The story of the Robohand is as inspiring as an Oprah interview. One of the participants, however, noted that he didn’t intend to help those missing a limb. Instead, he sought out a 3D printed hand to save himself after a wood working accident shaved off four of his fingers. And yet, thanks to a collaboration between carpenter Richard Van As in Johannesburg, and a Seattle prop designer a five-year old born without fingers now has a more functional hand.

There’s also an Indigogo campaign to raise money to make more of these and help more children and adults born without fingers get their own Robohands. It’s heartwarming.

The collaboration between the two also emphasizes the best of what the internet and connectivity has to offer. This story wouldn’t have happened without a 3D printer, but it also wouldn’t have happened without the rapid dissemination of information enabled by the internet. For example, the South African woodworker first learned about Ivan Owen in Seattle because a video Owen had done showing a robot hand he had made went viral.

Then, there’s the building of the hand, which costs about $150. After Owen and Van As developed the plans for a hand, they made the plans open source and freely available on the internet. At a point where plenty of people are worrying about the IP infringement implications of 3D printing, such as printing out a proprietary design such as LEGOs or the dangers of evading regulations by printing harmful devices such as guns, this story is a reminder that people will use 3D printing for good as well.

Yes, this story is being pushed hard by MakerBot, the company that makes 3D printers (there are more than 15,000 of them in use today), but it’s also a reminder that as any new technology is introduced it will be used for both good and bad. And with regulators having met last month in Washington DC a conference to discuss some of the implications of 3D printing technology, it’s good to remember that 3D printers are a tool capable of good or bad when pondering upcoming laws and regulations.

We are lucky to live in a time when technological advances are making new things possible at pace that is possibly more rapid than any other time in human history. We have the rapid dissemination of knowledge and ability to share across continents thanks to broadband. Crowd funding tools now allow a wider spectrum of people to raise money for their ideas and we also have tools like 3D printing to turn digital designs into physical products.

And perhaps most of all, we have an engaged community of people who have the technical know-how reaching out to those around the world who have the curiosity and intelligence to make a difference. Now those billions can have the tools as well.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How emerging technologies will influence collaboration
• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?

The details on the new BeagleBone board are here, but basically TI is offering a 1 GHz ARM processor plus the connectivity and power components on a single board for $45. That’s a lot of compute power for a little price. While the Raspberry Pi costs $35 it doesn’t have as many ports built in, and Adrian Valenzuel, marketing director of TI’s Sitara ARM processor product line, said it also isn’t as open.

When pressed, he said that people who build with the Pi can’t buy the hardware that comprises the Pi board on the open market, unlike with the TI board. He’s right. The chip on the Pi is built by Broadcom, but it’s not something that anyone can simply order and play with. On the flip side, Atmel, the company that makes the processors on the Arduino boards, sells those components and has released software supporting the Arduino community.

And while some people might be content to play with $35 Pis, there are plenty of people thinking about pro-quality projects that might want to get even more granular than the board, and try their hand at tweaking the components around the processor. That’s TI’s sales pitch as it moves down market to the class of makers who love the power of the Pi over the ubiquitous (in Maker circles, anyway) Arduino.

TI’s hope is that by getting people playing with its board it can sell components and attract a user base that wants to play with its hardware. It may never be a huge business, but it’s one that chip makers are paying attention to. Earlier this year AMD introduced its GizmoSphere board, a $200 board and developer community for makers.

While none of the companies involved are willing to share any sense of how these products may help them financially, it’s clear that chip firms are eying the maker community as a market worth paying attention to, especially as the internet of things heats up.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Cloud computing’s impact on chip and hardware design
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

It’s a topic that came up recently during a conversation with SparkFun, the retailer of DIY electronics kits headquartered in Boulder, Colo. While sitting at a table with Nathan Seidle, the CEO of SparkFun and Pete Dokter, the director of engineering, we discussed the impact of Kickstarter on the firm’s business. In general, Kickstarter is great marketing for the DIY movement that SparkFun is dependent on, and it is happy to supply boards for prototypes.

However, once you start talking about huge production runs of an electronic board for the next big widget, or even worse, fulfilling those orders, Seidle is leery.

