Catarina Mota

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Bio

"Catarina Mota, a 38-year-old Portuguese PhD student, is typical of the new breed of DIYers, or, as they tend to call themselves, "makers". She's a member of a 40-strong "hackerspace" in New York – a co-operative workshop where members share tools such as laser cutters – and develops and makes "smart materials", ones that can change colour when you touch them or react to voltage. In the three years since she began, the maker movement, fuelled in part by the rapidly decreasing cost of 3D printers – devices that create objects layer by layer out of liquid plastic – has become a phenomenon. Mota's hackerspace, NYC Resistor, is one of the oldest, but there are now 1,500 in the world.

Like most makers, she's self-taught. "A lot of people were doing these sorts of things as kids and then stopped," she said. "As manufactured goods became cheaper, we became consumers. But now everything has changed. We don't accept things as they are given to us. We make technology work for us. And we can make a living from it: it's not just a hobby. It has the potential to change economics profoundly. Companies can compete on quality no matter what their size." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jul/01/build-satellite-shed-new-diy-revolution?)