Maker Faire Rome 2018: For the first time, a business-oriented reading

Let’s be honest: bringing the Maker Faire to Rome could not have been an easy project, especially with the ambition of making it the reference event for the European continent.

Let’s take a small step back and do a bit of history.

The Maker movement was born in the United States at the beginning of the new millennium. It is a counterculture movement whose roots reach into the hacker movement of the 1990s — hacker in the literal and positive sense, of course, the free-software movement which, under the Open Source flag, revolutionised and democratised the world of Operating Systems.

The same concepts applied to the hardware sector and to industrial automation were therefore carried forward by a network of new hackers who applied their skills to the physical world of manufacturing machines.

The term Maker was invented shortly afterwards by our friend Dale Daugherty — journalist, publisher and active exponent of that nascent movement. The term was carefully weighed up with the intent of distancing itself from the term hacker, which by then had taken on a negative connotation — wrongly associated with illegal intrusions into software systems — while at the same time clearly indicating the fact that makers build things.

The true maker was the one who invents objects and systems, often technological, often bizarre and useless, with what we would define as an artistic-conceptual intent. The maker builds things because he is able to do so.

The new term also becomes the base for the title of a magazine, Make: — the colon is part of the name, the very title of the magazine introduces its content. The reader’s question is implied: “What can I do today?”.

Together with the magazine, a format is conceived for a fair that self-celebrates the maker movement itself: the Maker Faire, precisely.

The first fair of creativity and ingenuity of the new hackers takes place in San Francisco, still today the home of the most important Maker Faire. Inventors, creatives, artists and scientists from all over the American continent flock to show and share their bizarre inventions — a mix between a fun fair and Burning Man, which strongly recalls the maker spirit of American festivals.

The format, owned by Dale Daugherty’s publishing company, first extends throughout the states and subsequently to the rest of the world. It is a format that is licensed, usually to a local maker community.

By 2012, the Maker movement had entered the cultural mainstream, and the economists of the Obama administration saw in the movement elements of inspiration for a new cultural and technological renaissance of the West.

The network of Fab Labs — laboratories that, instead of being generic makerspaces, are structured according to a model conceived by none other than the MIT of Boston — is indicated as the alternative to large robotised manufacturing industry, an opportunity to bring industrial production back to western countries.

In 2012, with the strong sponsorship of the Italian Embassy in the United States, the acquisition of the licence for the European edition of Maker Faire by the Rome Chamber of Commerce was favoured.

The objective was to bring an inspirational event to Italian territory, favouring aggregation around institutional initiatives of the Italian and Roman Maker movement, which already at that time was among the most relevant on a global scale.

Using an event born as a self-celebratory festival of a planetary community that identifies itself well in carnival-like events with a high-tech flavour — like Burning Man — to represent industrial and technological innovation in formal contexts such as Chambers of Commerce and business associations, you will easily understand that this is not an easy thing.

And in fact, after the enthusiasm of the first two editions in 2013 and 2014 — held respectively at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in EUR and at the Auditorium of Rome, both characterised by a great success with the public and strong participation from the European maker movement — the first frictions began in 2015.

The third edition, held inside the Sapienza University City of Rome, was once again a great success with the public — so much so that from 2016 the event would take place at the Nuova Fiera di Roma, occupying as many as 7 pavilions — but it left behind a long trail of criticism.

On one side, the purest part of the Maker movement contested the curation, considering the selection of projects and especially of sponsors too business-oriented and generalist; on the other, the entrepreneurial world did not detect actual elements of interest in what appeared to be a large bazaar of low-cost maker technologies, with a profusion of figurines and 3D-printed little jars.

In the meantime, however, the paying public continued to grow, and the organiser — today called Innova Camera, Special Agency of the Rome Chamber of Commerce — continues to perform an excellent task, facing seemingly insurmountable organisational difficulties and bringing home an undoubted success in the 2016 and 2017 editions too, despite the intrinsic ambiguity of the positioning of an event that presents itself as the Innovation Fair in the business sphere but is attended mainly by families seeking curiosity and fun.

In the meantime, the Roman and Italian Maker movement has grown, but above all has evolved.

From the Fab Labs of the “fablabroma” network, important and successful entrepreneurial spin-offs have been born. We ourselves are a valid example, and where the creative and impertinent spirit of the origins has not been lost, we are witnessing a generation of new entrepreneurs capable of channelling energy and inventiveness towards products and services that can bring social innovation and favour the development of their own territories.

In this year’s edition, the fifth European Maker Faire, for the first time elements appeared that give hope that the project started in 2013 is on the right track.

One example for all, the “New Manufacturing” area curated by CNA Nazionale within Pavilion 4, where we of Spazio Chirale were also present as exhibitors and where, together with our Association CNA Roma, we contributed to managing the curation.

For the first time, we managed to tell a story. The story of how technologies and processes born from maker culture can improve the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises and of artisan micro-enterprises.

From the carpentry shop that uses processes developed in Fab Labs to innovate the design of its products through epoxy resins and digital machines, to the company that is able to set up in a very short time film and theatre sets — of any style and historical era — thanks to digital fabrication, passing through the vintage shop that rents out clothes and stage costumes revitalised and made innovative through wearable and interactive electronics.

For the first time, large and small entrepreneurs were queuing at the stands attracted by the exhibition — not of bizarre maker creations, but of actual production processes, in which they identified, even from a distance, the relevance to their own activity and professional culture.

Many were at the fair with their family and children and were surprised to discover unexpected elements of interest for their work.

That this is the right path for the Roman format of the Maker Faire was confirmed by the thanks of a visitor who, satisfied, told us that the area we had curated provided the key to understanding what all the bizarre technologies seen in the rest of the fair could really be used for in an industrial context.

It was three gruelling days for our staff, but of great satisfaction.

A special thanks to our team who worked tirelessly in welcoming and managing the public; to CNA Nazionale and CNA Roma for the excellent work of organisation and management of the area, designed and built in record time; and naturally to the Management and to all the staff of Innova Camera who made this great event possible.