On Saturday 19th August 2023, I attended my first Makers Faire at Hannover Congress Centrum. I had a great experience and spent a few hours exploring the Faire.
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A patchy translation from the website said that a Makers Faire is: a place where Makers come together to present their projects to the public. It is a place for networking and knowledge sharing.
A Maker is purely someone who works, designs, manufactures, tinkers, constructs, fabricates and/or repairs things. This can be professional or just as a hobby. It includes everyone and there is no ‘formal’ way to become a maker- just working on something cool is the common way in my experience.
It is the largest Makers Faire in the German speaking region - something I did not know before attending. There were over 200 stalls ranging from casual Makers, student groups and companies showing their products. There was also a wide range of food and catering available for the event (including some amazing vegan waffles). There were over 15000 people who attended including people of different ages and different backgrounds.
I really enjoyed the range of stuff there. It is super inspiring to see what people can create without the need of expensive laboratories. There was also a lot of cool technology to try and talk to some of the companies supplying it.
I enjoyed chatting with the Czech companies that were there (and there were a good few of them at the Faire). It was cool to see a Prusa stand. There was some really cool embroidery work from Philipp Eggersglüß which we want to purchase in the near future. An R2 Builders Club. German Ameatur Radio club and so many more super awesome things that I am now looking into. A lot of these are in Hannover but there were also club/Makers from different regions of Germany (and some further afield). (List of the stands in the References).
Kind of. Despite the openness of the community and my love for creating things, I feel like I am not consistent enough with my work to be a ‘true’ Maker. I think this is just self loathing but I really aspire to have some long term projects that I stick to and learn from. I enjoy making things whenever I do it but there always seems to be other things competing for my attention. Soon I will have a dedicated space where I can work on projects and maybe I will even showcase them. Anyway, not to make this post all about my lack of confidence, the main thing I learnt from the Makers Faire is how awesome this community is. It would inspire handiwork even from the most reluctant of Techies!
The Maker Faire was amazing and I am looking forward to it next year. I hope that next year I will have the confidence to volunteer to work on the day (something I used to love doing in my undergraduate days). There were a lot of people and sometimes the rooms got a bit crowded (especially around the RaspberryPis) but I walked around everything multiple times and had a really nice and different Saturday experience. I highly recommend anyone who is creative or fancies themselves as a bit of a techie. I feel fully inspired and I can’t wait to get a bigger workspace to start on some new projects.
I don’t have many photos from Faire as it was crowded and I didn’t want to get people's faces in them so I encourage you to look at the references and media provided by the event organisers.