Instructables is a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others. The seeds of Instructables germinated at the MIT Media Lab as the future founders of Squid Labs built places to share their projects and help others.

To create a new Instructable, comment on someone else's Instructable, or do lots of other cool things, you need to create a free account. We also have a new guided tour.

We make a lot of stuff, for business, and for pleasure. We've been looking for a long time for a convenient system for documenting our how-to projects, and the things we make, but it simply didn't exist. We decided we'd have to develop it ourself, and here it is, it will evolve as we grow to meet our own rigorous demands, and those of our users. Principal in our demands is convenience - it should take less time to document a project than it did to build it.

We have been thinking and working in this space indirectly for more than 5 years, following the developments in Open Source Software, blogs, wikis, and version control systems. The largest influence motivating us on this project is the 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay of Vannevar Bush "As we may think" which has been widely accredited as a huge influence on the internet. Two sections of that article particularly engage us:

 

"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."

"One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that he projects them for examination."

Vannevar Bush, 1945
"As we may think"

We were impressed by the vision of the connection between information and the physical world - using highly connected information to richly describe experimental processes and physical objects. It implies an open source approach not only to the information, but to the physical objects that can be well described by information.

Read more about the history...