Maker City: An International Concept

Peter Hirshberg serves as an innovation advisor to cities and companies. He has created two centers of urban innovation from scratch: City Innovate Foundation, an organization formed with The San Francisco Mayor’s office, UC Berkeley, and the MIT Media Lab; and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, one of San Francisco’s most vibrant and civic-minded arts organizations, a center for digital media education, incubation, performance, and exhibition. He is CEO and founder of the Re:Imagine Group helping brands with strategy and marketing in a world of empowered connected audiences. He’s worked with executive teams at Best Buy, Sony, IBM, Verizon, Time Warner, Unilever, GE, Estee Lauder, Telefonica, and many others on their innovation and digital growth strategies. Previously, Hirshberg was Chairman of Technorati, the pioneering social media search engine and advertising network with over a billion monthly page views. During his nine-year tenure at Apple Computer, Hirshberg headed Enterprise Marketing, where he grew Apple’s large business and government revenue to $1 billion annually. His board and advisor positions have included Active Video Networks, Technorati, Build Public, The Computer History Museum, and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. He is a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership Policy and a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. He is co-author of The Maker City: A Practical Guide To the Reinvention of our Cities.

Ji Sun Lee is a professor at Sookmyung Women’s University and a leader of Maker Education in Korea. She exhibited her sewing circuit project at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, Austin, New York and Seoul. She is a co-author of Make: Tech DIY and also presented her works at World Maker Faire 2016. Her project originated from her desire to build education community, close gender gap, and share her love of technology with her daughter.

Tomas Diez is a Venezuelan Urbanist specialized in digital fabrication and its implications on the future cities and society. He is the co-founder of Fab Lab Barcelona, leads the Fab City Research Laboratory at IAAC, where he is a board member. Tomas leads the Fab City Global Initiative together with an international network.

Kent Larson directs the City Science (formerly Changing Places) group at the MIT Media Lab. His research focuses on developing urban interventions that enable more entrepreneurial, livable, high-performance districts in cities. To that end, his projects include advanced simulation and augmented reality for urban design, transformable micro-housing for millennials, mobility-on-demand systems that create alternatives to private automobiles, and Urban Living Lab deployments in Hamburg, Andorra, Taipei, and Boston. Larson also practiced architecture for 15 years in New York City, with design work published in Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, Global Architecture, The New York Times, A+U, and Architectural Digest. The New York Times Review of Books selected his book, Louis I. Kahn: Unbuilt Masterworks (2000) as one of that year’s ten best books in architecture.

After graduating from Wesleyan University in 2010, Kyle pursued his passion for community building by volunteering for the Americorps organization, City Year, in Columbia, SC where he would meet his future wife, Kristen. Upon completion of their volunteering, Kyle and his wife moved back to her hometown of Kansas City where he found a new and interesting way to impact the local community: building strategic marketing campaigns for small, local businesses with The Kansas City Star. Throughout his six years at The Star, Kyle has been fortunate enough to help usher businesses, whether local or national, into the digital age in which we live. It has been an eye-opening experience where he has not only learned the importance of strong, successful marketing for a business’s bottom line, but also how a strong small business community impacts the local ecosystem. Now, as the Strategic Partnerships Lead for the Kansas City Star and point person for Kansas City’s Maker City movement, he looks forward to engaging and educating businesses and the public on the importance of a vibrant maker community and its impact on the future of work in KC!