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Sustainable Making? Balancing Optimism and Criticism in HCI

Discourse

DAVID ROEDL, SHAOWEN BARDZELL, and JEFFREY BARDZELL

Indiana University, Bloomington

We examine the recent move from a rhetoric of “users” towards one of “makers”, “crafters”, and “hackers”

within HCI discourse. Through our analysis, we make several contributions. First, we provide a general

overview of the structure and common framings within research on makers. We discuss how these

statements reconfigure themes of empowerment and progress that have been central to HCI rhetoric since

the field’s inception. In the latter part of the paper, we discuss the consequences of these shifts for

contemporary research problems. In particular, we explore the problem of designed obsolescence, a core

issue for Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) research. We show how the framing of the maker, as an

empowered subject, presents certain opportunities and limitations for this research discourse. Finally, we

offer alternative framings of empowerment that can expand maker discourse and its use in contemporary

research problems such as SID.

Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5m. [Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g., HCI)]:

Miscellaneous; K.4.m [Computers and Society]: Miscellaneous

General Terms: Design, Human Factors, Theory

Additional Key Words and Phrases: Maker Culture, DIY, Discourse Analysis, Sustainability, Obsolescence

ACM Reference Format:

INTRODUCTION1.

Since the emergence of HCI as a discipline, the “user” has played a central role in the

field’s theory and rhetoric. Drawing on Foucault’s theory of discourse, Cooper and

Bowers [1995] argue that the “user” can be seen as a key discursive construct used to

legitimate the field’s existence and to define its essential goals. Through analysis of

early foundational texts, they show how the charge of HCI was defined as

representing the user in two senses: in the scientific sense as a new, not-yet-

understood object of study; and in the political sense as a constituency in need of

empowerment. Early HCI texts emphasized that users were poorly understood; they

were not like designers or programmers. Moreover, it was frequently argued thatusers, as cognitive agents, could be best understood and represented by Cognitive

Psychology—in contrast with the older notion of the “operator” from Ergonomics. In

this way, the construct of the user was used to argue for the necessity of integrating

HCI as a special discipline within Computer Science.

This research was funded by NSF IIS Creative IT (#1002772) and the Intel Science and Technology Center

for Social Computing.

Author’s addresses: D. Roedl, S. Bardzell, and J. Bardzell. School of Informatics and Computing. Indiana,

University, Bloomington; email: [email protected]

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Cooper and Bowers also show how the early discourse of the user was strongly tied

to liberal, humanist values of progress and empowerment. HCI’s dominant rhetoric

praised technological development for its power to transform society, while at the

same time warning that when users needs are not taken into account they will be leftangry, scared, frustrated, etc. Cooper and Bowers observe: “characterisations of the

woes of users are commonplace in creating simultaneously both the user as a fragile

beast under threat from technology and a duty for HCI researchers to help rescue

them” [1995, p. 8]. In this way, the scientific goal of cognitive representation was

directly tied to the social goal of user empowerment. HCI experts were (self-)

appointed as the advocates for user interests within system design, with the promise

that better knowledge about users would lead to happier, more empowered users.

Cooper and Bowers also analyzed the way these tropes were re-interpreted during

the second wave of HCI and it’s discursive turn toward “social actors”. They found

that while these texts criticized the “naïve user” as an overly reductive concept, at

the same time, they continued to emphasize familiar tropes of representation,

progress and empowerment: “HCI still has a duty to empower and, hence, a reason to

be” [ibid, p. 25]. Cooper and Bowers argue that the continued reliance on thisdiscursive strategy for legitimacy suggests that, “as long as HCI takes the (political)

representation of the user as part of its justification and remit, the frustrated and

slightly exotic user will have to be repeatedly rediscovered” [ibid, p. 8].

Over the last decade, numerous authors have sought to further revise HCI’s

conception of the user by stressing the abilities of people to do many things with

technology beyond “use,” including building, modifying, maintaining, repairing,

reusing, and repurposing [e.g., Wakkary & Maestri, 2007; Buechley, et al., 2009,

Kuznetsov & Paulos, 2010; Mota, 2011]. This move from a rhetoric of “users” towards

one of “makers”, “crafters”, and “hackers” can be read as the articulation of a new

discursive subject and constituency for HCI. As we will demonstrate in this paper,

research about “maker culture”1 is frequently framed as a challenge to HCI’s

traditional conception of the “user.” This discourse is also often accompanied by

claims that the maker, as a specific configuration of a technological subject, isparticularly well positioned to bring about increased democracy and empowerment.

That is, the argument goes that if HCI acknowledges the DIY movement, and begins

to design for “makers” instead of “users”, then the field will help to further

“empower” and “democratize” society [e.g., Paulos, et al., 2008; Mota, 2011;

Tanenbaum, et al., 2013].

This development seems significant for several reasons. Research on maker culture

has emerged as a substantial genre in the field that is rapidly growing in volume.

The maker is arguably approaching prominence on par with earlier formations of

subjectivity in HCI, such as the “user”, and the “social actor”. In addition, the

associated rhetoric of empowerment is taking on greater stakes in contemporary HCI

research. Whereas first-wave HCI rhetoric warned about user frustrations resulting

from about lack of usability, today, HCI is increasingly confronting complex societal

1 This trend in the discourse encompasses a variety of keywords, including “makers”, “crafts”, “hackers”,

“DIY”, “everyday designer”, etc. For simplicity, we mostly use the terms “maker” and “maker culture” to

refer to all of these at once. Later, in section 3.1, we attempt to disentangle some of the different meanings

that have been associated with each keyword.



Sustainable Making? Balancing Optimism and Criticism in HCI Discourse xx:3

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challenges with explicit socioeconomic and political components (e.g.. HCI4D,

Sustainable HCI, Feminist HCI, etc.).

Because of (a) the rise of “the maker” as a major subjectivity of information in HCI

and (b) the accompanying notion that this subjectivity is more democratic and/ormore socioeconomically or politically significant than the user and social actor of

previous HCI, we believe there is now a need to critically examine the maker as a

major new formulation of HCI’s core discursive construct. We ask, how does the

maker reframe HCI’s approach to participation, empowerment, socioeconomic

progress, and sustainability?

To contribute towards this critical examination of the maker (as both a construction

of a certain type of user and also as an agent of democratic change), we have

conducted a Foucauldian discourse analysis on HCI’s construction of the maker,

particularly in relation to sustainability. A Foucauldian discourse analysis, as we will

explain later, is a systematic analysis of discursive structures that enable and also

preempt certain types of discursive statements: what counts as legitimate,

interesting, novel, relevant—that is, what counts as a contribution. Our choice to

focus on making in relation to sustainability helps scope and lend coherence to ourinquiry, while also foregrounding one instance of the central underlying discursive

relation—the maker and its purported connection to social progress—that

characterizes so much of the HCI discourse on makers.

We analyzed 191 papers from the last 15 years to understand how HCI researchers

have framed and legitimated the maker, especially with reference to outcomes

deemed sustainable. Our analysis begins with questions such as the following: How

does HCI discourse conceptualize the maker as a subject-position of interactivity?

How are tropes of empowerment, and progress (re)configured in this

conceptualization? Why is the maker spoken about in this way; i.e. what are the

discursive rules and mechanisms that produce these statements? Finally, what

consequences does the underlying “grammar” of HCI maker discourse have for

contemporary research problems—and what, by implication, could we intervene upon

to improve?We devote to the second half of the paper to exploring the latter most question,

using the example of Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) and in particular, the

problem of planned obsolescence. We chose this topic for several reasons. First, there

is an important intersection between the discourse on making and SID in that both

have critiqued the “user” for the way it reifies a consumerist relationship to

technology. Second, in several cases, the “maker” has been specifically associated

with repair and reuse and thereby claimed to be (more) sustainable. For these

reasons, SID is an especially promising area in which to investigate the ways that

makers can and do (or can’t, or fail to) effect the positive social changes HCI

researchers have promised. To this end, we ask: what are the benefits and limitations

of adopting the maker as a key discursive subject in SID research?

The contribution of this paper, then, is to offer a discourse analysis

(methodologically described in section 2) of the maker, to understand it as the sort of

agent that has the power to effect certain beneficial societal changes (section 3); we

then consider this agent in relation to findings from scholarship on sustainability,

with an emphasis on planned obsolescence, to reveal ways that makers’ agency vis-à-

vis sustainability is in fact circumscribed by pre-existing social structures

unacknowledged in the more optimistic characterization of making typical in HCI

research (section 4). We conclude by proposing several opportunities for HCI research




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to support makers not merely as users (i.e., with more powerful, more usable, or more

functional tools) but also to support makers as agents of positive social change

(section 5).