He pointed to the MaKey MaKey campaign of 2011 as an example. The MaKey MaKey team, which was building a kit for would-be hardware hackers, worked with SparkFun ahead of the campaign to guarantee the production of the needed boards and for fulfillment. If the MaKey MaKey campaign was successful, SparkFun would manufacture and assemble the product and then ship it out.

What happened next was a nightmare for SparkFun, which to this day is still seeing at least two returns a week from the product. The problem wasn’t a bad product, but bad data. As Seidle puts it, Kickstarter doesn’t have checks in place to ensure people don’t enter the wrong address or make other mistakes when ordering a product.

The result was that about 40 percent of the data Kickstarter sent over on behalf of Makey MaKey needed clarification. That led to SparkFun’s customer service people trying to verify addresses — one example: is there a Houston, South Africa? — and it is still leading to returns. Seidle vowed to avoid that side of the business from this point forward.

Luckily a quick check among the people doing current and former Kickstarter projects shows that there are plenty of companies that will offer fulfillment for Kickstarter orders, and most entrepreneurs plan to use them. But it’s yet another sign of the holes we need to fill if we’re going to make the transition from the more traditional large-scale manufacturing process or the traditional funding models for a crowd sourced future.

It’s also a good idea to double and triple check your address when you enter it into Kickstarter.

Update: Kickstarter’s Dave Ghallagher notes that Kickstarter fixed the bad data problem by implementing an address validation system back in 2012, too late for the MaKey MaKey project, but in place for existing projects.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

James McBennett, the founder of Fabsie, is hoping to act as an essential bridge between designers of CNC (computer numerical control) manufactured furniture that can be found on sites like Instructables and the average consumer who may want custom furniture but has no means to get it manufactured. CNC furniture is made of plywood on a CNC router, that allows a router to cut computer-designed shapes. The results can be surprisingly high end.

Currently Fabsie has a Kickstarter project that features a plywood rocking stool that can be made with a lot of rock, less rock, and no rock. Eventually, the company wants to do all kinds of furniture and maybe even branch out into household goods.

But McBennett’s hopes are bigger than one stool. He thinks the time is ripe for a company to act as a broker and quality assurance agent of sorts between the maker movement and people who have custom wants, but no desire to make. Fabsie, as he envisions it, would take designs from people and maybe even sites like Instructables, manufacture them, test the resulting physical product, and adapt the design if needed for a mass audience.

At the same time it will also develop a network of manufacturing sites around the world. Today these sites are usually university towns with hacker spaces or labs that have the machines to fabricate and cut plywood, but it’s possible that independent companies might step up to fulfill this niche if ideas like Fabsie and custom manufacturing take off. Currently, many of the facilities with CNC routers only use them a quarter of the time, McBennett said. His business could help put those machines to work full time, and help the maker spaces make money.

The trend toward custom products and the rise of cheaper manufacturing equipment such as home 3D printers and laser cutting machines, as well as the availability of more and more designs are creating new business models for companies like Fabsie, or Nervous Systems, which makes custom 3D printed jewelry that’s sold in the MoMA store.

Similar to how the digitization of content undercut the physical distribution systems of newspapers and print magazines — one of the primary advantages that print newspapers had — the digitization of product design holds similar promise if we can figure out how to package and consume those designs closer to the consumer on an on-demand basis.

But even with digital designs, physical objects have to at some point convert from digital over to the analog world. Pushing that point out closer to the end consumer of the product via fabrication plants closer to the home helps reduce costs associated with shipping and also delays in getting the item. And newer manufacturing makes doing a custom run a bit more economical. McBennett estimates he can produce stools at a cost of £20 (almost $30) apiece, but that prices drops to £10 if a manufacturer is making 10.

Clearly, those economies of scale vanish at the totally custom level, but that design is still stored and could be made again for other customers. With a material like plywood, which has a standard scale that measures the quality of the wood, it’s easy to control the end result. I might pay more for higher-quality plywood, but I will also know exactly what I am going to get.

As we embrace customization in our products, digitization of our designs and the new manufacturing technologies coming online, the distribution of physical goods will change. Fabsie may be one model for how that change will happen while still delivering quality products for consumers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

And as such, a large part of this movement focuses on kids. How do we teach our kids to code? How can we get them interested in hacking? In building? SparkFun, a Boulder, Colo.-based retailer of various DIY hardware kits, has a solution: a subsidized national tour that will supply hardware and tools for teaching kids how to build electronics and code to schools.

