Inside the roughly 1000-square-meter space of FutureWard, which formally launched operations in June of 2014, they have every kind of workshop function you can imagine, including 3D printing, electronics, machinery, metalworking, digital manufacturing…. Built around an axis of “education, sharing, inventiveness,” the space is nurturing the makers of the future for Taiwan.
Cofounder Yang Yuhsiu says that typical coworking spaces are places where newly founded innovation teams or individual inventors can do software development, whereas most “maker” spaces are weighted toward providing a home for hardware developers. But FutureWard is aiming to set a new precedent by combining software and hardware in the same space, in the hope that there will be cross-fertilization and synergy.
A “gym” for creators
During our visit, we see Romain Gadant, a professional woodworker from France, intensely concentrating as he crafts a lampshade.
Gadant tells us that he moved to Taiwan four years ago when his wife got assigned to the Bureau Français de Taipei (France’s representative office in Taiwan), and he suddenly found himself without any opportunities to put his professional skills to good use. When he found out that he could use the machinery at FutureWard, he was elated. “In France, you can’t find any kind of makerspace like this except when you’re at school.” Talking with real excitement in his voice, he relates that he has personally made every piece of wood furniture in his home.
Over on a large work table, Huang Yixuan, a third-year student in the Department of Design at Tatung, is using Strawbees, an assembly kit, to design the prototype for a remote-controlled car that he will show at an exhibition in Taipei later this year. He says that this makerspace is packed with talented people and is the ideal launching pad for him and his classmates.
Yang Yuhsiu says that FutureWard was constructed with the same mindset that is used in setting up a health club. The space has the machines, instruments, and equipment, but as to how they are employed and for what purpose, “That’s entirely up to the user!” FutureWard provides consulting “coaches” available to assist those who are unable to operate the machinery, and arranges introductory classes for people to choose from.
Communications director Meg Dong explains that FutureWard works on a membership system. The 500 students of the Tatung Department of Design are all automatically members, free of charge. Off-campus individual members pay a fee of NT$3000 per month. For a designated seat of your very own in the coworking space upstairs, the monthly fee is NT$4000.
Since the FutureWard management team inherited the formerly student-only workshop, the usage rate has skyrocketed. Dong says that before they took over, each year the workshop got less than 800 visits. In the six months alone since they took over, there have been more than 6000 visits per month. She adds, “It has even become a selling point for the university in recruiting students, because they can now say, ‘We have on campus the largest makerspace in all of Taiwan.’”
If you can make it here…
But there is still a large gap between the rate of expansion of FutureWard and the initial conceptions of the founders. Yang Yuhsiu puts it this way: “This is just a step, albeit an essential one, in building our capabilities.”
Yang points to the American chain “TechShop” as the example he most admires. After being founded in 2006, the firm honed its operations for five years before expanding into Silicon Valley, San Jose, San Francisco, Detroit, Arizona, and other locales. TechShop expects to have 12 makerspaces in various places by the end of this year. “At first, nobody had any great expectations, because suburban American homes have garages, so people have plenty of space. But now every TechShop facility has at least 1000 members.”
In Taiwan, on the other hand, the idea of making things yourself is not very common. Yang avers that in today’s consumer era, people are habituated to going to the store to buy whatever they are lacking. They don’t think about doing the work themselves. Yet, he argues, although the term “maker” has been around for less than ten years, first appearing in this sense about 2006, the desire to create things is an innate part of human nature.
In that case, who are the makers that FutureWard is expecting will come and whom FutureWard is hoping to inspire? “Actually, there is a broad group of people who want to make things.” says Yang. For him, the most telling example comes from the process of how FutureWard itself was designed.
Because money was tight then, rather than hire a designer the founders went online to ask people to submit ideas for the interior layout of the makerspace. Incredibly, 65 volunteers responded, with more than 300 suggestions. What’s especially interesting is that most of these people had no interior design background—they included writers, dancers, civil servants, housewives, and many more. Ultimately the founders adopted 15 of their design ideas. The whole process from start to finish took only eight weeks. “What I took away from this is that a lot of people have ideas, it’s just that all they can do is think about them, and they have no opportunity to put them into practice.”