METHODOLOGY2.

The methodology of this paper is discourse analysis (DA), as developed in the work of

sociologist and philosopher Michel Foucault. Our understanding and application of

DA is especially informed by the book Discourse [1997] by Sara Mills. Mills defines

Foucault’s notion of discourse as “groups of utterances which seem to be regulated in

some way and which seem to have a coherence and a force to them in common” [Mills,

1997, p. 7]. Kannabiran et al. [2011] summarize the approach of DA as follows:

“Foucauldian discourse analysis seeks to expose rules and mechanisms involved in the production,

circulation, and validation of texts in a discourse… A discourse analysis, then, aims not at

providing a summary of what is said per se, but rather an attempt to expose the discursive rules,

demonstrate their operations and consequences, and subject them to the possibility of intentional

change” [p. 697].

Discourses can be described as regulated knowledge practices that “systematicallyform the objects of which they speak” [Foucault, 1978]. In others words, a discourse

constitutes a space of legitimate objects as well as a set of rules for what kinds of

statements can be made about those objects. So, for instance, in the case of maker

culture, there are makers, maker practices, technologies, outcomes, etc., and one rule

for HCI research on makers is that such research can be legitimated by an appeal to

the potentials for empowerment and democratization (i.e., traditional values of HCI

research and practice) that making (i.e., understood as a new category of user) is

claimed to offer.

In turn, discourse “causes a narrowing of one’s field of vision, to exclude a wide

range of phenomena from being considered as real or as worthy of attention” [Mills,

1997, p. 51]. Thus, in the case of making, aspects of making that might be picked up

in, for example, cultural studies—such as the underlying ideologies and forms of

privilege that making perpetuates—are backgrounded in a field like HCI, which (at

least compared to cultural studies) lacks discursive rules that foreground such issues.

(And cultural studies as a discursive practice would have its own exclusions, hidden

spaces, and modes of legitimation.) Thus, an important goal of DA is to identify the

spaces of exclusion—and the underlying rules that create them. In this way, a DA is

significantly different than a traditional literature review, which typically seeks to

survey relevant key contributions and findings, but not to identify gaps or to attempt

an analysis of the tacit grammar making such discourse possible in the first place.

See also Goodman [2009] and DiSalvo et al. [2010] for examples of discourse analysis

regarding sustainability in HCI.

Discourse analysis attends not just to what is said but also to the positions of the

speakers in relation to institutional authority. In the context of academic knowledge

production, discourses are often tied to claims of disciplinary legitimacy. Moreover,discourses can often be identified by the way they are positioned in opposition to

other competing discourses. Cooper and Bowers note that: “in the case of the human

sciences, the constitution of a distinctive domain is reflexively tied to claims that the

discipline in question… acts as the representative of a particular constituency” [1995,

p. 4]. As the rules of a discourse regulate knowledge production, they also “structure

both our sense of reality and our notion of our own identity” [Mills, 1997, p. 15]. The

discourse of the naïve user helped to both establish HCI as a discipline and to shape




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the identity of HCI researchers. HCI knowledge, thus constructed, has influenced the

way that computing systems are designed and ultimately how real end-users interact

with technology. In this way, the structure of discourses have real and significant

consequences on how people think and act. Likewise, we assume that HCI’s rhetoricabout the maker may have real consequences for the uses of technology in broader

culture. However, the dynamics of such effects remain outside the scope of this paper;

our analysis is focused solely on the role of the maker as a discursive subject within

HCI research.

Our goal in the present paper is to explore what it means for the “maker” to be

positioned as a new constituency or discursive subject for HCI. More specifically, we

aim to address the following questions. What is nature of the maker identity that is

imagined/constructed by HCI rhetoric? What attributes, capabilities, and forms of

agency is the maker said to possess? In what ways is the maker subject to various

forms of governance and social power? How is the maker able to respond to these

forms of power? What is the proposed role for HCI in relation to the maker, and is

this similar or different from the first- and second-wave themes of empowerment

discussed above? Finally, and most importantly, how can we explain the causes andconsequences of this development in discursive terms?

Discourse analysis allows us to address these questions in the following way. Our

starting point is to identify what has been said about maker culture and by whom.

Next we look at how the conversation has evolved over time and how it maintains a

logical coherence through a set of common themes, rhetorical strategies, and

(perhaps) unstated assumptions. After this initial analysis, we attempt to explain

how these patterns in the discourse result from specific institutional pressures,

disciplinary conventions, and legitimating practices.

Although we view Cooper and Bowers [1995] as fellow travelers, we note some

important differences. Their analysis was primarily concerned with disciplinary

relations; i.e., how HCI established itself as a field and negotiated relationships with

constitutive disciplines of cogsci, computer science, and design. While these

disciplinary tensions are still relevant today, they are not the central issue of ourwork. Instead, we are more interested in the nature of maker subjectivity, how and

why it is constructed, how it construes themes of governance and empowerment, and

what consequences this has for dealing with contemporary research problems—

sustainable interaction design in particular—that have these notions at their core. To

a limited extent, we attempt to contextualize these developments within a broader

history of HCI, but we do not set out to analyze or draw conclusions about HCI

discourse as a whole. For example, although research discourses around

Participatory Design, ICT4D, and Post-colonial Computing each have significant

arguments relating to subjectivity and empowerment, for practical purposes they

cannot be addressed in the scope of this paper.

Our archive for analysis is a collection of 191 HCI publications related to the topic of

maker culture. We collected these papers by performing keyword searches of the

ACM Digital Library (in October 2013) for the following terms: “maker”, “hacker”,

“craft”, “DIY”, “appropriation”, “design-in-use”, “repair”, “reuse”, “fabrication”. As

described in the introduction, the commonality that unifies these topics is an explicit

focus on activities that go beyond HCI’s traditional conception of “use”. We began by

searching for “maker” and “DIY”. From the results, we selected the additional

keywords that appeared together and seemed most relevant. The keywords, “repair”

and “reuse” were chosen because of our interest in claims about the intersection




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between making and sustainability (which we discuss in section 4). One of the goals

of the analysis was to understand how the various keywords relate to each other and

overlap. This is described in the findings section 3.1. From the results returned by

the searches, we included only papers that were related to HCI discourse. Forexample, results for “hacker” that only addressed security issues from an engineering

perspective were not included. The majority of the papers selected were from SIGCHI

conferences such as CHI, TEI, DIS, C&C, and IDC.

There are a total of 288 contributing authors represented in this corpus. 17 of these

authors contributed on four or more papers, and 40 percent of all papers (76/191) in

the corpus featured at least one author from this prolific group of 17. The most

prolific authors can be seen as representing several distinct groups based on

collaboration and affiliation: UC Boulder / MIT Media Lab (Buechley, Blauvelt,

Eisenberg, Elumeze, Mellis, Perner-Wilson, Wrensch), UC Irvine (Dourish, Lindtner,

Williams), UC Berkeley (Goodman, Rosner, Ryokai), Simon Fraser University

(Desjardin, Maestri, Tanenbaum, J., Tanenbaum, K., Wakkary) and Carnegie Mellon

University (Kuznetsov, Paulos, Pierce). Since these authors have been most active in

defining the genre of maker research, their work is featured prominently in ouranalysis. At the same time, there were a handful of authors who only contributed one

or two papers in the corpus, yet whose work strongly influenced our analysis due to

its seminal and/or genre-defining nature (e.g., Diana, 2008; Mota, 2011; Silver, 2009;

Wang & Kaye, 2011). These proportions indicate that while there is a relatively small

set of authors who have been especially influential in defining the discourse, there is

a relatively large set of authors participating (288). Moreover, the genre is clearly

growing from year to year, as two-thirds (128/191) of our corpus has appeared in the

last four years (2010-2013).

To perform the analysis, we first read through all of the papers, generating

emergent themes and patterns and collecting quotes. We did this in chronological

order of publication so that we could observe how the discourse evolved over time. We

also paid attention to how specific keywords were introduced and defined in relation

to one another. We gave special attention to the ways that authors justified theimportance of their work for the field and to ways that they argued for revisions to

prior knowledge and research agendas. After this first reading, we then reviewed our

list of themes, looking for relationship to issues of governance, empowerment, and

progress. In doing so, we also looked for the conspicuous absence of relevant topics.

We compare these discursive patterns to those discussed in Cooper and Bowers

[1995] and consider their causes and consequences. The results of our analysis are

described in the following section.

THE MAKER IN HCI DISCOURSE3.