SparkFun wants to visit schools in all 50 states and will offer courses to both students and educators, as well as development kits. The first 50 spots are subsidized and so cost $1,500 for a class, while later spots will cost $2,500. Already 13 of those 50 slots have been claimed even before the program has been publicly announced outside of the SparkFun website, according to Lindsay Levkoff, the director of education at SparkFun.

Teaching middle schoolers Scratch programming.

Levkoff created the SparkFun department of education in 2011 to help bring the maker movement to schools that were interested in adding programs but had no idea how to go about it. After a West Coast and East Coast tour last year, the company decided to make it even bigger with a nationwide effort. As a side benefit, SparkFun is creating potential customers for its store.

“When I designed the department it was almost an altruistic branch and there was no guarantee that we would pay for ourselves,” Levkoff said. “We’re trying to be a nonprofit within SparkFun … but if people want to buy the kits and products then that’s a fantastic by-product.”

SparkFun’s plans are part of a larger effort to create hacking groups like Hacker Scouts for kids and even offer classes or hacker space for the younger set.

And while I’ve been pondering how to start one of those for my own daughter’s school, I’ve also been thinking a lot about the bigger issue here; namely why is this movement gaining ground and how important is it really? Is programming the literacy of the 21st century? Does being able to solder, sew or build a robot make someone more employable or creative than another?

The SparkFun tour is helped along by a drive to push Science Technology Engineering and Math education (STEM) and subsequent government and private grants to schools. As a parent I also am eager for my daughter to engage in building things and playing around with hardware in part because I loved building computers, radios and whatnot with my own dad.

But in some ways, beyond the mechanics of programming and the magic of electricity, I think these projects add a venue for concrete accomplishment that can be lacking in everyday schooling for many kids. And that sense of accomplishment, of completing a concrete task as opposed to learning algebra, might be the real value of these maker-based curricula. After all, there are a fair amount of people who get a lot more satisfaction from creating than from consuming.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?

Here’s the Ford video showing an employee talking about using 3D printers for prototype designs of a gearshift.

A Ford spokesman told me that while it’s tough to give an exact count on the number of employees who have the 3-D printers, the company has multiple locations at the company’s Dearborn, Mich. headquarters where hundreds of engineers have access. And at the carmaker’s Silicon Valley Lab in Palo Alto all employees have Makerbots. The most popular areas they are in use today at Ford are in the Vehicle Design and Infotronics group.

3D printing will change the distribution chain for manufactured goods

As devotees of the computer and broadband revolution may recall, both of these technologies were first deployed in the workplace and then trickled down into users’ homes. Remember the concept of Cyber Monday? That was a thing because people used to have to go into work to use their office broadband in order to buy stuff online. Now, despite the fact that 19 million Americans lack access to broadband, we still have embraced the consumer web.

The PC was a similar revolution that started with mainframes, then went to minicomputers and finally to desktops. With 3D printers I wonder if we’ll see similar adoption trends that we saw with the PC. PCs were very work-specific with software for productivity dominating, so when people purchased them they tended to do so for word processing, spreadsheets and other productivity related tasks. Those initial machines were also expensive, so you bought one because you needed it. Later, it became a hub for games and fun activities as well.

What’s killer app for 3D printing?

With 3D printers, which can cost less than $1,000, the common consumer may not see much need for one, yet. But all we need is the right killer app to intersect with the right price point and then the machines will become widespread. Some might argue that printing LEGO bricks are the killer app, but I kind of doubt it. My hunch is it may be more mundane, like someone building an open source library of common household parts that break, or a line of products whose parts could be replaced by parts created in a 3D printer. The printing technology and materials would also have to improve, although I’m certain with wider adoption this would happen.

And once we have common 3D printers in the home and office, that could signal a fundamental change in the distribution of physical goods, much like the development of the web was a fundamental change in the delivery of digital content. Instead of buying new furniture, we buy new replication materials and download the designs over the Internet. If the replication materials are recyclable, you might be able to change your home’s decor in a few weeks and consume ever more products at a lower price point.

