The industrialization of the maker movement—the birthing and growing of companies by and for makers—was an obvious next step in its evolution. Making stuff costs money. Materials, tools, and time all start to add up as your making habit progresses. Finding other people who appreciate what you’ve made—and want to pay you for it—can be a beautiful and exciting moment.

But as the years have gone by, I’ve noticed more than just greater numbers of people getting involved, new tools being developed, and new companies launching. There has been a cohesiveness to the culture, as if the whole global community has been thinking together. In addition to the excitement of all the opportunity and new companies, questions have arisen: How can making really matter? How can we apply the same philosophies of openness and rapid prototyping to issues that truly need innovation?

The questions have bubbled up in a number of different situations, and each group approached them differently. But the basic line of thinking was the same: bring in the tools and start experimenting. Some have used contests and others have used classes. From scientific labs to hospitals, innovative makers have been spreading the movement beyond Maker Faires and makerspaces.

Makers as Scientists

In July 2013, the OpenROV team attended the Ocean Exploration 2020 conference at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California. It wasn’t so much a conference as it was a meeting, an invite-only event that brought together the leaders of the ocean exploration world: federal agencies, leading scientists and engineers, as well as private foundations and organizations. It was a who’s who of famous explorers and influential groups: Sylvia Earle, Don Walsh, the Google Ocean team, scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And then us: Eric and me, with three of our OpenROVs.

Our presentation came near the end of the first day. We did what we know—we told our story of wanting to explore the Hall City Cave and the network of DIY ocean explorers that have grown around the project. We talked about the broader maker movement and how, as amateurs, we were attempting to remake a whole swath of the scientific toolkit, using OpenCTD and the Raspberry Pi Data Buoy as oceanographic examples. We also (inadvertently) used a term we had never used before: citizen explorers. The crowd seemed a little stunned. As a group, they had very little idea what makers have been up to. It wasn’t until the final slide—a photo I snapped of Eric and Colin Ho in the airport—that everyone saw the potential: two guys with three ROVs—all of it carry-on luggage.

The group decided the growing potential for citizen science and exploration was an important development, enough that the concept has made it onto NOAA’s National Agenda for Ocean Exploration.¹ The ocean scientists and researchers loved the idea of citizen science—amateur scientists making contributions to ongoing research. They viewed it as an endless supply of Internet helpers sorting through their data and contributing to their research projects. That’s what citizen science had come to mean. They’d seen other disciplines, notably ornithology, take full advantage of volunteers, and they were eager to catch up.

An Old Idea with a Maker Twist

Birding—the amateur pursuit of watching and monitoring bird populations—is a big deal. The numbers back it up. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service puts the number of “wildlife watchers” in the country at over 20 million. They estimate the industry is larger than $50 billion.² But there is more to the story than legions of spotting-scope-equipped, L.L. Bean–wearing retirees moving through national parks and recreation areas. Like everyone else, the birders are now wired up.

In addition to notebooks and life lists, birders are now using apps and centralized databases like eBird and iNaturalist to quantify their work. This data is becoming the backbone for important ornithology work (even though it often doesn’t receive any credit).³ Researchers have been able to turn to statisticians and computer scientists to add quality control filters to the data, as well as tweak the interfaces to encourage more participation from an ever-growing number and diversity of people.

The birders are just the tip of the iceberg—a small sliver of a much bigger trend emerging around amateur science. Networks of makers are creating tools to explore, monitor, and understand our planet in an entirely new way.

The pace of innovation is staggering. There have been very public success stories, like the use of drones for conservation⁴ or the development of small satellites for continuous Earth imaging.⁵ These are more than just clever hacks. Each one adds a new tool to the toolbox of the growing army of citizen scientists around the world. These people—passionate networks of amateur and professional scientists—are busy wiring up the natural world with every sensor they can get their hands on. To paraphrase the ideas of Planet Labs CEO Will Marshall, these are the neurons of a new planetary nervous system.⁶

A New Era of Citizen Science

The idea of amateur science isn’t new. In fact, a few disciplines have been pioneering this approach for decades. Astronomy and ornithology both have a long track record of including the work of nonprofessionals in their research. In both cases, the formula is simple:

