Meeting with Maker Faire France

Meeting with Maker Faire France

Make France Maker in a few numbers:

Maker Faire events are spread throughout France. From Paris to Perpignan, via Lille, Metz, Strasbourg, Grenoble or Nantes.

In 2017, Maker Faire is 12 events produced in France with nearly 50,000 visitors.

Can you introduce us to make Maker?

The community of makers appeared on Internet forums and federated around the MAKE magazine. She quickly feels the need to gather around an event. This is how Maker Faire becomes in 2006 the first maker event in the world.

It is both a science festival, a popular fair and a reference event for innovation. This concept brings together demonstration stands, discovery workshops, performances and conferences around creativity, manufacturing, Do It Yourself and maker cultures.

Today, more than 400 editions take place in 40 countries. They bring together communities of enthusiasts, experts or beginners, sharing the desire to create, manufacture and learn from others.

Explain to us this trend the "Movement Maker"?

The maker movement appeared at the end of the 90s in the heart of California's Silicon Valley. It is a constructive counter-culture that seeks to provide solutions for building a sustainable future in a modern digital society.

The movement of the makers invites us to take control over the technology, on these objects that we use every day. It aims to understand how they work, how they are produced, how they can evolve and change for an active consumer posture. The fields of intervention are infinite and concern all aspects of our daily lives.

It is therefore not surprising to find among the makers, very diverse horizon profiles: engineers, designers, electronics engineers, computer scientists, artists, gardeners, cooks, amateur or professional do-it-yourselfers. It is this variety of talents united around a common ambition, which creates a real movement on a planetary scale. These talents are capable of lasting impact on our society.

Can you tell us more about Maker Faire events?

A figurehead of the international maker movement, Maker Faire is a great opportunity to educate the youngest. It seems essential to us to help them very early, to better understand the world in which they grow up. This is to give them the keys so that tomorrow they become actors / makers themselves.

At makers, convinced that anyone can innovate and change the world, equality of opportunity prevails. The idea is simple: to dare to open the objects that surround us, to try to understand how they work, to appropriate the technologies, to seize them, to divert them...

Doing and sharing his know-how are therefore the watchwords of the maker movement. It tends to reinvent the methods of transmitting knowledge by reconciling the spirit (knowledge) and the hand (doing it).

Do with others too, because if there are always more ideas in two heads, there are also more hands to make them together. The maker movement encourages students who are dropping out to re-enter a learning logic by developing their faculties of collaboration. It helps them to regain self-confidence through the realization of tangible projects.

Who are the Makers?

For starters, makers (of the verb Make = Faire in English) are literally "doers". They invent, manufacture, or repair all kinds of objects.

Being a maker is above all a state of mind. The makers start from the idea that anyone can innovate and change the world. The maker culture emphasizes learning by doing in a social setting and in an Open Source spirit (Free Access to Information for All).

see more