Fixperts is a learning programme that challenges young people to use their imagination and skills to create ingenious solutions to everyday problems for a real person. In the process they develop a host of valuable transferable skills from prototyping to collaboration.

Fixperts offers a range of teaching formats to suit schools and universities, from hour-long workshops, to a term-long project, relevant to any creative design, engineering and STEM/STEAM studies.

Of all the mysteries and injustices of the McDonald’s ice cream machine, the one that Jeremy O’Sullivan insists you understand first is its secret passcode.

Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine’s vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike error messages.

“No one at McDonald’s or Taylor will explain why there’s a secret, undisclosed menu," O’Sullivan wrote in one of the first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year.

As O’Sullivan says, this menu isn’t documented in any owner’s manual for the Taylor digital ice cream machines that are standard equipment in more than 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants across the US and tens of thousands more worldwide. And this opaque user-unfriendliness is far from the only problem with the machines, which have gained a reputation for being absurdly fickle and fragile. Thanks to a multitude of questionable engineering decisions, they’re so often out of order in McDonald’s restaurants around the world that they’ve become a full-blown social media meme. (Take a moment now to search Twitter for “broken McDonald’s ice cream machine” and witness thousands of voices crying out in despair.)

The Haul Earth Ledger is an opensource fundraising platform aiming to facilitate the transition from a consumer society to a creative, inventive, expressive society. Drawing from similar efforts before it like the Whole Earth Catalog, the Ledger collects tutorials which look at consumer goods as raw materials for further experimentation.

In doing so, the team aims to question the power of the few remaining consumer brands out there clinging to power, while ensuring the lifecycle of these devices is extended to the best of our community's capacity. This, we hope can contribute acknowledging and alleviating the burden our lifestyles have been for our home, the Earth.

When I walk, I get inspired by the things that I find in the street. So I’m just walking and collecting. I don’t have high-class friends. Because people know me as the person who just collects things on the street. People feel ashamed when they are with me. When you collect in the street, you look like a street boy or madman.

a blog by greg giannis

The Hybrid Ecologies Lab (H•E•L) explores scientific research, design, and art through the innovation, development, deployment, and evaluation of novel physical devices and interactive systems that advance our computing culture, encourage broad participation by non-experts within science and engineering, improve human health and well-being, and provoke critical debate and inquiry concerning our existing and emerging technological society.

Use Make Works to source local fabricators, material suppliers & workshop facilities.

Disobedient Electronics: Protest (Hertz, 2016) is a limited edition publishing project that highlights confrontational work from industrial designers, electronic artists, hackers and makers from 10 countries that disobey conventions. Topics include the wage gap between women and men, the objectification of women's bodies, gender stereotypes, wearable electronics as a form of protest, robotic forms of protest, counter-government-surveillance and privacy tools, and devices designed to improve an understanding of climate change.

We are a global community of people who make local repair events happen and campaign for our right to repair.

Inspirado no projeto Precious Plastic de Dave Hakkens Plástico Maravilha busca levar a pequenas comunidades capacitação gratuita para a montagem de uma mini usina de reciclagem de plástico, desde a construção das máquinas até a produção de objetos diversos, usando plástico reciclado como principal matéria prima.
 O projeto visa tornar a reciclagem deste material um processo mais artístico e acessível, para que todo o plástico consumido seja reciclado localmente e os artesãos estimulados a desenvolver técnicas e produções autorais, levando em consideração os produtos que consomem, formando artistas técnicos que poderão multiplicar estes conhecimentos nas suas comunidades e regiões vizinhas.
Nesta primeira edição, a construção das máquinas, trituradora e extrusora, ocorrerá durante laboratórios abertos a interessados no Instituto Pandavas, na cidade de Monteiro Lobato, coordenados pela equipe do Plástico Maravilha e técnicos convidados. Serão realizados também um Bate-Papo e quatro Oficinas (Introdução à Fabricação Digital, Modelagem Manual, Desenho em Softwares Livres, Modelagem em Softwares 3d) que visam conscientizar os participantes sobre os conceitos básicos de modelagem e da criação de objetos, para que eles mesmos possam desenvolver diferentes maneiras de explorar este material.

Se você espera sobreviver às catastrófes que antecedem o fim do mundo, deve pensar em alguns itens para colocar na mochila. Aliás, mochilinha. Carregar peso desnecessário não é uma boa ideia...

An open resource for sourcing local manufacturing and materials

Make Works started because we wanted to make fabrication in Scotland more accessible for artists, designers and makers.

Now we teach passionate people in other places how to do the same!