San Mateo
May 2014
Just past the lost-child ID station, where Anjali the 8-year-old huffed indignantly at my suggestion that she could use an ID tag, past the fire-belching, scrap-metal Octobot, Myth Busters’ host Adam Savage stood on a rickety platform, with hundreds of fans adoring him.
“What’s the best thing you’ve ever made out of duct tape,” asked a young girl. A raft, he said. They went down some rapids in that raft, and he flew through the air at one point, completely confused about when he was supposed to put his legs straight out, when to fold them.
“Where did you go to college,” someone asked. “I pretended to go to NYU for 6 months.”
“What was your most memorable creation?” When he was 9 years old, he cut up some refrigerator boxes and put them in his mom’s closet, pretending he had created a space shuttle. He outfitted his shuttle with desks and sat in it for months.
“What was his biggest failure?”
His biggest failures have not been with technology, he said, but with people – hurting someone emotionally, or letting them down. Could he have thought of a more perfect answer? It might have been a practiced line, but he had me.
The best of Savage was not his inventions, but his humor, his humanity. As I wandered the exhibits of the Maker Faire, I realized the same was true for fair itself.
This lanky moose wandered the fair. While my daughters preferred to admire him from afar, I saw one girl hugging his leg.
A massive, erector-set-like giraffe, its long neck lit up, and its surprisingly expressive face, bent snout-to-nose with its young admirers, had Anjali starry-eyed. She asked its colorful inventor, “did you make this?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a genius,” she squealed, and shook his hand with the gusto and gratitude of a long time devotee.
The man rolling by on his la-z-boy immediately jumped off and offered to let the girls go for a ride, trusting them to steer it through the crowded fair.
A proud mom showed off her son’s science project, a robot navigating through a maze using echolocation, like bats do. The bespectacled 15-year old maker of the marvel hunched over a laptop as two teenage girls hovered over him. They could have been his sisters or cousins, but I wanted to imagine them as high school girls who adored this clever nerd and weren’t too cool to show it. They hugged him before they left; he beamed.
Aanika wants to make sure I mention the drone battles: in a cage reminiscent of MMA, engineers maneuvered their homemade drones up into the air, positioned them for a strike, and with a quick contact, downed the weaker opponent. As pieces of the defeated drone sprinkled down, the crowds cheered. I hope this pass-time can one day replace dog fights and cock-fights.
And for Maya, a nod to her favorite bot: We found a pen full of R2D2s, with some that looked like they had just completed some rough intergalactic travel. The dirtiest one was her favorite. My favorite, C3po, was nowhere in sight.
Of course, even this fair had its down moments.
We almost walked into an entire warehouse brimming with stuff for sale – with towering shelves of games and gadgets that promised to make makers out of our screen addicts. We left it others to test those claims.
Brains overloaded, we sat down at the nearest available seats, and found ourselves at a Q and A session on 3D printers. I suspect most people were there to just rest their feet, but some earned their seats by asking clever questions: when will we be able to print printers? Most of the answers sailed unobstructed over my head. One that I did get: “Do you think we will soon be able to print wood products through these printers?” The expert with the mic pointed out what seemed obvious: wood is flammable and the printers run at very high temperature. But to be fair, technology has managed to do a lot of seemingly impossible things.
Speaking of things wooden: wouldn’t the suit below have made a great Al Gore costume in his VP days?
This wooden robot approached us to say hello. The guy inside had worked on it for years — in the classic, saw and sand manner, combining artisanal, modern, and charming in the best of Maker Faire fashion. He said the outfit currently weighed 30 pounds. Without the pants. I wish I had asked him more questions. For one, what does he do if he has an itch? Hopefully we’ll see him again next year. We’ll ask him then.