Practical dreams
If we can provide these creative people with a collective working site offering space, equipment, and know-how, they can produce quite amazing results. “A lot of very inventive things have first seen the light of day in a makerspace,” Yang notes. Whereas people who have been fully trained in a given field can actually be limited by the techniques and technology they have learned, people who only have a vague idea what they’re doing have no boundaries and can let their creativity run free.
Yang points to one member of FutureWard as an example. Last September, this person came in to learn how to do laser cutting and after learning the skills, he began to make and sell beverage coasters made from felt. Within six short months, he had turned this idea into a successful enterprise, and he went out and bought his own laser cutter, costing NT$200,000, to continue production at home.
Yang himself is an example of someone who has had an idea that he made into reality. He worked at the Taiwan Design Center (TDC) for ten years, of which he spent five years on overseas assignment in San Francisco. During that period overseas, he saw the process of development of makerspaces in the United States, as a result of which he made two documentary films, one about design conceptualization and the other about the “maker” idea. “I applied to the TDC for funding to make the documentaries, but I got turned down. So I raised the money through crowdfunding. I raised US$18,000 for the first film and US$32,000 for the second.”
Grassroots movement
Going back to the man who started a business making felt coasters, does this mean that we can expect the makerspace to incubate new businesses? On the one hand, maybe not. “Entrepreneurship is just one small part of the maker scene,” says Yang. Most people do it for the sheer pleasure of learning and making something by themselves. Only a very, very small ratio end up going into business or making a living at it.
But on the other hand, FutureWard can at least promise to enlarge the “denominator” of that ratio. “Without maker education as the primary step, there aren’t going to be any entrepreneurial outcomes,” says communications director Meg Dong. Over the past year, all kinds of organizations and corporations have come to visit FutureWard, but all they are interested in is marketable outcomes. Dong says, “That’s fine, but if no one is planting trees, how will you get any fruit?”
“So long as the culture and the education system remain unchanged, I think that it’s premature to be talking about innovation and entrepreneurship,” states Daniel Lin. First you have to create a sound environment, a world where innovators and entrepreneurs can find sustenance. You need to turn more and more people into makers by providing them with adequate resources to bring their talents into play. Only then will you find one day that your long-term vision of creative entrepreneurship has become a reality.
In the year since its founding, FutureWard has been exploiting every possibility for educating people. It should go without saying that they have been offering a wide variety of basic-level classes and hands-on activities. But they also think outside the box. For example, they hosted a birthday party for one member who brought 100 guests who were given some instruction and allowed to try out some of the gear.
Go with the flow, go global
“Last year we concentrated our efforts on education and cultivating makers. This year we will start playing around with some programs that are more fun. We also will seek out some groups from overseas, so that we can have more interaction with international makers,” says Lin. He says that the fastest way he can think of to promote FutureWard is international links. “We will bring makers from overseas to Taiwan, just at the stage where they will need Taiwan’s capabilities, and everyone can work together.”
Lin states that now makerspaces in the US are thinking about how to help makers to found businesses, so that they can take the things they make and turn them into commercially viable products, and he thinks that “Taiwan is very well suited for carrying out the final stage of product development—the making of these commercial products.” Taiwan has the hardware, software, industrial design engineers… everything you need. If FutureWard can bring foreign makers to Taiwan, and manufacture their creative inventions here, that’s good for them and it’s good for us—both parties come out ahead.
At “Maker Faire Taipei 2015,” held at the end of May, FutureWard’s pavilion was packed with visitors of all ages.
FutureWard founders Daniel Lin (left) and Yang Yuhsiu (right) aim to turn more people into “makers.”
The photo above shows cookies made using a 3-D printer, while the photo below shows a robot that can write with a pen. The “maker” idea has no limits.
The photo above shows cookies made using a 3-D printer, while the photo below shows a robot that can write with a pen. The “maker” idea has no limits.
These innovative lamps and shades, made at FutureWard by French woodworker Romain Gadant, show refined and sophisticated craftsmanship.
