On today’s O’Reilly Radar, Alex Howard has a really nice write up about Dale being recognized by the White House yesterday. The piece includes a brief interview with Dale and an embed of the streamed event at the White House conference center. Dale’s comments can be found at 58:18. Here’s some of what he said:

“You mentioned tinkering,” said Dougherty, responding to an earlier comment by Chopra. “Tinkering was once a solid middle-class skill. It was how you made your life better. You got a better home, you fixed your car, you did a lot of things. We’ve kind of lost some of that, and tinkering is on the fringe instead of in the middle today.

The software community is influencing manufacturing today, said Dougherty, including new ways of thinking about it. “It’s a culture. I think when you look at MAKE and Maker Faire, this is a new culture, and it is a way to kind of redefine what this means.” It’s about seeing manufacturing as a “creative enterprise,” not something “where you’re told to do something but where you’re invited to solve a problem or figure things out.”

This emergent culture is one in which makers create because of passion and personal interest. “People are building robots because they want to,” Dougherty said. “It’s an expression of who they are and what they love to do. When you get these people together, they really turn each other on, and they turn on other people.”

The maker movement’s potential for education, jobs and innovation is growing