions.

What about exterior prototyping? In the past, making just one design mock-up cost hundreds of thousands to millions of yen just for the mold. In 2026, you can shape and verify an idea overnight with a 3D printer costing less than 30,000 yen. The structure requiring molds for mass production has not changed. However, the cycle of shaping and verifying has gone from several weeks and hundreds of thousands of yen to overnight and several hundred yen. This change has fundamentally altered the development speed of hardware startups.

The funding environment has also changed. Banks required collateral for loans, and VCs demanded scalable business models for investments. For small ideas that didn't reach that level but were still worth realizing, there were almost no means to raise funds. Kickstarter filled that void. It remains true that VCs and banks play important roles in the mass production and commercialization phases. However, a new entry point was created for the stage of making something to show before presenting it to the market.

And regarding information and learning: knowledge of electronics was only circulated through specialized books and closed master-apprentice relationships. The birth of YouTube in 2005 and the founding of GitHub in 2008 dismantled that structure. Arduino programs, KiCad board data, and 3D printer modeling files were openly shared, allowing anyone to learn hardware development skills through self-study. And since 2026, AI has begun to expand the areas where it can take on development.

The true capability of this infrastructure was proven in 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, the Czech 3D printer maker Prusa Research established a design and mass production system for face shields in a short period, printing and donating a total of approximately 200,000 units.
Hospitals in Italy replicated missing ventilator valves using 3D printers and supplied them at a cost of almost zero for materials.

More than 70,000 makers from 55 countries around the world participated, and over 48 million medical supplies, centered on face shields, were manufactured.
Weeks before mass production systems were ready, decentralized individual manufacturing supported local medical care.
This was not the heat of a fickle movement, but the achievement of a solid infrastructure.

The same 3D printers and open-source designs are saving people in another scenario as well. In 2011, American puppet maker Ivan Owen made a metal hand for a steampunk costume and posted a video of it on YouTube. Shortly after, he received an email from Richard Van As, a carpenter in South Africa. Having lost his fingers in a work accident, he asked if this hand could be made as a prosthetic for him.

The two continued the design process via Skype and email while remaining 10,000 kilometers apart. Commercial prosthetics cost over $10,000 each. The 3D-printed prosthetic they made cost $35 in materials, a 99.9% reduction in cost. The design data was released as open source, and makers around the world began printing the same hand.
Children began customizing their prosthetics with Spider-Man or Captain America colors.
They went from being 'the strange kid' with a prosthetic hand to a child with a superhero arm.

A community called e-NABLE was officially launched in 2013, and currently, over 10,000 volunteers from more than 100 countries participate.
However, the same infrastructure is also being used for completely different purposes.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Ukrainian makers have been combining 3D printers and off-the-shelf electronic components to mass-produce FPV drones, or small unmanned aerial vehicles. The blueprints are available on GitHub and Telegram, and they can be manufactured for under $400 per unit. There are now volunteer organizations with the capacity to produce over 100 units per day.

Face shields, prosthetic hands, and attack drones all use the same 3D printers and the same open-source design-sharing mechanisms. The infrastructure nurtured by the Maker Movement has no filter for good or evil. It is not the tools that decide what to make, but the humans who hold them.

When Make: magazine introduced the word 'Maker' to the world in 2005, it was aimed at a small number of enthusiasts. MakerBot abandoned open source, TechShop sank under the weight of over-investment, and the 'valley of death' in crowdfunding presented the wall of mass production. From 2017 to 2019, when the symbols disappeared, the movement certainly looked like it had ended. However, at the moment those symbols vanished, the structure of the world had already changed irreversibly.

You can buy a 3D printer for around 20,000 yen. You can make a circuit board for 300 yen. You can use KiCad for free. Kickstarter has mediated a total of $8.7 billion. The Fab Lab network has expanded to over 2,000 locations worldwide. In places without symbols, the infrastructure was quietly taking root.

Remember the opening of this video. Doing electronics with a Raspberry Pi, ordering a circuit board for 300 yen, and making a case with a 3D printer.
Each of the things you do as a matter of course is the accumulation of 20 years.
The movement is not dead. It is shifting into infrastructure. That change is still continuing today.

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