How to UnMake a Makerspace build thread: Why I make things, Part 1 Emotional Needs.

You know they sell that at Walmart for like 20 dollars right? 

I do, but thanks for letting me know.  I could for sure buy something close to what I want for a very small amount of money mass manufactured in china that is very similar to what I am making.  But I want it to have the USB port able to continuously deliver 2 amps and dissipate the heat. Why would I computer model, 3D print, make a custom PCB for greater cost than the off the shelf solution that takes 16 hours to do?

Because I can!

I may actually have some deeper emotional needs than just "Because I can".  In life I can't control much.  It gives me anxiety when things are out of my control.  I put great effort into understanding the world around me.  Issac Newton, the father of modern day science, watched as the entirety of human knowledge became greater than anyone man could understand as he ushered out the age of alchemy.  Since I likely won't be able to understand all of recorded human knowledge I need to grab what I can.  We all have different learning styles, my strongest tendency is towards kinesthetic learning. Specifically project based learning.

By doing a project, I retain a greater portion of the subject matter.  The hands on creates emotional connection to the parts of the project and the lessons learned.  For anyone who questions this, take a look at a broken tap or stripped screw and tell me you don't have an emotional response.  I know I do, I can still picture exactly the first tap I broke in a fighting robot.  I can remember every tap I have broken.  Each time I can also go back to the point where I had to reflect on the failure.  Did I repeat a dumb mistake, or did I fail in a new and different way?

Making satisfies some of the Human-Givens approach list of ten required emotional nourishment.

1.  Sense of competence and achievement

By finishing a project, I get a high.  It is similar to the high I get while at the gym pressing atlas stones or dead lifting.  A raw guttural response and an explosion of energy.  I have a physical manifestation of what I have learned and put into practice.   

2. Meaning and purpose — which come from being stretched in what we do and think.

It may for a short period of time, but I have a purpose, make a thing.  When I choose a project, I choose it based on pushing limits of what I have done in the past.  

3.  Privacy — opportunity to reflect and consolidate experience

I reflect on what I do as I step through the learning process.  This is an internal process usually focusing mistakes or as Gui calls them "opportunities."  The only way to avoid screwing things up is to not do anything.  My projects often have a lot of opportunities for learning.

And that about covers it for working in my basement alone.  That leaves me with a gaping opening with the rest of the list.  For most people they need a third place.  After home and work, they go to church, bowling, or a bar.  It usually will knock out the most of this list.  But I don't fit at most of these places.  I got this from Fighting robots and Crossfit.  I was working as a 3D printer Application Engineer when a friend and co worker pointed out an article in the Nashua Telegraph. Earlier in 2011 I met my wife and after our first date it was like that was how my life was always supposed to be.  To a far less degree but with the same conviction I knew what I had walked into when I entered MakeIt Labs.  I could check off some more boxes on the list.

4.  Security — safe territory and an environment which allows us to develop fully

The space was accepting of failure.  Just like at CrossfitTuff, everyone cheers you on when you are trying. They give you ideas and share experience.  They give you the one piece you need or lend you a tool.  When you say "hold my beer and watch this," more than one person offers and they film it for "Science."

5.  Attention (to give and receive it) — a form of nutrition

Kevin Smith says that one of the basic human needs is to be heard.  In order to have someone listen you need to say something.  I can tell stories of things I have done in the past, but as time goes by the minds eye's focus starts to become less clear.  Did I get pulled over at 107 or 117 MPH?  I can very clearly however tell you about the Unified Chart of Accounts for Non Profits and how it is designed to fill out the 990 tax form.  My audience may not car so much about the content every time, but they hear my passion.  On the flip side, I enjoy hearing about other peoples projects and learning.  I have a lot of experience, sometimes people become apologetic as they explain what they assume is a mundane task to me.  It never is, I am always excited to see the passion in peoples eyes as they get that eureka moment

6.  Sense of autonomy and control — having volition to make responsible choice.

Lets be serious.  Doing things is dangerous.  Walking down the street you could get hit by a 16 ton anvil falling from the sky.  The chance is remote, but it could happen.  Walking into a room with power tools is going to increase that danger by an exponential factor.  Every tool is designed to deliver energy in some type high discharge function.  A trained cyclist can output 400 watts at peak for short amounts of time.  The Plasma cutter can output 11,000 watts of power continuously for 45 minutes.  10 milliamps at 100 volts can kill a human.    That tool can kill you 110,000 times over in 5 seconds.  Ever used a bandsaw? No better tool exists to cut meat and bones in a butcher shop.  You know what we are made of? Mostly meat, some bones.  The shop is a direct representation a humans need for making good decisions.  Every injury I deal with begins with some version of the statement "I didn't think."  

On the flip side what you do also effects others.  By leaving the shop better than you found it, you are setting up the next user for success.  By leaving a mess, broken tools, or an unsafe condition, you are being selfish.  You can receive gratification by leaving things better than you found them.  