We’re not there yet, but imagining how the widespread adoption of capable 3D printers could change the world doesn’t just stop with industrial designers or hobbyists. One day you might print out your flatware, your trash cans or even your next computer. If you think this is nuts, just ponder the line from the minicomputer to your smartphone. Or just go watch one of my favorite videos showing how quickly technology advances.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How emerging technologies will influence collaboration
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis

But the options are growing for curious would-be makers including a new box of the month service called For the Makers, a New York City startup founded by two former designers. The company, which just opened to the public in December after a private beta, offers a monthly collection of four craft and design projects that can be purchased for $29 a month. Users can make their own necklaces, accessories and baubles by following clear step-by-step directions, which can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour to complete. The service delivers boxes anywhere in the U.S.

The emergence of companies like For the Makers highlights the growing interest in DIY box services, which help empower newbies to try their hand at different projects. Brit + Co., created by Path founder Dave Morin’s wife Brit, also puts out a DIY box and new food services like Blue Apron, Fresh Dish and Plated are getting first-time cooks into the kitchen. These services lower the bar for users by packaging all the materials into a box and letting them learn by following simple directions.

For the Makers came together a little over a year ago when friends and former Fashion Institute of Technology graduates Janet Crowther and Katie Covington looked at hatching a business together. Crowther was a design consultant for brands like Kate Spade, Fossil and Marc Jacobs while Covington designed jewelry collections for brands like Anthropologie and Target. The two, both DIYers themselves, realized that there’s a growing interest in users making their own stuff to express their tastes, but most people didn’t have the tools to get started.

For the Makers co-founders Katie Covington and Janet Crowther

So the pair started creating their own boxes by tapping their design inspirations. They are making thousands of boxes and have consistently sold out, including their latest December box.  The pair has also secured retail deals with Anthropologie, which is now offering its own For the Makers box to consumers and Gilt City, which is selling discounted For the Makers subscriptions to its users. The service has also gotten the attention of Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, who is advising the company and whose girlfriend Mari Sheibley, former Foursquare lead designer, has also been providing design advice.

While box of the month clubs have become trendy, and garnered some negative coverage, Crowther and Covington believe they have a business that can last. The two are able to keep costs low because of their connections to local suppliers. They’re able to call upon their design experience to create things that people actually want to use and wear. And they’re finding that the service is spreading well by word of mouth, with both first-time crafted and experienced DIY makers.

“We’re taking people who are not necessarily crafters but people interested in curating what they’re wearing and we’re saying there’s no reason why you have to go Anthropologie and buy that. You can make it yourself,” said Covington.

For the Makers will have to prove it can build a sustaining business off its DIY boxes and services, which can be harder when you start to scale up. But I’d like to see this particular trend grow. From 3D printing and coding classes on the techie side to more services like Etsy and Shopify which are encouraging makers to become sellers, there’s more tools to help encourage the overall maker movement. Not everyone wants to make their own stuff, but the barriers are falling for those that do.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

Here are some of the suggestions from Emile Patrone, the founder of DIY project sales site Tindie, Scott Miller, the founder of product design consulting firm Dragon Innovation, and William Hurley, the co-founder of design firm Chaotic Moon Studios. And yes, all of them recommended some sort of 3D printer, either the Form-1 that began as a Kickstarter campaign and will sell for $3,299 in April, or the MakerBot Replicator for $2,199 (because of Hurricane Sandy it looks like that won’t arrive in time for the holidays though). But like a soldering iron, I’m going to assume if your hacker recipient wants a 3D printer they already have one.

Product: Simon Says
Cost: $12.95
What you need to know: The Simon Says board is a beginner board kit that plays a light and sound-based memory game. The board plays a series of sounds and you play it back in sequence. The kit aims to teach people how to solder, and is also uses open source hardware so you can program your own light and sound combinations after you’ve maxed out the ones already programmed on the board.

Product: The Rascal
Cost: $175
What you need to know: This is a somewhat hard-to-buy gift, since they are batch-made, but the boards are basically portable (if you include a Wi-Fi radio and a battery) web servers that you can program using Python. People have used them to control any electronic device from the web. You can hook your electronic device into the board (you will probably need a shield of some sorts) and then write some code to build a web site from which you can now control the device. With the right board and shield I may be able to figure out how to control my oven from the web (yes, this is a dream of mine).