We now turn to the results of our discourse analysis. We begin with a genealogy of

key terms, to present them as they emerged within the discourse over time. From the

genealogy, we are then able to show how the rhetoric of technoscientific progressshapes what can be said about makers, and how that in turn leads to two deeply held

understandings that constitute the maker as an empowered subject (i.e., an

individual subjected to certain material and social conditions, who is also the subject

of , or agent of, skilled and purposeful action within those material and social

conditions): the maker as a materially empowered subject and the maker as a socially

progressive subject.




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Genealogy of Key Terms and Themes3.1

We begin with a genealogy of how the rhetorical move from “users” to “makers” has

emerged in HCI—that is, we trace the emergence of terms and their relations as they

happen over time as a way of accounting for the present. This activity is necessarilyinterpretative, but following critical best practices we attempt to move from

descriptive (and relatively verifiable) statements toward increasingly interpretative

statements (whose adequacy can be judged but not verified) [see, e.g., Bardzell,

2011]. At the descriptive level, we focus on the emergence of key terms including

craft, appropriation, hacker, maker, expert amateur, and reuse; at the interpretative

level, we justify our synthesis of these terms into a single genealogy by noting how

these terms are commonly offered as an alternative to (what is characterized as) a

traditional HCI conception of the user as naïve.

We begin with discussion of crafts and craft culture. Discourse around the “crafter”

appeared as early as 1998, originating with a research group from University of

Colorado, Boulder [Wrensch and Eisenberg, 1998]. This line of work was primarily

positioned as an approach to integrating computation into the design of physical

materials. However, at the same time, Wrensch and Eisenberg sought to bring digitalmaterials into use within a new social context, namely the creative subculture of

home crafters. In drawing inspiration from craft culture, Wrensch and Eisenberg

called for a departure from HCI’s notion of the naïve user, characterized as “a

longstanding engineering philosophy in which increasingly complex devices are made

increasingly mysterious and opaque (though easy to use) from the standpoint of the

user” [Wrensch and Eisenberg, 1998, p. 5]. In contrast, the authors argue that ethics

and values of craft culture require “a style of design that emphasizes low cost,

personal participation and creativity, and a certain degree of eccentric self-reliance

on the part of the user” [ibid]. In other words, in the authors’ view, designing for

crafters suggests a reframing of the desired design output from easy-to-use finished

products towards low-cost flexible materials that can be readily adopted in a creative

process.

Craft discourse was inspired by the effort to bring computation to a new

constituency of users. However, issues of flexibility and user creativity have also been

raised in an effort to rethink the traditional HCI context of computers used in work

practice. The term “appropriation” appears in our corpus in 2003, defined by Dourish

as “the way in which technologies are adopted, adapted and incorporated into

working practice” [2003, p. 2]. Dourish describes appropriation as a broader view of

customization, an older topic with a long history in HCI discourse. Drawing on

Suchman’s situated action perspective [1987], Dourish claims that appropriation is

inherent to all collaborative work practice. Systems are continually repurposed and

reconfigured by users (often in ways unintended by their design) in the effort to

respond to the specific situation at hand. The implication of this line of thinking is

that usability should be complemented or perhaps even displaced by

appropriability —the goal of designing flexible technological systems that supportprocesses of appropriation. As a general discursive concept for thinking about in situ

adaptations of design, appropriation has been used and further developed in several

HCI domains including CSCW, ICT4D, Ubicomp and home technology. For example,

Wakkary and Maestri [2007] studied the creative appropriation of artifacts in the

home. They argue that family members can be better seen as resourceful “everyday

designers” rather than passive users of technology.




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As interest in appropriation and crafts has grown, authors have introduced a

variety of other specific terms in place of the user such as “hacker” [Galloway et al.,

2004], “expert amateur” [Paulos, 2009], and “maker” [Silver, 2009; Mota, 2011].

Importantly, many of these terms have been positioned not just as theoreticalconcepts but rather as namings of actual and significant trends in society. For

example, a panel at DIS ‘04 pointed to growing “hacker, open source, net art, DIY,

and remix cultures and practices” [Galloway et al., p. 363]. Researchers have given

attention to variety of distinct, yet related communities of hobbyists, including Ikea

hackers [Rosner and Bean, 2009], Steampunk enthusiasts [Akah and Bardzell, S.,

2010] and car modders [Wang and Kaye, 2011], among others. The growth in

subcultures involved in hands-on creative practice with technology has been

characterized as an emergent cultural “movement” [e.g. Mota, 2011; Kolko et al.,

2012], and is sometimes referred to as a “revolution” [e.g. Diana, 2008, Mota, 2011,

Tanenbaum et al, 2013]. The existence of online sites for sharing DIY tutorials is

often referenced as evidence of this movement and also credited as substantially

enabling its emergence. New technologies in open hardware (e.g. Arduino) and digital

fabrication (e.g. 3d printers) are also frequently credited with propelling thedevelopment of maker culture.

Alongside the growing interest in DIY culture, a number of researchers have

studied practices of repair and reuse from the perspective of sustainability. A

recurring theme of this research is that for people to avoid the wastefulness of

obsolescence, significant amounts of skill, creativity, and time are required [e.g.

Woodruff et. al, 2008; Wakkary and Tanenbaum, 2009; Huh and Ackerman, 2009].

Traditional user-centered rhetoric can make these activities hard to see. Thus, SID

researchers have repeatedly argued for new vocabularies—or those borrowed from

craft and appropriation studies—to better understand sustainable practices. For

example, Huh and Ackerman [2009] use the term “negotiated appropriation work” to

describe the difficult task of weighing the trade-offs between maintaining obsolete

devices versus acquiring new ones. Pierce and Paulos [2009] argue that the rhetoric

of “consumption” obscures the nature of material practice since most material goodsare never metabolically consumed. In its place, they propose a reframed vocabulary

of “acquisition”, “possession”, “dispossession”, and “reacquisition”. Maestri and

Wakkary [2011] describe household repair as “an act of creativity that entails the

repurposing and resourcing of objects” [p. 81]. Wakkary et al [2013] use a practice

theory perspective to analyze green DIY projects in terms of the skills, values, and

materials involved.

2009 was perhaps a watershed year for maker discourse in which many papers

appeared at CHI and a workshop [Buechley et al.] brought together research on

“craft”, “DIY”, and “hacking”. “Hacking” is a term with a long history among

programmers and in popular culture [Levy, 1984], but it has not received much

attention in HCI. It has appeared only recently and only in relationship to recent

trends in maker culture. While some recent work integrates discussion of “craft” with

that of other labels, discourse on “craft” can still be discerned as a distinct genre,

especially in its emphasis on materials, aesthetics, tangible interaction, and

traditions of skilled practice. In contrast, discourse on “DIY” and “hacking” tends to

focus more on broader social issues such as democracy, resistance to authority,

community, values and norms. For example, Wang and Kaye [2011] claim that

resistance to authority is a key element that distinguishes hacking from craft.




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From a higher level of abstraction, we can see two distinct but related definitions of

“making” present in the discourse. The first, represented in research on

appropriation and everyday design, sees making as a near universal human activity;

a practical, everyday means of making-do and making-sense in the world. The secondnotion examines particular practices of making that are enthusiastically approached

as hobbies and/or and come to represent subcultural identities and lifestyles, such as

those found in research on hand craft, steampunk, car-modding, etc. These two

notions are not contradictory; the latter can be seen as a more specialized, extreme

case of the former. In this paper we use the term “making” without modification to

refer to both phenomena in the broadest sense: any and all practices of tinkering,

craft, and appropriation by anyone anywhere in the world. Likewise, we use the term

“maker” to refer any person, hobbyist or not, in such a way that highlights their

capacity to make. And we use the term “maker culture” to refer to the ways that

these practices are socially shared and endowed with meaning.

Although this category may seem dangerously broad, it is significant in that all of

the above works can be seen as participating in a common discourse in which creative

practice with technology is positioned as a challenge to HCI’s notion of the naïveuser. Recall that discourses can often best be identified and understood by their

relation to opposing positions. For example, Wakkary and Maestri write that viewing

people as everyday designers “presents a challenge to current technology design that

is founded on the production of finalized forms and understandings of use as static

and individual” [2007, p. 164]. Williams and Irani write that DIY culture

“challenge[s] traditional representations of users in HCI with examples of people who

design longer term solutions as they use” [2010, p. 2728]. They proceed to call on HCI

to “place the dichotomy between ‘design’ and ‘use’ into an ecology of practices:

designing, crafting, making, appropriating, hacking, tinkering, borrowing, stealing,

playing, perverting, rejecting, and so on” [ibid]. Tanenbaum et al. echo these

statements, neatly summarizing the common positioning of maker discourse:

“Maker cultures challenge traditional conceptions of the technology user. The dominant paradigm

of user-as-consumer gives way to alternative framings of the user as creative appropriator, hacker,

tinkerer, artist, and even co-designer or co-engineer” [2013, p. 2609].