Low-Cost Tools + Open Standards + Connected Enthusiasm

In the case of astronomy, one of the main drivers of the recent boom was the development of the Dobsonian telescope. In the 1960s, John Dobson—a monk in San Francisco—contributed an entirely novel way to mount larger lenses using whatever materials happened to be lying around. He never patented his design but instead set about teaching anyone and everyone the methods and joy of constructing your own telescope. He spent the rest of his life standing on street corners, traveling around the world, and inviting everyone he met to look at the stars. As Timothy Ferris wrote in Seeing in the Dark (Simon & Schuster, 2002), it is these low-cost tools combined with the networking enabled by the Internet that has fueled the renewed momentum for amateur astronomy.

Today we’re seeing this powerful trend emerge in dozens of other disciplines. Every component of that formula—tools, standards, and connectivity—is going through a renaissance.

The most important change is in tools. The maker movement has sped up the pace of prototyping and lowered the barriers to small-batch manufacturing. What used to take an entire company’s R&D budget can now be achieved by two friends in a garage. We didn’t have any money when we started OpenROV, but we did have access to TechShop in San Francisco, where we used a laser cutter to prototype the initial underwater robot design. That would have been impossible just a few years earlier. And with Arduino and Raspberry Pi, as well as cheap, affordable sensors (accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, GPS, temperature, etc.), makers now have the building blocks for a new generation of connected devices. These are the same forces putting computers and sensors on our wrists and in our thermostats. This trend is happening in the natural world, too, but we haven’t stopped to give it a catchy name like “wearables” or the “Internet of Things.” Personally, I like Wildtech.

The tools for scientific research and exploration are especially ripe for this maker-style disruption. For the past half century, the key drivers of the market have been low volumes—limited to labs and research institutions—and high margins. Because the labs pay for the equipment out of grants and endowments, they have little regard for the large markups, especially when their research institution receives a direct percentage of that grant as indirect overhead. All the players in this game—the manufacturers, researchers, and institutions—have little reason to complain. It’s the Scientific Industrial Complex.

But here come the makers, building tools for themselves and for each other. It’s a textbook case of what Clayton Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016), calls a disruptive innovation, the process of technological evolution where a new design or business model breaks up the existing state of affairs by opening up the market to new and different customers.

Global, Open, and Resilient

The maker-style science and exploration tools don’t pander to the nuanced needs of researchers. The goals are broad participation. These projects become economically feasible and profitable at higher volumes, as opposed to the higher margins associated with the traditional research tools. But it’s also ideological. There’s a sense of purpose among these projects that permeates the business plans and organizational structures; the process of discovery and the pursuit of curiosity should be available to everyone.

This radical inclusion has a number of important spillover effects. The first is that these projects are born global. With OpenROV, our forums and discussions have always been an international collaboration. Some of our most important contributors lived halfway around the world, and we never met them face to face until many years into working together. We have shipped ROVs to almost every country, and we have seen homebuilt versions of our design in even more surprising corners of the globe.

All of these projects are built on a foundation of openness. Influenced and built by open source software and open hardware scaffolding, the same methodology is being applied to the science itself. It’s meta-level bricklaying. The best example is the CubeSat standard. Throughout the 1990s, there had been discussions at NASA and elsewhere about finding ways to reduce the cost of space science, but it took the enterprising of two professors to bring the idea to life. Bob Twiggs, a professor at Stanford, and Jordi Puig-Suari, a professor at California Polytechnic State University–San Luis Obispo, dreamed up the CubeSat idea as a way to get smaller, cheaper satellites into space.⁷ The backbone of their idea was the philosophy of standardization. In 2000, they published a 10-page document that outlined the basics: the size (a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm cube), the weight (less than a kilogram), and some ideas for framing, electronics, and power. As explained, the CubeSats could be rigged with whatever experiment their makers could imagine, as long as they fit into those defined boundaries.⁸

Given the exorbitant costs of rocket launches, Twiggs and Puig-Suari knew that the only way to get these experiments into space would be on the coattails of larger operations, so they created a specially designed orbital deployer as a way to piggyback on those launches. That was in 2003. Since that time, the CubeSat phenomenon has exploded. It’s given rise to an entire industry, as well as an entirely new genre of space science, from the LightSail (which is prototyping a novel method of solar sailing), to the Firefly (which measures gamma-ray flashes coming from Earth’s atmosphere).

