Steve Marotta writing in Artisan Economy Initiative:
Lately we have been thinking about how the artisans within the maker movement become (and stay) connected. The movement manages to encompass everyone from tech-oriented hackers and engineers to crafty jewelry makers and clothing designers to artisan food cart chefs to creative branding agencies to socially entrepreneurial placemaking nonprofits. Jeremiah Owyang, a Silicon Valley and San Francisco-based maker movement researcher, has called the maker/artisan connective tissue the “collaborative economy.” We prefer to think in terms of an ecology (an assemblage, if you will).
image courtesy of the bluma project
This ecology consists not only of the very diverse set of makers and artisans themselves, but also of makerspaces such as ADX Portland, online e-commerce sites such as Etsy or Big Cartel, fairs and festivals such as the Maker Faire or Renegade Craft, local blogs that end up being read all over the world (like Bike Portland), local boutiques, collaborative workspaces, social media, community workshops, and so on. Collectively these things coalesce into an ecology orchestrated by many individuals and small enterprises. This ecology is in juxtaposition to a more easily visible network of larger corporations within which the actual human ecology (the inner workings of the firms themselves and how workers connect between firms) is somewhat obscured or even rendered unimportant (because the total output of the firm is primarily what is considered). The artisan economy is different, as if the shell of the large corporation has been melted away and we are left with actual humans counting on each other to produce and exchange...[continue reading]
