Origin Story

On November 7, 2013, eight DIY enthusiasts gathered at EyeNetra’s office in Mumbai with a simple goal: to build something together. On that first day, they made three tables with borrowed tools, shared curiosity, and a lot of enthusiasm.

What started as a one-time gathering quickly became a weekly ritual. Every Sunday, the group returned to learn, experiment, and build new projects together. Members began bringing their own tools, skills, and ideas, and before long, the small back room they occupied was overflowing with activity.

That room became a refuge for tinkerers, artists, engineers, designers, and makers of all kinds—a place where creativity mattered more than credentials and learning happened through doing.

They called it The Asylum.

In January 2014, at MakerFest, Vaibhav met Anool. Their shared passion for building, tinkering, and learning by doing sparked an instant connection.

Back at the Asylum, the original back room had already begun to feel too small for the growing community. Recognizing the need for a dedicated space, Kirti, one of the early co-founders, offered her garage in Bandra as a new home for the movement.

That garage became Maker’s Asylum’s first official address.

Open seven days a week, it welcomed anyone curious enough to walk through its doors. Engineers worked alongside artists, students learned from professionals, and strangers became collaborators. The philosophy was simple: Make Break Create.

What began as a humble garage soon became something much larger—a community-driven workshop that encouraged experimentation, creativity, and lifelong learning.

It was India’s first open-access makerspace, laying the foundation for a movement that would inspire thousands of makers across the country.

The Bandra garage had served its purpose well, but it was never meant to be permanent. As Kirti moved on, Maker’s Asylum had to vacate the space and once again begin the search for a new home.

By then, the community had outgrown its humble 250-square-foot garage. More makers were joining every week, projects were becoming increasingly ambitious, and the limitations of the space were impossible to ignore.

Finding an affordable workshop in Mumbai, one of the world’s most space-constrained cities, was no easy task. Vaibhav explored every possibility, determined to keep the community alive and growing.

The breakthrough came when he met Soumitra and Siddharth at the India School of Design and Innovation (ISDI). Believing in the vision of democratizing access to tools, technology, and hands-on learning, they offered both their support and a new space.

Maker’s Asylum found its next home in Lower Parel, at the heart of Mumbai’s corporate district.

For the first time, the community had room to dream bigger. What had begun as a back room and then a garage was evolving into a permanent hub for makers, innovators, designers, and entrepreneurs from across the city.

Long before he had heard the term maker movement, Vaibhav was building things in the basement of his family home in Delhi. Like many aspiring makers, he encountered familiar challenges: tools were expensive, materials were hard to source, and when something went wrong, there was often no one around to ask for help.

Those experiences shaped a simple belief: making should not be limited by access to tools, knowledge, or community.

As Maker’s Asylum continued to grow in Mumbai, it became clear that these challenges existed across the country. To address them, the team set out to build a second home for makers in the nation’s capital. In 2016, Maker’s Asylum Delhi was born.

Spread across 2,000 square feet, the space became a vibrant hub where students, engineers, artists, entrepreneurs, and hobbyists could come together to learn, collaborate, and build. More than just a workshop, it was a community-driven space designed to ensure that no maker had to work in isolation, struggle to find the right tools, or give up on an idea simply because they lacked support.

The maker movement was no longer confined to Mumbai—it was becoming national.

As Maker’s Asylum grew in India, its vision began extending beyond national borders.

Between 2016 and 2019, Maker’s Asylum worked closely with the Embassy of France in India to create a series of student exchanges, innovation challenges, and cross-cultural learning experiences that connected young makers, designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs from India and France.

What started as a handful of collaborative programs evolved into a thriving international exchange ecosystem. Students traveled across continents, worked on real-world challenges, lived and learned together, and experienced firsthand how innovation could transcend geography, language, and culture.

The success of these initiatives helped establish Maker’s Asylum as a bridge between global innovation communities and laid the foundation for its immersive learning philosophy.

The impact of the program grew to such an extent that it attracted attention at the highest levels. The initiative received recognition from the office of Emmanuel Macron and was invited to be showcased in Paris. Maker’s Asylum went on to host programs at Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Europe’s largest science museum, as well as at the headquarters of UNESCO.

These experiences reinforced a core belief that continues to shape Maker’s Asylum today: innovation thrives when people from different backgrounds, disciplines, and cultures come together to learn, build, and solve problems collaboratively.

The French Connection marked Maker’s Asylum’s emergence onto the global stage and demonstrated that a movement that began in a small room in Mumbai could inspire and connect makers around the world.

Just as Maker’s Asylum had begun to settle into its home in Lower Parel, another challenge emerged. ISDI needed the space back to expand its own operations, and once again, Maker’s Asylum faced the prospect of becoming homeless.

By then, however, the community had grown far beyond a small group of enthusiasts. Hundreds of makers had passed through its doors, and countless projects, friendships, and collaborations had taken shape within its walls.