Radical collaboration is pushing maker-style citizen science ahead at an increasing rate. It’s becoming cheaper and faster to build on top of these open standards, which in turn broadens the scope of what can be attempted because so much more can be done with less.

More importantly, this model of science is broadening the scope of who can take part—mainly a function of falling costs. The tools for prototyping and question asking are becoming more reasonable than ever before, and the open standards mean there are foundations to build on. But the real story of expanded participation has to do with connected enthusiasm.

Over the past few years, a new digital layer of connection has allowed enthusiasts to forge new bonds. The importance of community building was also pioneered by amateur astronomers and birders. The astronomers have long held “star parties” to get together and share tips and techniques. Birders come together for annual events like the Christmas Bird Count. The culture that emerges around these groups has always been the critical glue for turning interest into networked science and discovery. Collectively, the group knows more than any one individual, and the Internet enables this to happen at scale.

Citizen scientists are using all the tools available—social media, apps, mapping software, and Kickstarter—to find each other and share ideas. By digitizing the community effort, they’ve been able to do more, faster. People are now logging on to websites like Zooniverse and helping to identify galaxies and gravitational lenses. Non-astronomy disciplines are also getting in on the action. Zooniverse now runs projects based on everything from identifying plankton to studying the collective intelligence of wildebeest. Tools like OpenStreetMap and MapBox are allowing groups to quickly create knowledge maps of sightings and environmental data. But perhaps the most exciting congregation of amateur science enthusiasm is on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter. Projects such as Rainforest Connection and Open qPCR all found support and just enough funding to get off the ground. National Science Foundation grants require that you have a Ph.D. and an affiliate institution; Kickstarter projects just need a community.

The impacts of these trends are just starting to be recognized. Wherever this goes, we already know the importance goes far beyond just data collection. The true potential is the reimagining of science communication and engagement, and turning citizen science into civic action.

This is the largest and most hopeful part of the citizen science story: the sense of agency. For too long, science has been isolated in the ivory towers of academic institutions, accessible only to a few. This is a new way forward that invites everyone to explore, get involved, and take responsibility—each of us a critical node in the new planetary nervous system.

Community Building

Four years after our presentation at the Ocean Exploration 2020 National Forum, the concept of makers turning their focus to citizen science and conservation has picked up major speed. Numerous efforts have been made to coordinate this momentum. Much of this is happening online, and you can follow along:

1. Wildlabs On Wildlabs.net, this organization describes itself as “a community of conservationists, technologists, engineers, data scientists, entrepreneurs and change makers. Together, we share information, ideas, tools and resources to discover and implement technology-enabled solutions to some of the biggest conservation challenges facing our planet.”
2. It’s a bold and ambitious mission, and Wildlabs is making measurable progress toward their goal. The site came about through the cooperation and coordination of numerous conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and many others. And the project was funded by technology companies like Google and ARM. Don’t let the big names fool you—the discussions on the forums are from first-rate enthusiasts. The topics range from techniques in ocean acoustic monitoring to best practices for tagging and camera traps. For conservationists, these types of skill and tool sharing, along with low-cost solutions that can scale across geography and organization, have been a revelation. For technologists, the window into the conservation world has given them a whole new problem set to which they can apply their engineering prowess. It’s a fortuitous match, and one that is still open to all sorts of new contributors and ideas. Dive in.
3. MongaBay Wildtech Mongabay (wildtech.mongabay.com) has been a leading conservation websites for decades; it pioneered the coverage of environmental issues on the Internet. Mongabay was also one of the first to notice this collision of scientists and makers. In order to chronicle these stories in a coherent way, they created a new beat: Wildtech. In addition to reporting on new tools and academic papers involving these techniques, they do in-depth interviews and include how-tos on the DIY techniques.
4. OpenExplorer OpenExplorer (openexplorer.com) is a digital field journal that grew out of the OpenROV community. We built this site because we wanted to move the community beyond just building things together to actually exploring and getting in the field together. It started with ROVs, but it’s intentionally designed to be capable of supporting all types of exploration: marine protected area (MPA) monitoring, urban exploring, BioBlitzes, and archaeological work.
5. We started OpenROV without any expensive equipment or a research grant. We took a different route: sharing and collaborating with others who wanted to share the adventure. It worked! The community helped us build the tool we needed and provided countless ideas and tips that made our expedition a success. We learned that incredible things can happen when a curious group of amateurs focus their attention. That’s what OpenExplorer encourages and supports.
6. The expeditions are broken into three phases:
   1. Preparation Getting ready to go. Gathering and testing equipment. Planning routes and strategies. Acquiring any necessary permits. Background information.
   2. Underway In the field.
   3. Debriefing Reporting back. What was learned. Data gathered. Videos or other media to share.
7. OpenExplorer is a great tool for documenting an expedition, but it’s also a great place to get inspiration or find other makers who are getting out into the world. We’ve seen everything from laser-equipped drones that protect desert tortoises to robots that examine the thickness of lake ice.

