The Quiet Maker Revolution

No castles were stormed. No governments were overthrown. We’ve been experiencing a revolution in the worlds of engineering. It’s just been a quieter one than expected.
When open-source platforms and the maker movement started ramping up five years back or so, change came with its chants of “power to the people.” Indeed, the two trends that see individuals or groups of individuals create and possibly market products often without corporate intervention aim to do just that: give power of design to the masses.

As often accompanies change, fear came, as well. Fear that these self-proclaimed makers would take jobs from professional engineers, that open-source designs would work their way into high-level systems and leave them unsecure, that the design process would become a convoluted mess with every Tom and Sally Maker interfering and revising without end while flooding the market with underdeveloped consumer contraptions.

To be true, there has been some of that occurring. However, largely what we’ve seen is a flourishing interest in engineering brought by an easier approach to design. And while Tom and Sally Maker have created their share of flippant devices, we’ve also seen the rise of serious makers, sometimes call Pro Makers, like this month’s Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) keynote speaker Kipp Bradford...