In the following sections we elaborate on how the maker is positioned as a new

subjectivity for HCI in sharp contrast with the user. We explicate the discursive

mechanisms at work in making the case that HCI should focus on the maker. In

particular, we describe: rhetoric of progress, celebration of making as a route to

empowerment, and the new role proposed for HCI in supporting makers. Following

this, we reflect on several issues that are obscured by these rhetorical strategies.

Making and the Rhetoric of Technoscientific Progress3.2

As discussed in the introduction, the legitimacy of early HCI depended on rhetoric

linking notions of technical, scientific and social progress [Cooper & Bowers, 1995].

The discourse around maker culture relies on a strikingly similar rhetorical strategy.This move can be attributed to the discursive pressure to establish the “maker” as a

legitimate alternative to the “user” in HCI theory and method. From the traditional

perspective of user-centered design, appropriative activities might at best be seen as

indications of design flaws to be avoided. At worst, they may be seen as deviant cases

of misuse or simply as marginal edge cases not worthy of attention. The challenge for

the authors of maker discourse has been to argue that appropriation is not only an

important phenomenon to be studied, but also something to be supported by design




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rather than discouraged. In the effort to make this case, authors have repeatedly

positioned maker culture within a narrative of democratic populism and techno-social

progress.

In this framing, maker culture is characterized as an emergent social “movement”or “revolution” enabled by innovations such as crowd-sourced information sharing,

open hardware platforms, and digital fabrication tools. By casting maker culture as

an already ongoing social transformation driven by technology, the rhetoric evokes a

sense of simultaneous novelty and inevitability. Moreover, the claim that makers

challenge conventional HCI knowledge about users creates additional urgency to

study them as a novel and poorly understood constituency. At the same time, the

appropriative activities of makers are described in an overwhelmingly celebratory

tone and associated with a range of desirable values and traits, such as aesthetic

expression, individualism, environmental sustainability, socioeconomic and gender

equality, resistance, and critique. In this way, the maker is characterized as an

empowered subject in relation to technology, and the rapid growth in DIY

subcultures is described as a democratizing force with potential to spread technical

skill and social power throughout society. Thus, while the discourse presents themaker as new and alternative constituency for HCI (and as a critique of user-

centered design), it does so by appealing to HCI’s traditional humanist goals of

progress and empowerment.

In what follows, we elaborate on the specific ways in which the maker has been

celebrated as an empowered subject. The first three themes concern the celebration

of making as a form of material empowerment over technology, and they are

expressed in section 3.3. The latter three themes concern the celebration of making

as means of social progress, expressed in section 3.4.

Makers as Materially Empowered Subjects3.3

Here we describe several claims in the literature that position the maker as a subject

that is empowered by the skills and abilities embodied in her/his material

relationship to technology.

3.3.1 Makers view “finished products” as “unfinished”, and they are able to modify

products to suit their purposes. Perhaps the most common theme in the discourse is

that makers are not satisfied using products exactly as they are designed. Rather,

makers are motivated by a desire to adapt, customize, and improve on technology in

order to better suit their particular goals and tastes. Some people adapt tools and

systems for pragmatic purposes, for example to enable smoother routines of

collaboration at work [Dourish, 2003] or in the home [Wakkary and Maestri, 2007],

or to simply keep a product working after it is no longer supported by the

manufacturer [Huh and Ackerman, 2009]. Others seek to develop their creativity,

feel empowered through the expression of a personal aesthetic, and to show off their

work to a community. Such goals are at work in the cases of Steampunk [Akah and

Bardzell, 2010; Tanenbaum et al., 2012], Ikea-hacking [Rosner and Bean, 2009], car-

modding [Wang and Kaye, 2011], and among many other creative communities.

In some cases, appropriation has been described as a routine daily practice. In other

cases transcending the intended design of a product has been described as a

conscious and socially articulated goal. For example, in their study of various hacking

communities, Wang and Kaye [2011] write: “some hackers we spoke to specifically

stated that they pursue activities that are outside of the intended uses of the




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manufacturer, and the active negotiation of the tension between intended and

unintended uses is active part of their community” [p. 268]. In any case, that makers

are willing and able to modify technology beyond its design is an important theme by

which makers are described as empowered subjects in their relationship totechnology.

3.3.2 Makers repair and repurpose what would otherwise be considered “consumer

waste”. It has been argued that if makers do not view technology as finished

products, then for them the boundaries that designate a device as either working,

broken, or obsolete are much less rigid. Makers have the ability to modify technology

beyond the limits of its design, and thus they are more likely to engage in

maintaining and repairing products beyond their typical life, or repurposing and

reusing what others might consider trash. For example, Wakkary and Tanenbaum

[2009] describe the repurposing of non-digital household objects as a common

practice. Huh and Ackerman [2009] studied a community of users who went to great

lengths to use and maintain PDAs, long after the devices had been discontinued by

the manufacturer and were widely considered to be obsolete. Odom et al. [2009]describe the creative augmentation of household objects including a “computer

constructed from salvaged and spare parts.” Kim and Paulos [2011] analyzed

examples from DIY enthusiasts who adapt and reuse electronic waste and post their

results online. Maestri and Wakkary [2012] studied the repair of household objects as

a creative and resourceful everyday practice. Maintenance of information systems in

the workplace has also been addressed by Marcolin et al. [2012], who introduce the

concept of “maintenance-in-use” which “sheds light on how users come to matter in

preserving systems’ features and applications” [p. 58]. Jackson et al. [2012] examine

repair in the international development context of rural Namibia. The authors

describe a range of innovative salvage and repair practices working in spite of

“efforts to efforts to lock out and control use through repair-unfriendly policies and

design” [Jackson et. al, 2012, p. 115].

The salient theme of this work is that many users-as-makers are willing to investtime and energy into extending the life of digital materials through repair and reuse,

and they possess the creativity and resourcefulness necessary to do so. These

activities are framed as personally satisfying and empowering in that they allow the

maker to avoid having to repeatedly discard devices and purchase new ones.

Activities of repair and reuse are also celebrated in the discourse for their

environmental benefits.

3.3.3 Acts of making can enhance an object’s personal meaning, leading to greater

attachment and fostering an ethic of long-term care. It has been argued that the

hands-on nature of DIY practice may engender a more personal, satisfying, and

sustainable relationship to the world of material objects. One of the ways this may

happen is through adornment, which Ahde [2007] describes as the process in which a

product is “singularized, made personal by marking it with visible or invisible signs”

[p. 148], thus becoming more significant and valuable in the mind of the owner. Akah

and Bardzell [2010] make a similar argument in their analysis of Steampunk culture.

They operationalize appropriation as “the act of adapting an artifact to oneself in a

way that not only redefines the artifact, but also relates the artifact to one’s sense of

self” [Akah and Bardzell, 2010, p. 4022]. Rosner and Bean [2009] observe that

satisfaction gained through personalization is also an important motivation for Ikea-




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hackers. Once a personal identification has been established with an object, this

becomes a motivation to repair or otherwise care for the object over time. For

example, in their personal inventories study, Odom et al. [2009] found the creative

effort and skill involved in DIY augmentation of technology resulted in a greaterattachment to the artifact and desire to keep it in use. Wakkary et al. [2013] observe

that “personal attachment to objects… are part of the motivations people have when

repairing” and that “individuals are driven to preserve an object’s perceived meaning

and beauty” [p. 23:14]. This is related to Nelson and Stolterman’s [2003] notion of

ensoulment, an appreciation of quality that Blevis and Stolterman [2007] argue can

inspire long-term care and even allow an object to achieve heirloom status.

Numerous other authors have discussed themes of personalization, attachment,

care, and appreciation for materials in relation to DIY and craft practices. In this

way, making is imagined as personally empowering in the sense that it facilitates a

deeply satisfying relationship to objects that aid in a cultivation of one’s identity.

Makers as Socially Progressive Subjects3.4

Here we describe several ways in which maker culture is characterized as a socialmovement with positive, democratic attributes.

3.4.1 The pleasure of making is basic and human, which makes its widely appealing

and empowering. The hands-on nature of DIY and crafts is frequently celebrated for

having positive social benefit in addition to its personal benefits. It is a common

theme in the discourse that, as a tangible and embodied material practice, making

appeals to a wider and more diverse population than traditional computing skills.

Creating something with one’s own hands, rather than purchasing a mass produced

object, is often described as a universally pleasurable experience [e.g. Goodman and

Rosner, 2011; Buechley and Perner-Wilson, 2013] that may give rise to feelings of

self-sufficiency and empowerment [e.g. Akah and Bardzell, 2010; Lovell and

Buechley, 2010; Jacobs and Buechley, 2013]. For these reasons, it is often suggested

that making has the potential to spread out from the domain of niche hobby groups,to gather widespread participation, and to even develop into a mainstream cultural

practice [Diana, 2008; Mota, 2011]. In this way, making activities are often touted as

a viable means for increasing technological literacy in society [e.g. Buechley and

Perner-Wilson, 2012]. Electronic crafts and textiles, in particular, have been

positioned as a vehicle to introduce more women and girls to programming skills, and

thus foster a culture of gender inclusivity in computing [e.g. Lee, 2008]. The themes

of diverse participation and agency over technology often coalesce into a rhetoric of

populist democracy. The common argument is that if HCI acknowledges the DIY

movement, and begins to design for “makers” instead of “users”, then the field will

help to further “empower” and “democratize” society.

These themes demonstrate the way that maker culture is celebrated for its potential

large-scale social impact. The discourse posits that if making is an inherently

empowering practice, and it has potential for widespread adoption, then makerculture collectively might become a means of spreading technology literacy and

shifting the distribution of social power.

3.4.2 Makers share knowledge and resources widely in an open-source manner.

Claims of the potential social impact of maker culture often emphasize the ways in

which DIY knowledge is shared online and through social networks. For example,

Rosner and Ryokai [2009] write:




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“Today’s crafts have united with Do-it-Yourself (DIY) activity in creative subcultures across

America… Using largely public resources such as Instructables.com or Ravelry.com, crafters

discuss the intricacies of their work, tell stories around craft, and codify their creative process for

others to remake or modify, prompting further customization and reuse” [p. 196].

Wang and Kaye [2011] also observe that many hacker communities form to support

learning through sharing of experience. Free sharing of knowledge and resources also

takes place in person through organizations and community spaces such as

hackerspaces and makelabs. These practices are seen as formally and ideologically

related to the free and open source software movement. For example Silver [2009]

describes knowledge sharing as an explicit ethos of maker culture: “makers believe in

open source: ideas are free, no ownership, attribution is respectable though—it

strengthens and highlights interconnectedness and community fabric” [p. 245]. Low-

cost, open-source computing kits such as Arduino have also played a role in

facilitating the spread of interest in digital crafts and DIY electronics. More recently,

new technologies for digital fabrication (e.g. 3D printers) are spurring interest in

applying the open-source model to the design of all kinds of physical objects:

“This is the essence of open-source as applied to hardware: a process in which new versions of adesign can easily be shared, studied, produced, and further modified or combined. It stands in

contrast to both craft processes, in which modifications likely don’t exist in a digital form that can

be easily replicated, and mass manufacture, in which tooling costs often make it infeasible to

produce custom variations on a design” [Mellis, 2011, p. 83].

The values, technologies, and social networks supporting open knowledge-sharing

practices are often credited with enabling the recent popular interest in DIY

activities. The accessibility of how-to knowledge and the availability of low-cost

materials are said to significantly lower the barriers for novices and facilitate the

replication of practices. These trends are highlighted in the narrative to support

expectations of future widespread participation in making activities and to thus to

the potential for large-scale impact.

3.4.3 Makers actively resist or critique consumer culture. Acts of making, hacking, orappropriation are sometimes positioned as critiques of consumer products or of

consumerism in general. In this way, making is imagined not just as a popular social

movement, but also one with the potential to engage in political discourse relating to

issues of technology, design, and mass culture. The idea of making as resistance and

critique has a long history. The Arts of Crafts movement of the 19 th century was

inspired in part by imagining the handmade creation of goods as an alternative to the

alienation of factory labor [Buechley and Perner-Wilson, 2012]. This sentiment

continues to the present as some contemporary knitters view their practice as a way

to resist dependence on industrial technology [Goodman and Rosner, 2011].

Kuznetsov and Paulos [2010] note that contemporary DIY communities have an

inherited a spirit of resistance from older hobbyist communities such as amateur

radio and computer hackers: “today’s DIY cultures reflect the anti-consumerism,

rebelliousness, and creativity of earlier DIY initiatives, supporting the ideology thatpeople can create rather than buy the things they want” [p. 1]. Pierce and Paulos

[2011] describe people who view the use of previously owned goods as a conscious act

of opposition to the status quo of consumerism. These “critical reacquirers” are

motivated by “strong political, social and moral considerations, such as where and

how a product is made and the working and living conditions of those that actually

manufacture and produce it” [Pierce and Paulos, 2011, p. 2388]. Wang and Kaye




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[2011] found that hacking communities’ “sense of resistance can vary from the

extreme end of anarchism against organized governance to resistance against a

corporation to resistance against a dominant ideology” [p. 268].

The critical intentions of DIY can at times introduce apparent contradictions. Forexample, Rosner and Bean [2009] describe how Ikea-hackers activities critique the

mass-produced nature of Ikea products. On one hand, the standardization of Ikea

parts facilitates the social sharing of hacks that is foundational to the practice. On

the other hand, hackers often see their projects as ways to critique the generic

uniformity of Ikea products and imbue them with a more personal sense of style. This

paradoxical relationship to mass culture has been observed in other cases. Rosner

and Ryokai [2009] summarize Atkinson [2006] on this point: “though DIY

practitioners often react against the values of a mass-produced, industrial society,

they simultaneously reinforce the values of that society by emulating their products”

[p. 202]. This tension is especially present in the aesthetics and ideology of

Steampunk culture, as noted by Tanenbaum et al. [2012]: “although the genre

celebrates an era in which mass production and assembly were coming of age, it

resists traditional narratives of industrialization that prize uniformity andhomogeneity”. Instead, Steampunk imagines a techno-utopia where industrial

technology is coupled with skilled craftsmanship to provide individuals expressive

agency in the world. Tanenbaum et al. [2013] discuss the implications and

contradictions of maker culture as a democratizing movement. Ultimately they take

an optimistic stance towards its potential for political engagement:

“We contend that DIY practice is a form of nonviolent resistance: a collection of personal revolts

against the hegemonic structures of mass production in the industrialized world. The fact that

Makers rely upon these same structures to engage in and disseminate these practices complicates,

but does not negate, their revolutionary nature” [Tanenbaum, et al., 2013, p. 2609].

Resistance and critique of mass consumerism are clearly important themes in

maker discourse. Makers have been characterized as participating in a social

movement that openly and consciously questions the values associated with

technology design and production. This capacity for critique is another way that

makers are celebrated as an empowered group with the ability to effect social change.

The Reconfigured Role of HCI3.5

As we have shown in the six themes just described, the legitimacy of the maker as a

subject of HCI research relies on a familiar narrative of progress and empowerment.

However the discourse also reconfigures this narrative in several significant ways.

While the naïve user was characterized as a disempowered subject under threat from

technology and in need of rescuing from HCI, the maker is portrayed as an already

empowered subject, capable of shaping technology according to her/his intentions. As

repeatedly stated in the discourse, this position calls into the question the

conventional role that HCI designers and researchers occupy as the advocates for

users within system design. If makers are able to modify and redesign technology tosuit their purposes, independent of—and sometimes in direct opposition to—the

designer’s intention, then what is the need for HCI and interaction design as

disciplines?

Rather than conclude that HCI is now irrelevant, the discourse offers a new way in

which the field may contribute to technical and social progress. Authors argue that

HCI can help to support and further empower makers by designing for

appropriability and hackability, rather than usability, and by designing flexible tools




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and resources rather than fixed and finalized products. In this way, designers can

help improve the accessibility of maker practice, thus aiding in the dissemination of

maker culture and the democratization of technology. In order to achieve these

qualities in design, makers must be first studied, understood, and representedthrough qualitative HCI research. Thus, the role of HCI to empower through

representation and design is preserved. While the representation of the user

depended on cognitive psychology, and representation of social actors depended on

design and social sciences, the project of representing the maker invites contributions

from these disciplines as well new ones as such as Material Culture, Feminism, Arts

and Crafts, Fashion Design, Hardware Engineering—a collection of disciplines all

centrally concerned with materiality, which again is one of the defining features of

HCI’s maker.

