Homemade technology has mass market in sight

Wired on Friday: In many ways, Silicon Valley was built not on engineering, but re-engineering. Innovators here took government-sponsored, militarily-designed products and retooled and rebuilt them into the predecessors of our modern computerised consumer world.

It's a place where stitching together unusual components has been encouraged and rewarded - both by its culture of the garage inventor and by the riches thereafter. Steve "Woz" Wozniak, creator of America's first popular home computer, the Apple II, famously saved pennies by designing the machine from commodity components, ingeniously connecting them to make a computer cheap enough for individuals.

Now Wozniak is rich enough to not worry about such penny-pinching. Yet here he was, walking about with around 20,000 other visitors to San Mateo's "Maker Faire" last weekend, seeing the latest efforts to take mass manufacturer goods and turn them into something new.

Everything about Maker Faire had a strung-together, second-hand look, as though someone had decided to hold a craft fair after the collapse of industrial civilisation. But that was the point. The faire, named after its sponsor Make magazine, was all about re-making - or taking products, pulling them apart and sliding them back together to make something the user wants and the original producer never intended. In one corner of the faire, enthusiasts were souping up a Toyota Prius hybrid car into a fully-fledged, all-battery electric automobile (no petrol needed). The "fire engine" commandeered by pyrotechnicians to produce 40-foot belching fireballs served no better purpose than a forceful and entertaining pun. The "World's Largest iPod" was a remixing of a 1930s radio cabinet, as big as a dishwasher, with the tiny Apple MP3 player embedded within it.

But elsewhere were tricks and hacks that drew you in with their possibilities as much as their novelty value. Teenage girls created, like Wozniak, the building blocks of modern computers from spare components, learning the intimate details of how PCs operate far better than any armchair programmer could.

Dozens of enthusiasts pre-figured a day when we'll all have cheap robots by building their own, and setting them to autonomously explore around the faire-goers. Inventor Perry Kaye demonstrated how to build a machine shop to make most pieces of equipment for around $200 (€159).

Alongside, a small village fete of modern-day crafters did a roaring trade with handmade knitted and crafted jewellery, clothing and textiles. Between the back-yard jetpacks and floating, self-guiding helium blimps, these domestic designers held a fashion show that mixed bespoke garments with blinking, bleeping technology, and somehow managed to look more chic than geek. The faire was clearly a success and made some impact on the wider public. Even stars like Jay Leno and Darryl Hannah turned up on the Sunday to gawp at the strange sights.

But you can't put more than a few hundred people with the same ideas in a Silicon Valley space without it being labelled a movement, and a business plan or 20 being hatched off it. The online gurus have been talking about user-generated content, and the rise of the amateur for years now (to the point where News International and the BBC have picked up on the idea). But in the world of media, one successful amateur podcaster, blogger or video-maker can entertain millions of us. Does a faire like this really presage the mass market turning into a place where products are bought not just to be used, but to be abused, and mashed-up for far more user-empowering ends?

Make magazine's motto is "Technology on your own time" - but who has the time to create technology? Just because its editors had managed to splice together hip homemade craft types with roboticists and car junkies to make a weekend spectacle, does that mean anything for mass production itself?

It may do. Maker Faire was not short of corporate sponsors. Yahoo!, Intel and Sun participated, while Microsoft demonstrated how it could produce software and hardware that users could re-use. But what was also noticeable was that, for every amateur retooling for the fun of it, there were five who were making money, or planning to. The craft stalls didn't just sell their homemade works here - they sold them on sites like www.etsy.com/, designed to allow small homemade businesses to find a market. The roboticists made money from touring their battling bots. These ingenious creators of the Valley had either made their money, like Woz, or were being consulted by those who were thinking of giving them some.

Whether Maker Faire scales in a business sense is yet unknown. But its impact on how consumer markets are being seen here is already making a mark. If nothing else, companies want to attach themselves to this movement while it has its time in the sun and if that means making goods that can be easily pulled apart and re-invented, then that's what Lego, Apple, Toyota or Microsoft are going to do.

One of the most amazing parts of the Faire was the younger attendees. Children from three upwards were walking around, giggling with excitement. No-one stopped them from reaching into piles of computer junk and making their own fake robots. Everyone was happy to teach. Steve Wozniak, who spent eight years as a teacher after Apple, had his role as a remixer. He is a team member of the Valley's Segway polo team, taking the "personal transportation device" and turning into a steed. But as he performed demonstration matches for the crowd, you could see that the re-making that had once been the domain of smart Valley engineers like "Woz", was spreading far further. The mass markets of the 20th century may have spawned generations of consumers. Perhaps our children may do much more with what we leave.

Danny O'Brien is activism co-ordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation