Many maker-led startups are building products that integrate hardware and software. However, they rarely stop to think about where the raw materials for their electronics come from, or what happens when their devices break and get thrown away.

There is mounting global pressure to move beyond the throwaway economy, but how can small hardware and IoT companies think about these issues when they also have huge financial and time pressures? Does the culture of hardware startups, incubators, and accelerators allow space to even begin to think about these issues?

This session tackles these broad questions with some specific threads around the repairability of electronics; tracking the provenance of materials; and one startup’s own perspective.

Featuring Janet Gunter (Restart Project), Charlie Bruce (Beeline), Matthew Cockerill (Worked on Fairphone whilst at Seymourpowell, now at Swift Creative), chaired by Nat Hunter (Machines Room)

This event is part of a series of talks entitled Intentional Things, Building values into maker-led businesses.

The world is changing fast, but things – products and hardware – are still the only way that software technologies can access us humans. And until recently, the manufacturing of things was primarily reserved for those with access to large factories. Today, new tools and infrastructures, from desktop fabrication tools to crowdfunding, allow independent product businesses to flourish. Individual designers, makers, nonprofits, and startups with bold ideas can fund and deliver products that may not have found support through conventional methods.

So if industrial-era manufacturing has been disrupted, why not dismantle some of the problems that went with it – to create more intentional, ethical product businesses?

Kickstarter and Machines Room are collaborating on a series of three panels, alongside the new Cohort programme, that highlight the importance of building values into maker-led businesses, to create cultural value alongside capital value.

• Incorporating for Positive Impact, Wednesday 25th October, 18.30
• Insecure Futures: Privacy, Security and Connected Devices, Wednesday 1st November, 18.30
• Ethical Electronics, Wednesday 8th November, 18.30

Doors open 18.00, talk starts 18.30, drinks and networking until 21.00