Criticism Obscured by Celebratory Rhetoric 3.6

Narratives of progress and empowerment have largely been successful in

establishing maker research as a legitimate genre in the field. However, we argue

that the celebratory rhetoric around the maker obscures the concrete mechanismsthrough which making operates as a critique of traditional computing and its

relationship to consumer culture. As discussed earlier, the narrative of maker

empowerment relies on a critical stance towards user-centered design, mass

production and consumer marketing, but this critique remains relatively

unexplicated. In the case of Ikea-hacking and Steampunk, practitioners are said to

make an aesthetic critique of the “homogenous” quality of mass-produced goods. The

“critical reacquirers” described by Pierce and Paulos [2011] are said to make an

ethical critique of, for example, the living conditions of factory laborers. But in most

of the cases presented in the discourse, the arguments and political aspirations that

motivate these practices have yet to be examined in much detail. With few

exceptions, the discourse is relatively vague about the motivations and ideologies of

maker groups, the specifics of their social organization, their participation in public

discourse, and their potential to effect political change. As a result, many questions

remain about how the critical tendencies of DIY relate to wider issues of public

politics. For example, how do design and other societal forces currently inhibit or

disempower makers? What exactly do makers seek to critique and/or resist and why?

We argue that this is a line of questioning that has been foreclosed, or at least de-

emphasized, by the pressure to adhere to HCI’s traditional narrative of progress. The

discourse emphasizes the many capabilities of makers, while saying little about the

ways that makers are themselves governed, opposed or otherwise subject to power.

This omission can be seen as one example of a larger pattern in which HCI prefers to

emphasize design opportunities, rather than critique the values underlying present

technology [Knouf, 2009]. This pattern is easy to explain given that HCI is a field

founded and funded through close partnership between industry and academy. In

this way, HCI researchers are able to play it safe, legitimating the maker bycelebrating its “revolutionary” potential, while avoiding the alienation that might

result from laying blame or taking sides against any particular institutions or

practices within the technology industry.

We believe these omissions are inherited, at least in part, from HCI’s historically

anodyne treatment of concepts such as “democracy” and “empowerment.” The notion

of “empowerment” used in the discourse is one narrowly constructed to refer only to

agency over technology, and is typically discussed in an individual and apolitical




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sense. The common theme is that acts of making empower individuals to develop

technological skills, personalize their products, and to experience a sense of self-

sufficiency. “Democracy” is also a word frequently associated with maker culture, but

surprisingly, it is rarely accompanied by a discussion of issues of public politics.Instead, “democracy” is typically used to refer to the idea that DIY allows more

people to participate in the design and physical making of the things they own. It is

easy to argue that such participation is a positive development in and of itself.

However, what is left out of this discussion is the question of how individual agency

over technology relates to participation in political conflicts. In what ways might

making in fact perpetuate existing forms of social domination? Does making bring

democratic participation in technological innovation disproportionately to those who

are already on the right side of the digital divide? How might making reinforce

traditional gendered divisions of labor that devalue women’s labor compared to

men’s, or the innovations of makers in the West vs. Asia or Africa?

Research on making often doesn’t attempt to take on questions such as these

(although critical perspectives are growing in number, e.g. see Ames, et. al [2014];

Hertz [2012]; Sivek [2011]). What they do take on—and with some energy—is thematerial dimensions of making. We already observed that many of the disciplines

brought into HCI to support making—Material Culture, Hardware Engineering,

Crafts, and Feminism—all treat materiality as a central concern. This is a positive

development: the increasing emphasis on materiality in HCI research has significant

potential for supporting makers. However, by repeatedly framing the material

practice of making in celebratory terms, the discourse tends to give less attention to

specific ways that material design may also act as a constraining force or a site of

struggle, e.g., the fact that maker resources—including physical materials, maker

magazines, and so forth—are economically and pragmatically more available to

already privileged groups. Moreover, we note that the support that a more robust

theoretical and methodological understanding of materiality in HCI will provide

predominantly serves the maker as a materially empowered subject but has less

opportunity to support the maker as a socially progressive subject.Now, within Sustainable HCI, there is a growing movement to seriously engage

with public politics [e.g. Nathan et al., 2008; Aoki et al., 2009; DiSalvo et al., 2009;

DiSalvo et al., 2010; Dourish, 2010]. In recent years, considerations for political

implications of DIY also seem to be emerging, as exemplified by research on “urban

computing” [Bisker et al., 2010], “citizen science” [e.g. Paulos et al., 2009; Kuznetsov

et al., 2012], the politics of repair in ICT4D [Jackson et al., 2012], and issues of

government and corporate co-optation raised by Tanenbaum et al. [2013]. These

works notwithstanding, the majority of maker discourse to date has been relatively

silent or vague about issues of social conflict (including forms of domination,

injustice, violence, and strife). This allows HCI researchers to focus on work they are

traditionally good at, such as studying users to discover opportunities for designing

new products, tools, and materials. Thus HCI research can continue to portray itself

as contributing to social progress through technological development in support of

makers, while sidestepping the need to consider structural socio-economic issues or

engage in controversial public debates. In the following section, we explore the

consequences of this discursive position in greater detail, using the problem of

designed obsolescence as an example.




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THE MAKER AS SUBJECT OF DESIGNED OBSOLESCENCE4.

In what follows, we consider the designed obsolescence of digital technology as

difficult contemporary research problem for HCI, and one that has been a core

concern for the genre of Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) as raised by Blevis[2007]. There is an important intersection between the discourse on making and SID:

both have critiqued the “user” for the way it reifies a consumerist relationship to

technology. In contrast, the “maker” has been positioned as an alternative subject

capable of more sustainable practices such as repair and reuse. Thus, we now ask:

what are the consequences of adopting the maker as a key discursive subject in SID

research? As we will demonstrate, this move presents both opportunities and

limitations for addressing the problem of obsolescence. On one hand, the notion of

maker empowerment opens up new possibilities for thinking about resistance to

obsolescence. On the other hand, the celebratory rhetoric of progress obscures the

political conditions that inhibit repair and perpetuate obsolescence. While the

intersecting issues of DIY and SID have been explored in recent years, they have yet

to be developed into a systematic research agenda. In our discussion we point out

several ways these two discourses can each benefit from direct engagement with oneanother and suggest ways that each can move beyond its current discursive

limitations.

Designed Obsolescence and Critiques of the User4.1

Blevis’ [2007] SID principle, linking invention and disposal, calls attention to the

ways that interaction design contributes to premature obsolescence, often as part of

intentional and coordinated business strategies. Through criticism of particular cases,

such as Apple’s iPod, Blevis observes that obsolescence is achieved through the

reinvention of product form and functionality in concert with fashion trends and

marketing tactics. He notes that software design is also implicated in this process

because software releases frequently drive demand for new hardware. Other scholars

have pointed out that planned obsolescence has a long history within corporate

design practice and is especially integral to the way the computing industry operates

and generates demand [e.g. Huh and Ackerman, 2008, following Sterne, 2007].

Such observations have inspired broad-ranging critiques of HCI and interaction

design’s entanglements with capitalist economics and consumer culture. These

critiques call into question HCI’s traditional focus on designing new technological

products for individual users. It has been argued that this framing works to

perpetuate cycles of obsolescence and limits the field’s ability to respond to complex

issues of unsustainability. For example, Knouf [2009] draws on Papanek [1971] to

argue that HCI is ethically compromised in its focus on problems chosen by corporate

agendas, namely creating new products for profit:

“A view of HCI that limits it to the design of devices for purchase or use in purchasing severely

curtails the transformative power of design. HCI becomes merely a tool, a tool for diminishing the

barriers towards consumption. As a design endeavor, then, HCI is instrumentalized in the serviceof capital, rather than attending to the difficult-yet-important psychological and social needs of the

many” [Knouf, 2009, p. 2561].

Several other authors have called into question the product-centric orientation in

HCI. For example, Fallman [2009] draws on Borgmann’s [1984] notion of the device

paradigm to critique HCI’s view of digital technology as commodities that “invite a

consumptive way of being” [Fallman, 2009, p. 58]. As a result of this paradigm, he

argues that “being a part of HCI is almost inexorably also about nurturing the strong




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link between consumerism and HCI work” [ibid.]. Similarly, Hakansson and Sengers

[2013] argue that the rate of change in digital technology contributes to a culture of

over-work and over-consumption:

“Many modern technologies, including in HCI, are designed to bring us more... Digital artifacts areconstantly being improved to be faster, better, “smarter”. This approach embodies a modern

cultural orientation that “more” is probably “better”” [p. 2728].

