Picture a very small space containing a very large dragon-like thing, spinning and shooting flames. Then picture a lot of people in that space, and a lot of explosives – real explosives – inside that dragon. It’s a unique take on ‘Happy Easter’.
Like most vagoneros, Abel played samples of his wares through a portable speaker. Unsatisfied with the audio quality and appearance, he decided there was a better setup waiting to be invented. Through experimentation and testing, he designed audio backpacks powered by rechargeable batteries, powerful enough for a long day’s work keeping Mexico’s subways rocking.
“They’re evacuating the Rockaways,” says Tammy, identified by her duct-tape name tag. “The storm surge is going to be 3 to 5 feet. I can’t send my volunteers into a dangerous situation.” “We’ve got that U-Haul truck of donated groceries,” replies Shlomo, wearing a green military-style cap. ”The truck’s gotta [...]
Natural disasters, like the massive storm that just tore through the northeast US, have a way of bringing out the hacker in everyone. Faced with a disruptions ranging from slow Internet to flooded homes, people take creative measures to have some sense of normalcy and comfort – just like the [...]
From 3D printers to bicycle-powered farm equipment, homemade helicopters to hacked graphing calculators, Maker Faire is where you proudly let your nerd flag fly. The two-day event in New York brought makers from around the world to Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, the site of the 1964 World’s Fair, [...]
Recently we visited the office of an old friend at a young Silicon Valley start-up. It didn’t take long to spot the first pirate flag—the skull and bones banner that has come to symbolize the renegade attitude of the Valley’s tech disruptors. It started with Steve Jobs’s maxim, delivered at [...]
“Worker, build your machine!” So Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s proclaimed to Cuba’s industrial sector, shortly after the triumph of the evolutionary movement he helped lead. The year was 1961, and Cuba, increasingly isolated, was experiencing an exodus of foreign companies and investment due to the unfriendly market policies of Fidel Castro’s nascent government. The start [...]
Makeshift is reporting live from TEDGlobal 2012 with five questions for Genspace founder Ellen Jorgensen. Two years ago, Ellen Joregensen left her life as a biomarkers researcher to liberate life science. Starting with casual meetings in a living room doing experiments (and immediately dumping them into buckets of bleach), Jorgensen [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]