Product: Stirling Engine Model
Cost: $129
What you need to know: The product description says this is beautiful as well as a lesson in thermodynamics, and who wouldn’t want a desk-side sculpture that also doubles as a physics experiment? Plus you have to make it! As paperweights go the replica of a Stirling Engine, (there’s one inside a Segway) shows you how to convert an external heat source into motion via a fan, car and generator experiment. Outrage your steampunk friends with a more alternative engine.

Product: Electric Imp Breakout
Cost: $19.95
What you need to know: The Electric Imp guys have the ambitious goal of bringing Wi-Fi to everything using an SD-style card that you can plug into a variety of gadgets, appliances or even lamps. then you program those elements via a web-based service. You can’t get the easy-to-use version of the products yet, but you can buy a breakout board and build your own connected product if you’re so inclined.

Product: ExtraCore
Cost: $10.50
What you need to know: A lot of people buy Arduino boards and share them between projects. This makes sense because those boards containing the logic processors can be expensive. The downside is that you may have a lot of half-complete projects waiting around for a board to make it work. ExtraCore is a kit that can power your project for a third of the cost of an Arduino board. The key to this board is that it’s small and Looks just like Arduino Uno to the integrated developer environment.

Product: Twine
Cost: $99
What you need to know: Connecting stuff to the Internet is pretty much an essential step in many DIY projects, and Twine makes is easy enough that I can do it. The product is a rubberized self-contained sensor pack that also has a Wi-Fi radio that outputs to a web site. The Twine web app reflects what the sensors see in real time, so you can than write a little program telling Twine that when X happens it should take an action that might send info to a web page, to an email, to Twitter or to the Pebble Smart watch.

Product: The 2WD Rovera Arduino Robot Kit
Cost: $174.99
What you need to know: Who doesn’t want to build a friendly little robot to play with and/or help you in your plans for world domination. The kit includes everything you need to build a two-wheeled robot including the motor shield board, wheels and wires. It’s unclear if you can add a sensor that would allow you to program the robot to look soulfully at you and say, “No disassemble.”

Product: MiniStylophone Kit
Cost: $9:50
What you need to know: This is a kit for beginners that will allow them to play music and record sounds for later playback. The kit requires the recipient to solder 24 resistors to the board, so make sure your recipient has a soldering iron. When done you use a stylus to play the music on the stylophone. You can hook it into other projects or annoy your friends and parents.

Product: Membership to a hack space
Cost: It varies, but can range from $99 to $175 per month.
What you need to know: There are myriad places where like-minded DIYers can get together and take classes, use equipment and store their projects from the Artisan’s Asylum in Boston to TechShop which has spaces in the Bay Area, Austin, Detroit and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. For a listing of other popular places check out the Hackerspaces Wiki.

Product: Gamby
Cost: $25
What you need to know: This is a limited edition Arduino shield to combine with an Arduino board to make a mobile gaming console. It has a monochrome LCD screen and four-way directional pad for that up-up-down-down gameplay. The games are already in your head, so get coding and start playing them on your very own hardware. Great gift for a special proposal or an awesome product to make with your kids.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

So for $25 anyone can work on a project that uses computers at its heart, and if something breaks, they can just go buy a new one. This makes small Linux computers like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards the hardware DIYers’ new LEGO bricks. 

Last month, tens of thousands of makers from around the world came together at Maker Faire. Kids were begging their parents to help them build RC planes, buy them kits with Arduino boards and learning how to solder.

Will the DIY movement produce the next Apple?

Many of the kits these kids were using weren’t made by billion dollar corporations – they were made by cottage industry electronics businesses, hobbyists, and “fantrepreneurs.” Yes, as Chris Anderson says in his new book “Makers”, we are at the start of a hardware revolution – led from the ground up, in your home.

We have come full circle – back to April 1, 1976 when Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne started selling the Apple 1 computer kit.

 Today’s kit owes its creation to the Arduino project which pioneered this space. The Arduino board is a small, basic, almost disposable piece of hardware that integrated with a simple development environment. Originally intended for university-student projects, it quickly exploded into mainstream DIY culture – today Radioshack even stocks them.

Raspberry Pi on the other hand is a full Linux computer for basically the same price. And as such it has a vast library of existing building blocks that hackers can call upon. 

