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"The maker movement is gathering momentum. Slowly but surely people around the world are changing from passive consumer of the latest gizmo to active maker and modifier of existing designs. The promotion of an open source philosophy in the online era has given people access to myriad designs allowing them to make and modify almost anything. These days DIY not only applies to making simple home improvements, you can go online and learn how to build a robot if you feel up to the challenge! In America, MAKE magazine is the go-to publication for DIY and hack enthusiasts. Humans Invent spoke to MAKE's editor and overall hack guru, Mark Frauenfelder, to get an insight into how this movement is changing the nature of our consumerist culture."

The "maker" movement owes much to O'Reilly's Make magazine, which is like Popular Mechanics for a new generation of Arduino-enabled, LED-lit, UAV-launching DIY types. It's a monthly magazine packed with hobbyist projects: Everything from making your own homemade cigar box guitar to building a laser CNC router for fabricating stuff. With last week's day-long workshop, O'Reilly was making the case (pardon the pun) that making can be a business, too.

In his new book, WIRED editor-in-chief Chris Anderson writes that technology has "democratized the means of production."

"TechShop a développé pendant 6 ans une structure qui permet aux consommateurs de réinventer des produits pour leurs besoins et donc de franchir le cap long et onéreux du prototypage, le tout avec des outils rapides à un coût abordable. Le succès est au rendez-vous : surfant sur un mouvement populaire - "The makers movement" - TechShop a trouvé son public et les interactions entre ses participants ont dépassé les espérances de départ avec l'émergence de succès commerciaux comme "Square". La vision de ses fondateurs est que le TechShop est au coeur d'une nouvelle révolution industrielle des USA. Qu'attend l'Europe pour rentrer dans la course à la créativité ?"

"The edge of technology is when it enables you to do something that you couldn't do before. It's one thing to put your imagination down onto a piece of paper, or into a computer program, but what if you could hold it in your hands? This is the vision of 3D printing. Digital designs can be turned into real objects using various kinds of plastic. This technology is not new, but bringing the machine home with you is - the people behind MakerBot started the company with a goal of making 3D printing more accessible."