Maker's Asylum

Maker’s Asylum is open to everyone. The attraction of its community has brought a wide variety of profiles. Today 50% of its members don’t have a technical background, which seems still quite unusual for most of the makerspaces. There are startups using the co-working space and machines, hobbyists and professional craftsmen. During the weekends, everyone can subscribe to attend one of the workshops. Common projects are born in the lab such as the SatNOG (Satellite Network Open Ground Station), developed by makers who met in the space.

The lab has a strong reputation in India, and benefits from the word of mouth to attract new members. Also there are a substantial number of talks provided in the lab and outside its walls by the team, such as Tedx talks from Vaibhav.

Users feel to be part of a community inside the walls, and this is concretely visible as some regular and skilled members get an official status of “lab leader”, helping makers in the electronic, wood, metal areas…

Self-funded by Vaibhav and Anool, the 1st version of Maker’s Asylum was setup at the back of Eyenetra’s Office in Bandra East. It moved in a rented garage then in a space within India institute of Design and innovation.

In June 2015, the most recent makerspace was built thanks to a crowdfunding campaign, partners funding some machines and tools, and the community helping to build all furniture of the lab.

The lab has based his business model on memberships and workshops. In 2016, 25% of its 100 K revenues were coming from this field. 25% were linked to co-working space rental, 25% to corporate activities (workshops and team building activities), and 25% from the STEAM School program launched the same year.

Maker’s Asylum has a hybrid business model: its revenue model is split according to the labs activities. Hence, the membership and workshops activities are linked to the Non Profit Organization. The corporates services and STEAM school program are linked to the private company.

The lab is profit neutral for its 2016 activity. 50% of annual costs are salaries, 30% for rent and 20% are operational costs (machines use, electricity, materials…).

In the near future, Maker’s Asylum wants to expand its labs in others cities in India (they are already in Mumbai and Delhi). It focuses on cities that do not have makerspaces yet. It wants to foster education as well and create international connections.

Maker’s Asylum Team is ran by Vaibhav and Allan, and is otherwise composed of 7 members divided between the event and the operation team. The event team is planning monthly events and leading the community engagement. The operation team takes care of the daily work in the lab.

The community is highly involved in the lab’s life and play its role. Members are identified and recognized as “lead lab”, and help other members on technical issues.

The lab provides a wide variety of monthly workshops, and members can even ask to get a slot to make their own workshop.

A Maker in Residence project, in partnership with Autodesk has been also launched to help makers who have a project with social impact to develop it, using the labs resources and network.

As education is now one of the key focuses of lab, a STEAM school program has been launched in partnership with the CRI (Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire) and the French embassy. In 2016, 36 participants from India and France gathered to work on global challenges with local perspectives, as being trained on prototyping.

There is no formal documentation process in place in the makerspace right now. Members are responsible for their own documentation.

However a complete documentation process has been set up for the team. Every day, each team member has to dedicate 15 min to it. It concerns communication processes « how to make an event », machine uses, inventory, workshops… All is shared only internally thanks to google drive.

One of their main challenges is currently to find a way to document and manage the daily operations of the lab (record new members, know who used which tools, manage subscription fees…).