Our maker this week is Isaiah Saxon (@isaiah_saxon_). He’s the co-founder of DIY.org, an organization that encourages kids to make stuff and is a film director at Encyclopedia Pictura, which has made videos for the musician Bjork and others (the image above is from Bjork’s “Wanderlust” video).
He’s also working on an animated feature film about a group of DIY kids who have to rebuild civilization. Above, a gallery of screenshots of concept art for the movie (Click on the images to enlarge them.)
Here’s a time-lapse video that shows how Isaiah creates his amazing artwork.
Here’s Isaiah’s answer to a question that he didn’t get to answer fully during my interview with him. My question was about DIY.org. Was he planning on making it a nonprofit organization or a for-profit company? Here is his answer:
We decided to structure DIY.org as a for-profit startup because we know that if we create a tool that boosts kids’ creativity, that will be of tremendous value to parents. Rather than being a non-profit and begging wealthy donors to fund us, we aim to build a great service that parents are excited to pay for. We’ll never sell information about our users to advertisers and we’ll never allow advertising on the site. Membership to DIY.org will include embroidered skill patches that come in the mail once earned, and potentially a kit service as well. Using a majority of the site’s features will remain free for non-members. Also, we use a very flexible Creative Commons license for all the content uploaded to the site, and our team releases much of DIY’s platform as open source on a nearly weekly basis.
MAKE profiled Isaiah Saxon and his partners at Encyclopedia Pictura in MAKE volume 30. Here’s a PDF of the article.
