Promo video: Maker Activist – make more things yourself
Channel: Daniel Parnitzke
Date: 19/08/2019

We possess a lot of things. And we constantly buy new things to exchange old ones. This contributes to the issue of overproduction, a waste of valuable resources and an overload of unsustainable, short-lasting products, which are contributing to the environmental crisis we are facing. 

What, if we could create personal relations to items, be able to customize them for our needs, and even could decide the material or color?
What can we do to gain agency as consumers against big corporations with intransparent, over-complicated, non-local and unsustainable production processes?

We become maker-activists. MAKER ACTIVIST is a platform that helps you to make things yourself. It provides open instructions on how to make things yourself, using locally available materials and resources and connects a growing community of makers to share instructions and make together.

Go to www.maker-activist.com. Here you can read everything about the idea and the general issue. But mainly, you find plenty of open-source instructions for things you can make yourself. Filter the instructions by category to quickly find instructions for food, furniture, cosmetics, self-sufficiency or that are most popular with the community at the time. Once you made your choice, watch instruction videos to quickly learn how it works. then download the instruction for you to print out. Here, you can also see people who made the same item near you and ask them for advice. Once you finished making your object, take a picture of it and add it to the collection.
Everybody can access these instructions, but to be able to upload instructions, videos or pictures, and get in touch with other makers, you need to sign up. A little dot will appear on the map for you, and you become part of the community.

The bigger this community grows, the more people make things themselves and the less short-lasting crap they buy. As a bigger movement, we can disrupt the current system of production and consumption, and introduce a more responsible, self-sufficient and local approach to production. 

Most of us already ‚want‘ to take responsibility and make things right, through shopping locally or creating less waste.  By consuming less but making more ourselves we become active. There are plenty of things we can do.