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.

Makeshift contributors What Took You So Long followed Mobius Motors on their quest to take on Mobility, Africa-style. The idea behind Mobius is simple: design a vehicle for and by Kenyans. But the implementation is far more complex. Watch Mobius’s founder and mechanics discuss their grand design challenge: devising a [...]

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 [...]

Makeshift is excited to announce the launch of our first video series, Manufactured, about people and their craft. As a follow-up to Philippa Young’s article ”Seeing through Scrap” from the Re-culture Issue, we visited Cyrus Kabiru’s studio in Nairobi, Kenya to give you a more intimate look at his work. Thanks to filmographer [...]