Dispatches

From the Makery: Concrete Housing, Upcycling, and Air Quality Sensors

From the Makery: Concrete Housing, Upcycling, and Air Quality Sensors

From the Makery is a weekly roundup of inspiring stories of making collected from around the web. Follow our Facebook page or our Twitter feed for daily updates. Space Shift Space Shift is a photo essay that documents life in a series of temporary concrete housing units in Thailand. Photographer [...]

From the Makery: Minesweepers, Floating Soccer Fields, and Amazon Techno

From the Makery: Minesweepers, Floating Soccer Fields, and Amazon Techno

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

Caine’s Arcade

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 [...]

What do gangsters and Google have in common?

What do gangsters and Google have in common?

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 [...]

Anil Gupta’s Shodh Yatra

Anil Gupta’s Shodh Yatra

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: The Steel Yard

The Works: The Steel Yard

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 [...]

Infographic: Supplies Unchained

Infographic: Supplies Unchained

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 [...]

Shadow Goods

Shadow Goods

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 [...]

Fuel Hustle

Fuel Hustle

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 [...]

Let It Flow

Let It Flow

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 [...]