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Gareth Owen Lloyd's Book Selection

Gareth Owen Lloyd's Book Selection  MLN LIBRARY ICON BY KOBY BARHAD

MLN LIBRARY ICON BY KOBY BARHAD

12 August 2015

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.

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Commentary

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UK

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