Frugal Innovation

The cascading costs of science tools have outsized effects. Not only are the tools allowing scientists to do their jobs at lower cost, they’re changing the audience completely and making it so anyone can ask the questions. And that changes everything. No one knows better than Manu Prakash.

Prakash grew up in India, but his curiosity brought him to the United States, where he studied under Neil Gershenfeld at MIT. While at MIT, Prakash worked on microfluidics and pioneered an idea called bubble logic, which is essentially a tiny computer that moves droplets through channels and switches. Binary code carries more than just information; it also transports the water bubble. It’s pioneering scientific research, and it’s probably not even Prakash’s biggest act. He’s also been a leader in an idea he calls frugal science—a close relative of the citizen science tools we’ve been aiming at.⁹

For Prakash, frugal science is about creating low-cost, easy-to-use tools that enable everyone to ask questions, especially those in the developing world. He keeps a map in his office that shows the relative sizes of different countries according to their scientific output. When viewed this way, the global south is dramatically underrepresented. It was during a trip to field sites in Thailand and Nigeria that Prakash was inspired to invent the Foldscope, his first and major contribution to the frugal science toolset. He saw how people in these areas were acting around the microscope they had brought—they were afraid to use it because it was so expensive. The Foldscope was Prakash’s solution to making science playful and approachable. It’s a simple origami microscope that can be created out of paper, and it costs less than $1. And it’s changed everything.

In order to get his new creation into the world, Prakash received support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to send out 10,000 Foldscopes to people around the world. Prakash and the team made only one requirement for qualifying: a person had to ask a good question. It didn’t have to be a scientific purpose or be part of an ongoing research paper—just an interesting question. Like our vision for OpenROV, the Foldscope wasn’t a tool built exclusively for scientists; it was made to enable curiosity. And it has. A quick look at their community site, https://microcosmos.foldscope.com/, reveals the diversity of uses and interests: a classroom that has pulled up pond scum to examine, someone looking at the intricacies of mouse intestines, and someone evaluating the biodiversity inside an old vase that had filled with water outside their house. The site is full of weird and wonderful discoveries. It’s gone beyond just playful educational moments, too, and is being used for serious research.

Prakash and his team didn’t stop with the Foldscope, either. Their vision involves making the entire scientific toolchain available to everyone. The next stop on that journey: the centrifuge. A centrifuge is a tool used in a wide range of faculties, and the machines can vary greatly depending on the use. The basic idea is the machine spins at very high speeds, using centrifugal force to separate out solids from liquid or different liquids from themselves. One common use is with human blood; it is used to separate out the number of red blood cells or to identify pathogens. This is the main use case that motivated Prakash. Again, as with the Foldscope, he recognized the limitations of using expensive medical diagnostic equipment in developing country settings, this time seeing an expensive centrifuge machine being used as a doorstop in Uganda because there was no electricity to run it.¹⁰

Prakash and his team created the Paperfuge, a simple design that can be made out of paper and used without power in a variety of settings.¹¹ After years of toiling with a design that was built on the physics and philosophy of the yo-yo, it was another childhood toy that eventually ended up doing the trick: the whirligig. It works by tying a string to two plastic ends with a paper disc in the center. The strings are spun and wound, eventually folding over themselves in a supercoiling fashion. It was the supercoiling effects that allowed the Paperfuge to achieve the rotational speed required.