Raspberry Pi’s original stated goal is to help kids learn how to program on a computer without fear of breaking it. But at $25 dollars its allure is irresistible to hackers and inventors –  people have been using them for a wider range of ideas – like building a supercomputer out of LEGOs.

Raspberry Pi only went on sale in February, and has also sold hundreds of thousands since then.  Here are a few examples of the explosion of projects the Pi is enabling:

• An open source disaster relief drone;
• A Quadcopter Raspberry Pi;

• A voice controlled robot; and
• An XBMC Media Center for managing streaming media.

The rise of these Arduino and Rasbperry Pi projects is a symptom of a larger change. Because of the many niches, cost of production, and speed of innovation, it isn’t the big companies that make these kits and parts.  It is small one-person hardware companies and hobbyists around the world. 

A few examples are:

• Jason Huggins in Chicago, who makes the Robot that plays Angry Birds;
• 
LogicalZero in Boston which makes GAMBY, an Arduino Retro Gaming Shield; and
• Electronic Laboratory in the UK, which makes MiniStylophone Kits.



The result of this movement will be the innovation that our kids build on top of it. At the Maker Faire, while I waited in line for a hotdog, I overheard two banker types behind me. 

“It is amazing how many people are here,” one said. The other countered with, “What’s great is seeing all of the kids.”

As the internet was for my generation, hardware is for the current generation. The Maker movement proves this, and every day more and more small business pop up selling the kits, parts, and gadgets to support them. I may be a bit biased as I run tindie, a marketplace for people to buy and sell homemade technology, but the success of Arduino & Raspberry Pi only reinforce my bet on the maker trend.

Recently Jay Goldberg wrote, that “hardware is dead” – arguing that the drop in hardware prices is killing margins for the large producers to the point where is impossible to make revenue off commodity technology. It is true – prices are falling quicker than the large companies can innovate. However that price drop has opened an entirely new marketplace for smaller companies to emerge. Hardware isn’t dead – it’s moving back into garages where it started.

Emile Petrone is the CEO of Tindie, a site that sells hardware kits.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013

And because I’ve been recently entranced by the possibilities of moldable plastic after a visit to Chaotic Moon Studios here in town (I’ll write more on that later) I went looking for a solution that went beyond duct tape. Here are three tools I’ve found. For sure one or more of these are going to make their way into my little toolbox where I keep my hammers, screwdrivers and other small household fixits.

InstaMorph: For $10 on Amazon you can take home 6 ounces of these plastic beads, dump what you need in hot water and mold them into whatever shape you desire. They also sell the beads by the pound for larger projects. The beads cool into lovely little white blobs of plastic after about 2 minutes. For more conspicuous repairs there are also dyes you can buy to color your InstaMorph projects.

ShapeLock: This is the same type of material as InstaMorph, but it’s not clear if it has a bulk option for large projects. These are also white plastic beads that you can put in boiling water, wait until they turn clear and then use to create whatever shape fits your fancy. They cost $15 for 250 grams (roughly 9 ounces). They are re-usable, pretty darn strong when cooled and you can saw or file them into more refined shapes if your original mold looks off.

Sugru: Instead of beads that turn into moldable plastic, Sugru is a putty-like substance that cools into a semi-flexible substance. It costs between $18 and $20 for eight packs containing 5 grams, depending on the color of the putty. It can be used to protect cords, add protective layers to clothes, replace a broken tine in a dishwasher or whatever else you have a mind to do.

For those readers who wonder if they’ve mistakenly landed on Lifehacker, there is a reason I’m sharing this. The idea of finding cheap and easy materials to fix a broken trashcan, or create a custom mold to build a homemade iPad stand may be as fundamental shift in our lives as broadband is. These materials and the experience using them are a gateway drug into doing more projects just like email was a gateway drug to blogging for some people.

Having the tools to fix my trashcan means I’m not throwing it away, which is at the very least, green. But like learning about or how to use any new tool it sparks ideas and creativity that permeate our lives and culture. Maybe I’ll never have a 3-D printer (probably because my neighbor does) but I’ve at least taken a step toward DIY, even if it’s just an opportunity to fix things around that house that I wouldn’t have tackled before.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics