Here is some of my coverage of the 2012 Future Insights Live conference in Las Vegas where I was reporting for Dice and Dice News.
Is hacking at risk? With more and more platforms creating closed environments, what does that do to the future of hackability? Hacking is critical for innovation and development, and now that the world is made of computers (what device doesn’t have a chip in it?) hacking has the power to innovate practically everywhere and affect our lives.
“I love to make things that help other people make things,” said Adam Wiggins (@hirodusk), founder of the cloud application platform Heroku, and a self-proclaimed hacker and open source enthusiast.
In his presentation, “Hackability: The future of programming in a post PC world” at the Future Insights Live conference in Las Vegas, Wiggins suggested that we look for inspiration to an adjacent industry, the Maker movement, that is enjoying the unfettered freedom to hack the physical world.
Maker movement: DIY turned up to 11
The Maker movement takes do-it-yourself (DIY) projects and injects a lot of technology and inventiveness, often moving us from the digital to the physical world, said Wiggins. For example, you can start in a digital context, such as creating a design using the open source rendering program Blender, whose main purpose was just to output digital art.
But it doesn’t have to stay in the digital world. That design can be connected to a 3D printer, such as the MakerBot or RepRap, or a Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) device and can transform that “only in the digital world” image into a physical object.
Wiggins argued that while the digital world is getting less hackable with the increase of closed computing environments, the physical world is getting more hackable.
Like hacking used to be, the Maker movement is becoming more hackable and accessible by anyone. Hoping that others will join him in his charge, Wiggins calls out to fellow hackers, “Let’s shape a hackable future for computing.”
Creative Commons photo attribution to donjd2.
