Everyone Is a Designer

We are entering an era in which the consumer is both the designer and the manufacturer: DIY creations on Kickstarter; 3D printers in your home; increasingly affordable computing and components; membership-based workshops filled with digital fabrication tools; and open-source electronics, combined with design techniques that create new, unique—and often highly creative—inventions and applications. The democratization of technology and the rise of the maker subculture are changing who does the work of design, and how they conceive, explore, and fabricate things. Are we all designers now? Or is this more hype, similar to the promise of the Jetsons™ and the paperless office? Join us to hear more from speakers—from an array of disciplines—who will share their stories, talk about how the “make-it-yourself” mindset is driving innovation, and discuss where this DIY movement is really heading. This session features Eric Wilhelm, founder of Instructables; David Lang, co-founder, OpenROV; Schuyler St. Leger, enthusiastic amateur maker; Jason Chua and team, SparkTruck, Stanford d.School; Ben Kaufmann, CEO, Quirky.com; and Anne Filson and Gary Rorhbacher, partners at Filson and Rohrbacher and co-founders of AtFAB.