Dubai: Experts say that whilst the past decade was about discovering new ways to innovate on the web, the next 10 years will be applying those lessons to the real world. This is the ‘Maker Movement’ aimed at created a new manufacturing model enabling a mass market for niche DIY products. A manufacturing revolution which brings digital’s model of democratised innovation to the offline DIY culture.

The movement represents the ideas, dreams and passions of millions of people. It’s about creating products the world wants but doesn’t know yet. So why the sudden fascinating in making stuff?

Today we live in a world where everything physical around us has been digitised in the past decade or so. And this includes our social lives thanks to the social media landscape.

But the ubiquity of digital in our lives is leading to a countermovement — a yearning for the physical and tangible. Digital products permeate our everyday life, but humans are physical creatures and crave physical objects and experiences — something they can hold in their hand.

Millenials are the guiltiest in driving this growing phenomenon as they have never known an analogue world. Hence, their embrace of vinyl, film cameras, board games and all things physical is not about nostalgia — it’s about curiosity in the truest sense.

The simple reality is that we as humans are born makers and we are hard-wired to respond to physical objects around us.

At SMG, we strongly believe that the Maker Movement has the potential of delivering unique and meaningful emotional experiences to people. We are currently involved in designing a variety of ‘Maker’ projects for our clients — the latest one was ‘Bollywood on Wheels’ which was about bringing the joy of Bollywood to the entertainment deprived labour camps.

These people are certified Bollywood fanatics but a ticket to watch their beloved Bollywood movie is a luxury they simply can’t afford. For the majority of these workers, their last trip to the cinema was before coming to the UAE.

So we created ‘Bade Parde Wali Phillum’ (Rural Hindi slang for a ‘big screen movie’) – a portable cinema console designed for labour camps. The all-encompassing stand-alone device provides an ‘anytime, anywhere’ access to cinema. The console was a retro inspired device fusing new with the old. It included a projector, retro styled speakers and ran on a USB.

We knew blue-collar workers live in small dormitory style rooms, so the console was built on a ‘space friendly’, ultra-short throw projection system. The minimalistic design was a reflection of the no-frills low-tech needs of blue-collar workers.

The device represents the convergence between analogue and digital — the simplicity of analogue switch/button combined with ease of digital USB. ‘Plug and play’ was evidently more relevant here than technology.

The writer is the Human Experience Director, Starcom MediaVest Group Dubai.