Rather than seeing the move as a setback, the community saw it as an opportunity to dream bigger.

Maker’s Asylum launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, turning to the very people who had helped build the movement from the beginning. The response was overwhelming. Supporters from India and around the world came together to ensure that the community would not only survive but thrive.

Thanks to their contributions, Maker’s Asylum found a new home in Andheri’s industrial district.

At over 6,000 square feet—complete with dedicated workshops, collaborative spaces, and an open-air terrace—it was the largest and most ambitious incarnation of Maker’s Asylum yet. The move marked an important milestone: what had started in a cramped back room and a borrowed garage had grown into one of the largest makerspaces in the region.

More importantly, it proved something that would define Maker’s Asylum for years to come: the community wasn’t built around a building. The building was built by the community.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, the Maker’s Asylum community found itself facing an unprecedented challenge. As lockdowns were announced and supply chains collapsed, hospitals and frontline workers across India struggled to access even basic protective equipment.

A small group of makers quarantined together at Maker’s Asylum and asked a simple question:

What can we build that will help right now?

The answer became M19, a nationwide maker-led response to the pandemic.

What started with a few laser-cut face shields quickly evolved into one of India’s largest distributed manufacturing efforts. Volunteers, makerspaces, schools, startups, fabrication labs, corporations, and individuals from across the country joined forces. Designs were shared openly, production was decentralized, and communities manufactured equipment locally for their own healthcare workers.

In just 49 days, the network produced and distributed over one million face shields across India—demonstrating the power of open-source collaboration and community-driven manufacturing at a national scale.

But face shields were only the beginning.

As the crisis evolved, the M19 initiative partnered with doctors, hospitals, researchers, and institutions to tackle increasingly complex challenges. Working closely with teams including those at AIIMS, the community developed and tested active respirators, oxygen concentrators, PPE innovations, and other emergency medical devices designed to support healthcare professionals on the frontlines.

Thousands of volunteers contributed their time, expertise, tools, and resources. Engineers collaborated with doctors, designers worked alongside manufacturers, and makers across the country united around a common mission: solving urgent problems through collective action.

The pandemic had changed everything.

While M19 demonstrated the power of a distributed maker community, it also forced Maker’s Asylum to rethink its future. The 10,000-square-foot facility in Andheri had fallen silent during lockdowns, and it became clear that the next chapter would require more than just a new location—it would require a new vision.

Rather than scaling down, the team decided to take a leap of faith.

With four truckloads of tools, machines, and equipment, Maker’s Asylum packed up nearly a decade of history and headed to Goa. The goal was simple but ambitious: create a space where making, learning, living, and community could coexist in a more sustainable and meaningful way.

After months of searching, the team discovered a 100-year-old heritage home in the village of Moira. The building was in disrepair, with crumbling walls, overgrown gardens, and years of neglect. Yet beneath it all was immense potential. It felt less like finding a property and more like finding a home.

The community came together once again to restore and transform the space. Workshops were rebuilt, classrooms emerged, gardens were revived, and the old house slowly evolved into a vibrant hub for makers, students, artists, entrepreneurs, and lifelong learners.

What began as a necessity soon became one of the most important decisions in Maker’s Asylum’s journey.

The Goa campus enabled new programs, longer immersions, deeper community engagement, and a closer connection to nature and local culture. It became a place where people could not only build projects, but also build relationships, ideas, and futures.

The move to Goa marked a transition from operating makerspaces to building an ecosystem for creativity, innovation, and hands-on learning.

It also laid the foundation for an even bigger dream: the creation of The Design Village—a permanent campus dedicated to empowering the next generation of makers, designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

The location had changed, but the mission remained the same:

Make. Break. Create.

The move to Goa marked more than a change in location—it marked a transformation in how Maker’s Asylum approached learning.

Over the years, thousands of students, hobbyists, and professionals had come through our spaces to learn by doing. But one question remained: how could we make hands-on learning accessible to people regardless of where they lived?

The answer was to take Maker’s Asylum beyond its physical walls.

In 2021, we launched the Innovation School, a structured learning ecosystem designed to help young people develop creativity, problem-solving skills, technical confidence, and an entrepreneurial mindset through hands-on projects.

Alongside it, we built MASH — the Maker’s Asylum System of Hacking, our learning management platform designed specifically for project-based learning. Unlike traditional online education, MASH was created to guide learners through the process of making—combining digital content, challenges, mentorship, documentation, and community into a single learning experience.

Together, the Innovation School and MASH enabled Maker’s Asylum to become a truly hybrid organization, blending online and offline experiences. Students could learn from anywhere, connect with mentors, document their projects, and participate in a global community of makers while still benefiting from immersive, hands-on experiences at our physical campuses.

What began as a single room filled with tools had evolved into a platform for learning, innovation, and creativity that could reach far beyond the walls of a makerspace.

The mission remained unchanged: democratize access to making, innovation, and hands-on education—one project at a time.