Researchers have also critiqued that the way that HCI’s conceptualization of the

user contributes to cycles of invention and disposal. For example, Schweikardt [2009]

argues that the commitment to user-centeredness within interaction design has

prevented it from engaging with more pressing societal issues. Wakkary and

Tanenbaum [2009] argue that “HCI’s general understanding of the user is as a

consumer” [p. 366]. As a result, new features and functionality are continually

proposed in response to observations about user “needs”, thus propelling cycles of

obsolescence. Dourish [2010], Goodman [2009], and Brynjarsdo !ttir et al. [2012] have

critiqued the way that pervasive and underlying ideology tends to result in a

conception of users as individual rational actors. Dourish [2010] writes:

“the ideological framework of neoliberalism pervades other forms of cultural discourse including

that around environmental management… In the cultural logic of neoliberalism, markets appear

as natural objects rather than social constructions. It is in this context, then, that the typical

design response is to frame sustainability in terms of informed choice – on the part of individual

consumers operating in the unremarked context of a market economy… This in turn leads to the

third consideration here, which is the way that, by focusing particularly on individual patterns of

consumption, this particular formulation of the problem erases or obscures the responsibilities and

actions of other social entities, most notably corporations and states” [p. 3].

In summary, a variety of recent critical perspectives suggest that HCI’s traditional

construct of the user severely limits its ability to work towards sustainability. The

framing of users as consumers combined with a disciplinary demand for user-

centered innovation tends to result in problematic “solutions” to sustainability that

involve creating more and more products, rather than maintaining existing devices

or eliminating waste. The understanding of users as individual, rational actors tendsto obscure the ways that people’s actions are constrained by their social, material,

and situational positions. On the other hand, by conceiving of users as passive

recipients of design, researchers tend to ignore the potential for people to play an

active role in avoiding disposal. Instead, the ability for responding to

unsustainability is often placed solely with designers and researchers.

As seen in the works above, HCI discourse on sustainability provides a critique that

explicitly reveals ways in which the “user” and user-centered design are complicit in

propelling designed obsolescence and wasteful consumerism. This serves as a

counterpoint to the relatively unexplicated criticism of consumerism that is often

implicit in maker discourse. This is one important way in which discourse on SID and

making can be seen as complimentary streams of dialogue that could benefit from

productive engagement.

Making as Resistance to Obsolescence4.2

In light of the critical perspectives just discussed, the maker seems to represent an

appealing and alternative subject with which SID might consider issues of designed

obsolescence. Specifically, the discursive move towards “makers” opens up

possibilities to recognize and support the ability of people to avoid premature

obsolescence by engaging in practices of creative renewal and reuse. This argument




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has been articulated most explicitly by Wakkary and Tanenbaum [2009] in their

framing of the “everyday designer”:

“the role of a creative agent in the life of artifacts is a sustainable identity for users that

emphasizes principles of sustainability in interactions with design artifacts. This is in directcontrast with a consumer identity that engenders patterns of consumption and disposal”.

While this space of opportunity has not gone unnoticed, specific strategies for

advancing SID research along these lines are currently tentative and have yet to be

rigorously developed. For example, in the workshop abstract by Buechley et al

[2009], the organizers propose the following set of research questions regarding the

notion of “DIY as a sustainable practice”:

“How might DIY improve the environmental impact of products and technology? How might DIY

contribute to sustainability? Is DIY an intrinsically sustainable design method? Does DIY

discourage consumption, or merely displace it? Does the “hand-craft” of DIY increase emotional

attachment to objects and improve product lifespans?” [p. 4825]

Although researchers have yet to offer definitive answers to these questions, the

discourse has mostly taken an optimistic tone regarding the environmental benefits

of maker activities that extend the life of digital materials. For example, the

potential sustainability of DIY practice has been observed by several authors in

relation to repair [Jackson, 2012; Maestri and Wakkary, 2011], reuse [Kim & Paulos,

2011; Pierce and Paulos, 2011], and maintenance [Huh, et al., 2010], among others.

Our analysis of maker discourse adds new insight to this discussion. When the

critique of UCD and the rhetoric of maker empowerment are viewed together, these

arguments re-frame technology consumption (and obsolescence and disposal) as a site

of struggle for empowerment. We argue that this move opens up new discursive

opportunities for thinking about the problem of obsolescence differently. The way in

which the maker is celebrated as an empowered subject suggests that, even in a

world of objects “designed for the dump”, maker culture can be seen as a source of

active resistance to obsolescence, in both a material and social sense. We use the

term resistance to denote that individuals are compelled to participate in cycles ofinvention and disposal by a variety of forces, including design. In a material sense,

the maker is portrayed as capable of resisting these forces through his/her

willingness and ability to appropriate, modify, hack, repair and maintain digital

devices, even in spite of the designer or manufacturer’s intention. In a social sense,

this relationship to technology has been described as widely accessible and

pleasurable to the extent that it is rapidly developing into a mass social movement.

In addition, the maker movement has been associated with a desire to openly critique

the dominant paradigms of technology design and consumption, which suggests that

makers are well positioned to engage in political discourse regarding designed

obsolescence and its environmental consequences.

In these ways, the emergence of maker discourse opens up new avenues for

approaching SID. Rather than expecting all change to be initiated by (professional)

designers, the notion of maker as subject allows us to consider the agency of ordinarypeople in seeking sustainability through creative material practice and social and

political action. One implication is that HCI, as a field, can work to support such

efforts through the creation of resources for appropriation, hacking, etc. For example,

authors have proposed that HCI could help facilitate DIY repair and reuse through

the design of more flexible, transparent, modular systems (as opposed to fixed, easy-

to-use products,) or by creating new and better online platforms for the social

dissemination of DIY knowledge and resources.




~~ Libre version ~~

Although we are sympathetic to the opportunities presented by this line of thinking,

we are also wary of what may be obscured by overly celebratory rhetoric. In the

following sections, we discuss several ways that the current discourse surrounding

the maker limits our ability to talk about the political and economic contexts thatshape the problem of obsolescence.

Obscured Politics of Resisting Obsolescence4.3

As discussed earlier, the discourse of maker empowerment is constrained by its

limited vocabulary for politics and by discursive pressures that preference optimism

over criticism. As result, authors tend to praise the capabilities of makers, while

saying little about the ways they are governed, or constrained by structures of power.

In the context of SID, one consequence of this discursive pattern is that authors have

a tendency to praise the environmental benefits of activities such as repair and reuse,

while underestimating the significant difficulties that these practices entail.

Specifically, we argue that the rhetoric has resulted in an empirical blindness

towards the ways in which corporations are incentivized to actively inhibit repair and

reuse and compel obsolescence as a strategy for economic viability.One simple-but-useful model for thinking about governance is that introduced by

the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig [1999]. Lessig describes four types of forces that

regulate the actions of individuals: laws, social norms, the market, and architecture.

Each of these forces can be seen to propel obsolescence in varying degrees. For

instance, in the case of mobile phone consumption in the US, architecture drives

obsolescence in the form of regular changes to product form and functionality [Blevis,

2007]. Desire for the newest products is generated by media and advertising and

spread through the population via social norms in the form of fashion [Pan et al.,

2012]. The regular replacement of phones is further incentivized by the market in the

form of contract-based upgrade pricing schemes [Huang and Truong, 2008]. Finally,

the contract models are reinforced by architecture that locks phones to a specific

carrier and laws that prevent consumers from unlocking such as the U.S.’s Digital

Millennium Copyright Act. Many of these tactics are intentionally designed to inhibit

the sorts of activities in which makers are said to engage. The point here is that to

avoid participating in the rapid obsolescence of mobile phones, people will need to

find viable ways to resist or circumvent each of these forces. Moreover, different

forms of governance will be necessary to sufficiently support and propagate

alternative practices of renewal and reuse. Below, we describe several examples of

ways that corporations actively work to oppose practices of maintenance, repair and

reuse. These examples illustrate how the material practice of making is fraught with

issues of power and control that can put makers directly in conflict with corporate

interests.

First, companies use a variety of means to discourage users from modifying or

repairing technology. For example, the physical enclosures on digital devices are

often designed to be difficult to open and require special tools and skills in order toaccess and replace internal components. Wakkary et al [2013] argue that the practice

of everyday repair is constrained by the availability of household tools; thus the need

for specialized tools effectively excludes digital devices from the practice. The use of

special Pentalobe screws in recent Apple products—rather than more common

Phillips style—is one example of how external hardware design is used to create a

barrier that discourages ordinary users from engaging in repair or modification. Kyle

Wiens, the CEO of online tool distributor iFixit.com, has publicly criticized this




~~ Libre version ~~

design move2, and his site sells an “iPhone liberation kit” for users to replace the

Pentalobe screws with Phillips.

