From the Makery is a weekly roundup of inspiring stories of making collected from around the web. Follow our Facebook page for daily updates. Floating Soccer Field An incredible story of a Thai fishing community that built their own floating soccer field! Previously, the residents Koh Panyee, a village built [...]
Caine’s Arcade is the story of a nine-year-old boy who built an elaborate cardboard arcade in his father’s auto parts store. It’s a tale of street-level ingenuity and wild imagination supported by a community galvanized through digital networks. You can visit Caine’s Arcade or support his scholarship fund. Since the [...]
Two young drug dealers marvel at the ingenuity of their Chicken McNuggets and imagine the innovator who must have become incredibly rich off his invention. An older, more experienced dealer, D’Angelo Barksdale, mocks their naiveté, explaining that the man who invented the McNugget is an unknown at the very bottom [...]
Makeshift contributor Elias Scheer followed Professor Anil Gupta, founder of India’s Honey Bee Network and SRISTI, on his annual Shodh Yatra, a journey across rural India to uncover innovation at the grassroots. Special thanks to SRISTI for their invitation and hospitality.
The Works is a video series about incredible spaces of creative production. For our first installment, we visited Providence, Rhode Island, the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, where two entrepreneurs have revived an old steel mill into a community space for industrial art. The Steel Yard was featured in [...]
Consider an object you use everyday. Where was it born? The more advanced it is, the more likely its components were sourced from more places all over the world. Your laptop is a sort of third culture kid. Globalization has linked distant mines, factories, and ports to each other and [...]
Not long ago, I bought a bottle of whiskey at a liquor store in midtown Manhattan. It was only when I got home that I noticed some fine print on the bottom of the label that differentiates the Scotch from any other I had ever bought. The added words said that the bottle was reserved purely for the [...]
Weaving through Cambodia by motorbike, hugging the Vietnam border, I came to some startling realizations. Firstly, I was running worryingly low on gas, even though I fueled up just 20 minutes ago. Secondly, there didn’t appear to be any gas stations for miles around. Finally, the air was sweltering, and I could really use a drink. At this [...]
Ben Hamilton-Baillie is a fan of common sense. The former architect and founder of Bristol-based traffic consultancy Hamilton-Baillie Associates is a leading advocate for shared space, the urban design movement that proposes that human judgment—not conventional traffic control—should govern our streets. Makeshift asked him about the upside of chaos, the logic of skating rinks, and the incivility of traffic [...]
The number of cars on the road is exploding, but the number of cars in the garage is even higher. That’s why car sharing systems like Getaround are using peer-to-peer networking to use idle cars more efficiently. Getaround’s website and app match drivers with renters, making a wide variety of vehicles available in all areas—not just dense [...]
