Gareth, Maker Librarian at Machines Room, gives us his top three books about making. 

Makers | Cory Doctorow, 2010

This is a science fiction story that pitches two worlds of making, hacker/tinkerers versus big business, in the form of Disney. Doctorow takes a lot of the rhetoric of the maker movement and brings it to life with a new form of distributed maker economy and corporations trying to capitalise on the unlocked creativity that networked 3D-printing brings. The book has some great descriptions of imagined artworks the hacker protagonists create such as seashell robots that make toast.

Steep Foresight Cards

Not a book, but I’ve had these cards in the Library from the beginning. The cards are designed for corporations to use for planning the futures of their businesses. I am fascinated by in their origins in creative teaching methods of the 1970s. Despite their cringe-worthy imagery, they are surprisingly useful when brought into a making context and they are inspiration behind the Maker Cards project. 

Material Matters: New materials in design | Philip Howes and Zoe Laughlin, 2012

I worked with the Materials Library back when they were starting out. It is a university-nested collection of fascinating materials from the lightest solid Aerogel to radioactive crockery. This book digs deeper and I always show it to visiting makers to the Makers Library. My favourite chapter is on Material Futures – speculative stuff that makers can only imagine playing with.