The existing commercial options for these machines can cost thousands of dollars and often break down in difficult conditions. The Paperfuge costs less than a few dollars and can be used by field workers anywhere in the world. Prakash’s first field tests of the device were using it for malaria diagnostics in Madagascar. It’s a simple invention with profound ramifications.

The Paperfuge, the Foldscope, and one more—a $5 programmable kid’s chemistry set that enables the execution of chemical assays (and also designed to resemble a kid’s toy, the music box)—make up Prakash’s growing frugal science toolbox. We should all hope he keeps adding to it.

Cooperation through Competition

Makers are taking notice of important problems. There’s a reason that these problems have gone unsolved: they’re expensive. The trick to getting maker involvement has been replacing the lack of institutional resources with a reliance on the most renewable maker resource: enthusiasm. That organized enthusiasm usually takes the form of a “hackathon” or “makeathon,” where a group of people form teams and work diligently for a weekend-long blitz of ideas and hacks, culminating in a Sunday night pitch to judges to show how far they came. With their powers combined, they can get a lot done in just one weekend.

These events are momentum builders, for groups and for individuals. I saw the power of this type of focus firsthand when I was in the thick of my Zero to Maker journey. We organized a Maker Startup Weekend, a “hackathon” to try to bring new ideas into the world. Dozens of participants showed up on Friday night to pitch the rest of the group on their crazy ideas in an effort to recruit others to help them actually make them. By Sunday evening, the teams had come up with all sorts of interesting products, as well as prototypes to demo: an over-the-Internet button pusher, a DIY Gel Doc system, and even a musical tire swing. But more important than any of the creations, I saw the group come together and gel. Even beyond the team camaraderie, there was an energy among the entire cadre of participants that pulsed with possibility. Everyone coming together for that weekend and working in the same direction showed them what was possible when they worked together. They discovered more than tools—they found each other.

A number of mission-oriented maker groups have taken the playbook and applied it toward their purpose. Here are a few of the most interesting:

1. Make for the Planet (makefortheplanet.com) The Smithsonian put on event called the Earth Optimism Summit. The goal of the event was—instead of focusing on all the challenges and threats to the natural world, ecosystems, and species—to focus on the solutions. The goal was to highlight all the people, groups, and ideas that were making a positive difference in conservation and science. Of course, given all the success of the new low-cost science tools, the Smithsonian wanted to inject the maker spirit into this event, and do it in a way that was authentic. They enlisted the help of Conservation X Labs to help facilitate a “Make for the Planet” hackathon during the conference. The results were inspiring and fit right in with the goals of the conference. Over a dozen teams competed and created solutions ranging from smart composting bins to chemical trace animal tagging solutions. Again, the success of the event went beyond the weekend outcomes; it was a momentum-boosting moment for these (mostly) students in their careers as conservation technologists.
2. Tikkun Olam Makers (tomglobal.org) Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase that means “healing the world.” Tikkun Olam Makers is an Israeli startup focused on using the creative power of makers to solve problems for people with disabilities. They call the ideas and solutions assistive technologies. Their model is to bring together creatives and makers with “need-knowers”—people with disabilities who have ideas about how technology can help, for events as well as online developer communities in cities around the world. It’s like a local A Team for solving the issues facing people with disabilities. One of their events can turn up a dozen innovative product ideas, like the Bay Area Makeathon that saw the creation of Smart Seat, which uses pressure sensors and alerts to help wheelchair-bound folks know when they’ve been in one position too long so they can avoid pressure sores, and iEat, a team developing robotic arms for people with limited upper limb function. Of course, it takes more than just a weekend to solve these problems, but the TOM events succeed in getting makers to think about problems outside of their everyday worldview. That’s a first step in the right direction.
3. Hackaday Prize (hackaday.io/prize) The DIY website Hackaday has taken the idea of a “for good” hackathon to the next level. On Hackaday, the hackathon is not an in-person weekend event but a six-week global search that takes place on the Internet. They’re looking for the very best ideas from anyone, anywhere. Every six weeks they have a new theme, varying from assistive technology to “Internet of Useful Things” to anything goes. The themes aren’t so much specific challenges as they are guidelines for inspiration.