The Principles of Making?

Craft & Design
The Principles of Making?

Earlier this month, O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly posted on Google+ about the United Kingdom’s “Digital Design Principles.” There are 10 of them:

  1. Start with needs (the user’s, not the government’s)
  2. Do less
  3. Design with data
  4. Do the hard work to make it simple
  5. Iterate. Then iterate again.
  6. Build for inclusion
  7. Understand context
  8. Build digital services, not websites
  9. Be consistent, not uniform
  10. Make things open: it makes things better

In the spirit of our latest “Design for Makers” issue, MAKE founder Dale Dougherty wondered on Google+ what a set of making principles would look like. Any suggestions?

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Stett Holbrook is editor of the Bohemian, an alternative weekly in Santa Rosa, California. He is a former senior editor at Maker Media.

He is also the co-creator of Food Forward, a documentary TV series for PBS about the innovators and pioneers changing our food system.

View more articles by Stett Holbrook
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