Institute For The Future

Urban Acupuncturists: Mexico City Maker Field Report #1

From March 19-20, IFTF’s Technology Horizons program traveled to Mexico City to explore its emerging maker culture, community, and movement. It was an awe-inspiring journey, and was only the first of three immersions that IFTF will be hosting over the next few months (next up Shenzhen, China). The two days were jam-packed with hands-on experiences and stimulating conversations that we will post to this site in an upcoming series.

Future Maker Job Titles

To begin, we’ll share some future maker job titles that we brainstormed with our team in a session held at the end of our journey. Many of these were fanciful, or intentionally provocative, but they capture some of the sensibilities of transformation that we were seeing in our exuberant travels.

• Rainwater technician
• Urban acupuncturist (thanks to ENOVA México for teaching us about Urban Acupuncture!)
• Community resource procurer
• Re-use engineer
• Urban conquistadora
• Hack community manager
• Wearables composer
• Maker liaison officer
• Corporate disorganizer
• Activist architect
• Compost whisperer
• Eco-hacker
• Space explorer
• Brain enhancer
• Urban gardener
• Learning coach
• Technical access coordinator
• Community association augmenter
• Wearables fashion designer
• Resilience manager
• Maker barrista/bartender
• Challenge maker

Trip Experiences

Here is a partial list of the amazing people we met and places we experienced

• At CENTRO, a design school, we saw first-hand a powerful vision that leaders from academia and policy have for the future of makers in Mexico. Our panel of visionaries included representatives from CENTRO, Laboratorio para la Ciudad, the city’s office of innovation, and the President’s office of innovation.
• HUB DF introduced us to the world of social entrepreneurship, with presentations from some of the people and projects that are blossoming out of this co-working community.
• As if on command, rain started pouring down just in time for our session on water issues and projects that are harnessing and capturing the power of rain with Casa del Agua and Isla Urbana.
• At Huerto Roma Verde, a group of organizations focused on developing and implementing urban permaculture and community development projects in Mexico City, we were given a tour of the garden, bread baking oven, bicycle system, water catchment system, and future crafts area.
• Our experience was topped off with a “Meet the Makers” breakfast with 14 makers from throughout Mexico City, who shared their projects and visions for the future of the city.

Over the coming weeks we will be posting deeper dives into some of the experiences we had on the trip. Stay tuned for more!

 

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This post is part of IFTF's Maker Cities Immersions, journeys into the maker cultures of Mexico City, Shenzhen, and New York City with our Technology Horizons program. Contact Sean Ness ([email protected]) for more information.