7.  Emotional intimacy — to know that at least one other person accepts us totally for who we are, “warts 'n' all”

I don't think I deal with this much at the space, Paul generally grunts and drinks beers.  That may be as good as we get.Experiences may vary on this one.

8.  Feeling part of a wider community

When I walk in, I say hello to a bunch of people.  They all know my name.  I can often go for weeks at a time and only see my wife, Dunkin Donuts employees, and Inmates.  How many of you can say that everyone at your work, customers and co workers, want for the place to do well and be better?  I may not always agree with the path, but we want the place to be better just the same.  It gives us a reason to work past our differences.  All you have to do is try not to be a jerk.  To be fair, we like them to. 

9.  Sense of status within social groupings

Maker spaces become a Meritocracy.  We have co authored a term Do-ocracy as a community.  The doers actions become louder than the "experts".   How much do I weigh your input?  How good does your R4-D5 unit replicate the original?  

I am not comfortable with excepting the world around me.  I need to make it better.  I need to know that when I am gone, what I did will be looked upon as a net positive on the balance sheet of life.

I leave you with Adam Savages talk on Why We Make.

How to UnMake a Makerspace build thread: "What do you make?"

"What do you make?"  

The TARDIS door at MPR2.

This is the first question I get asked by most people when they encounter me incidentally at work.  I meet new people on tours, or at Tag's Hardware, or just walking down the street.  My answer varies from robots to rally cars at the beginning.  I have said all kinds of answers but most of them were a lie at the time and described something I had done in the past.  One day a sweet old woman was on a tour I was giving asked me this question.  I was doing the tour in between working on some sort of infrastructure improvement.  I explained the specific project and she responded with a very succinct  "So you Make Makerspaces?"

Now when people ask me that question I have a very specific answer canned and a few sentences.  "I make Makerspaces!  I work as the facilities manager.  I make sure tools work, people are safe and things make sense".  That was true.  For a while at least.

At the end of last year I put in a bunch of orders and nothing was ordered.  It turns out we ran into a cash crunch as an organization.  I will go into this deeper in a future post and how we are fixing it.  From this with no resources to do my job, I turned my attention to why I did not have the resources to do my job.  As time progressed, I used my extra time to understand the business of Making a Makerspace.  This system can best be described like my pants and waist since I stopped working out at Crossfit.  My waste grew and I lied to myself saying that my pants still fit.  Then one day you go to buy a suit and the tailor measuring you says 53 when you are expecting 38.  It's not like I didn't have a mirror, I just didn't have enough perspective to see the change and notice the issues.

Let me make one thing very clear.  Being a not for profit does not mean running with no surplus.  It means that you are tax exempt and can't distribute dividends or profit.

We ran with greater than 90% earned income.  If we had an unexpected expense or drop in revenue for even a brief period, we would have issues weathering it.  In a December of 2013 we had both a drop in revenue, and an unexpected expense. I didn't know what was going on.

I have developed a system for when I don't know something.

Step one: Buy a book on the subject.
Step two: Read it and become an expert.
Step three: Make stuff.

I then went on a buying spree on amazon since I didn't know why we were where we were.  If the money did not make sense, lets look at that Nonprofit Bookkeeping & Accounting For Dummies This started to give me a better picture of the intricacies of Not for Profit accounting.  All of my experience was based on Cost accounting, or Throughput accounting as applied in a lean manufacturing environment.  In either case, I would use quantifiable data to make decisions to either maximize profits or reduce bottlenecks in a manufacturing process.  With a not for profit organization we start to add some additional data points.  As a not for profit, profit was not the goal, programs are the deliverable.  This was a much more qualitative measurement.  But how does this fit onto a balance sheet?

The next book I bought was The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management.  I poured over it to understand the differences between a not for profit and a for profit.  I started to look deeper at the numbers and we were running with a very low margin of revenue and social capital.

Working for Artisan's Asylum as an organization has been very hard, emotionally and mentally.  I ended up taking a position of Operations manager (Transitional Manager) after our Interim executive director stepped down.  I figured that I could just find a book that talked about how to do this. How To Do Everything had some great tips but I was in the same position as my predecessors, no one ever did the thing we were doing.  Lots of not for profits exist.  Lots of shared shop space exist.  Lots of Makerspaces exist, some with more people, some with more tools, some with more space.   None at the level Artisan's Asylum is.  Every time we do something for the first time, it is the first time it has been done to the level that we need to do it.  Gui gave three levels of projects he does, awesome, ridiculous and ludicrous.  Being that that is how we plan projects, it has been hard to translate this to GAAP.

The first thing we had to do was stop and admit we had problems.  Our staff, our board, and members took on our biggest community project to date.  We were going to fix OUR Makerspace.  One of my favorite parts of Battlebots competitions was the open build threads where people gave detailed build reports as a story.  Not much was held back.  Our story has just begun.  I want to start to chronicle some of our failures and successes for not just the Artisan's Asylum members, but for all other community workshops to learn from.  This will be a build thread and a place to document for me what has happened.

Please leave specific questions in the comments for future blog posts on topics you would like to see covered.  This is not an Asylum project and only reflects my personal views and experiences.