Gadgetory

while I was in grad school I interned at a company called Eaton Corporation and when I graduated Eaton said we will hire you but we would like to place you in Southfield Michigan which is a suburb of Detroit I didn't know a lot about Detroit and so a lot of people told me you know you're gonna get shot Detroit's a scary place don't go there but I was looking for a little bit of an adventure and I kind of wanted to smudge myself I mean that I haven't lived anywhere on sides Minnesota and so I said what the hell I'll go for it so while I get to be pretty creative at my job at work I still have to develop technologies that are very useful to eating it has to make sense for you to make that technology and I thought you know what since I don't know anybody in this state I'll go check out this place called i3 Detroit so I three Detroit runs classes and all classes are run by the members so we encourage our members to sort of broadcast their skills to the membership and to the general public when someone comes in and builds something they haven't done before for the first time they kind of have this like first moment of like turning on the electronic board or you know taking the thing out of the laser cutter and they go this is really cool I made this for Valentine's Day this year and I wanted to really impress my new boyfriend at the time because he's a computer engineer and I was googling pictures and I found this design for a circuit board and I was like this is something I can do and it just kind of goes through some really pretty sequences I'm actually really proud of it because it was the first board that I made by myself so traditionally these places have been called hacker spaces the term hacker is sort of a misunderstood term what hacker means at a hacker space is someone who takes things apart figures out how they work makes it even better or just somebody who wants to understand what makes things run it's sort of having that curious drive but a lot of people when they hear the term hacker they think of somebody stealing their bank account so some people propose let's just call these places maker spaces I don't really see myself as a hacker I actually do in this space because I really like to make stuff I doodle and I paint it's really great to be up here and watch people use stuff and how they use stuff so I can integrate it into my own work I'm breaking on these like light boxes right now I want to make some out of acrylic actually so like the whole thing kind of glows but these are my first prototypes to see how it would work and then eventually after I'm done with this I'm going to paint on the front of it to give it my Flair and hopefully people buy it so I guess I don't have altruistic motives for being here it's not like a pure love of the game it's for a job been back about a year but for about four years before that I worked in Afghanistan I've heard that referred to as Pakistan conditions a little harsh not as comfortable as as we might like things aren't plenty so that causes you to reach you know to to struggle a little bit to make things better for yourself you do that things get a little better and it just builds momentum if it was possible to have a place like this and the place I worked which was Kandahar wow you too really seen some things they need a hackerspace makerspace whatever you like to call it there who knows maybe one will form before all sudden done the maker mentality or the maker philosophy and was really important to getting our society going and off the ground it's gotten us through difficult times historically and it's something that unfortunately through our comfortable lives we've slid away from a little bit everybody wants to see Detroit recover one thing that needs to happen for that to happen is people need to take ownership in the city they need to feel proud to be there and they need to feel like this is my city I'm gonna make it awesome people need to to look at this city not as a broken city like a broken cellphone they can't just throw it away and just go well it's broken and we're just not gonna use it anymore that sort of same empowerment is what maker spaces and hyper spaces can give to people hopefully some of that culture even rubs off into the people of Detroit I three Detroit gives people a place that sort of lets them have unrestricted creativity right you don't need to think about a business case you don't need to think about why it's good for the company or you know a specific business unit you can just say wouldn't it be really cool to have a mind-controlled flamethrower this is like oh yes at the end of the day people build everything even if it's an industrial robot that builds something you know at some point down the line someone had to build the robot that built the robot that built the robot right it's giving that power back to the people you