Restrictive design measures are also implemented via software. For example,

Jackson et al. [2012] observe that mobile phone repair in Namibia is hindered by thefact that “most phones do not allow easy access to manipulate or reset foundational

software settings”, a problem that is only overcome through hacking tactics [p. 112].

Companies also use legal mechanisms to prohibit or tightly control the repair of

devices. For example, warranties are often voided if a user attempts to open the

enclosure of their device. Repair manuals are copyrighted and sold only to certified

technicians for high prices. iFixit is attempting to organize opposition to these and

other practices in the form of public and political advocacy for the “right to repair”3.

Even if users are able to keep digital hardware in working order, the devices are

often eventually made obsolete through problems of software compatibility. For

example, Huh et al. [2009] describe how HP discontinued support for its DOS-based

PDA following the release of the Windows CE OS. Users who were committed to the

DOS platform had to exert “tremendous effort” just to maintain basic functionality in

the device [Huh, 2009, p. 2]. Another example is Apple’s regular updates to its tightlycontrolled iOS software. Users are prompted to accept the latest updates for security

reasons and in order to the use the latest apps. However, in some cases, users of

older devices have found that updates seriously degrade their performance speed4.

Once a user has updated, it is impossible to revert back to an earlier version using

Apple’s software; the only way to do so is to install third party hack software to

“jailbreak” the device (voiding the warranty in the process). Thus, while the

discourse praises making in its potential to inspire long-term use and care, current

industry practices make this extremely difficult to achieve with digital products.

DiSalvo et al. [2010, p. 1980] highlight this problem as an unresolved issue for SID

research, but to our knowledge, it has yet to receive much attention in the discourse.

Companies also go to great lengths to discourage reuse. As mentioned above, Huang

et al. [2009] found that the industry practice of locking mobile phones to a specific

carrier is the primary factor that deters transfer of ownership in the United States.In addition to preventing reuse, the locks also work to reinforce two-year service

contracts, compelling users to wait out the duration until they are in position to

renew for a new discounted phone. In this way, the combination of locking and

contracts helps the carrier retain customers and helps the device manufacture to

ensure high turnover of devices. This tactic has proven so beneficial to the industry

that companies began using DMCA, the controversial copyright legislation, to

successfully sue individuals who attempt to unlock phones. This in turn has led to

the development of a currently ongoing public debate5 over the legality of unlocking

that has involved the White House, FCC, Library of Congress, and Congress.

These examples illustrate the extent to which makers are faced with material,

economic, and legal barriers that hinder their ability to practice repair and reuse.

These barriers are sometimes mentioned in the discourse, and the works cited above

are notable examples (Huh et al. [2009]; Huang et al [2009]; Jackson et al. [2012];

2 http://www.ifixit.com/blog/2011/01/20/apples-diabolical-plan-to-screw-your-iphone/3 http://ifixit.org/right4 http://lifehacker.com/how-to-speed-up-a-slow-aging-iphone-or-ipad-12429524035 For background, see: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/03/heres-how-legalize-phone-unlocking




~~ Libre version ~~

Wakkary et al, [2013]). However, we argue that, for the most part, researchers have

failed to acknowledge the full severity and complexity of these challenges, and that

this failure can be attributed to the discursive limitations described earlier. We have

noticed a rhetorical pattern such that when HCI authors discuss barriers to repairand reuse, the implications are commonly framed according to HCI’s typical means of

empowerment; i.e. opportunities for designers to better support makers. What is left

out of this formulation is an acknowledgement that the barriers in place have been

created as an intentional and coordinated effort to deter repair and reuse. Thus, the

common rhetorical frame is “how can HCI support making” rather than “how can

HCI attack obsolescence”—a move that obscures the insidiousness of obsolescence as

a pervasive business strategy and HCI’s complicit participation in it.

If repair and reuse pose a threat to industry profits, this suggests another way that

people who resist obsolescence may find themselves subjected to forms of power that

constrain their ability to develop as a “movement.” That is, in addition to measures

that inhibit repair and reuse, corporations may attempt to influence maker culture so

as to develop into a more corporate- and consumer-friendly practice. In fact, it is

reasonably imaginable that popular interest in creative DIY could be leveraged intofrequent and intense consumption of technology and materials. There is ample

historical precedence for this type of development. The history of advertising and

public relations is rife with examples in which subversive social movements are

successfully transformed into new market opportunities. For example, in the 1920’s,

so-called “father of PR”, Edward Bernays famously leveraged feminist activism as a

way to sell more cigarettes to women [Ewen, 1996]. In the 1960’s, advertisers

identified themselves with the youth counterculture as “a perfect model for consumer

subjectivity, intelligent and at war with the conformist past, and a cultural machine

for turning disgust with consumerism into the very fuel by which consumerism might

be accelerated” [Frank, 1997, p. 119]. Frank comments: “it is deeply ironic, then, that

a movement purporting to be a revolt against the sartorial codes of mass society

wound up providing such a powerful fuel for nothing other than obsolescence” [p.

197].There is evidence that a similar effort is already occurring in relation to DIY. As

Tanenbaum et al. [2013] point out, even if makers are critical of the infrastructure of

mass production, they cannot completely avoid a dependence on its products. In

recent years, corporate and government entities have become increasingly active in

the media and events of maker culture, either to market products to it or to influence

the skills available among potential labor for hire. For example, Tanenbaum et al.

[2013] note that “Maker Faire has controversially accepted funding from DARPA”

and that “authoritative publications in the DIY community, such as MAKE

magazine, [do] not provide a venue for ‘political’ topics” [p. 2610]. In some sense, HCI

research, with its corporate affiliation and preference for design implications, can be

seen as participating in the effort to transform DIY into a market opportunity.

It is important to note that the point of raising these issues and of discussing the

examples above is not to condemn or condone corporate motives in an ethical sense.

Rather our goal is to point out that in the current state of affairs, planned

obsolescence is such a predominant model for doing business that, in order to

compete in the marketplace, companies are incentivized to actively discourage

practices that extend the useful life of devices. We believe it is reasonable to imagine

an alternative future in which HCI and technology firms interface with maker

culture in a way that supports repair and reuse rather than obsolescence. For




~~ Libre version ~~

example, Lara Houston’s ethnography of mobile phone repair in Uganda suggests the

potential for a paradigm “where hard and software are left more radically open to

upgrade, and companies move towards a role of service provision” [Houston, 2014]. If

makers can provide evidence of a viable market for IT re-use, centered on notions oftinkering and repair, then it seems at least a priori possible that there is an economic

incentive for some corporation to serve that emerging market. But for that to work,

we have to openly admit that such a future is in some ways at odds with the current

market reality. Thus, if HCI wishes to address obsolescence by supporting makers, it

must first acknowledge the concrete ways in which the interests of makers and

corporate entities are brought into conflict, as well as the role of larger political and

economic structures shaping their positions.

In discussing the examples above, we have attempted to illustrate how makers who

wish to engage in repair and reuse cannot help but be drawn into legal and political

debates such as those over copyrights and the right to repair. If makers wish to

someday practice activities of appropriation and modification subjected to

substantially less material and legal opposition, they will need to engage in political

efforts to change the current economic situation. Recall that making has at timesbeen characterized as a form of resistance that critiques the values of mass

production and consumption. Thus, on the surface, rhetoric around maker culture

suggests optimism about its potential to inspire wide participation in public debates

about the design of technology and its environmental consequences. We also see

precedence for this type of development in the open-source software movement:

Coleman [2012] explains how software hackers’ desire to freely practice their craft

led them to become activists in legal debates over intellectual property. Moreover,

there is some evidence that advocacy under the banner of DIY is already forming, as

illustrated by the phone-unlocking and right-to-repair debates mentioned above.

However, as discussed in section 3.6, HCI rhetoric often relies on an individual

notion of empowerment and an anodyne conception of democracy. As a result, the

discourse has offered little discussion of specific ways that makers might participate

in public political efforts to oppose the paradigm of designed obsolescence. Moreover,there are very few examples in the discourse of makers who explicitly critique the

practice of planned obsolescence or of the environmental effects of products. In short,

one implication is that if researchers want to support making, in addition to

developing more functional, inexpensive, appropriable, hackable, usable (etc.)

technologies, they should also support the construction of a legal, aesthetic, and

socio-economically viable infrastructure in which making can more fully flourish.

The focus on individual self-reliance as opposed to public engagement may also be

symptomatic of underlying neo-liberal ideology, which Dourish [2010] argues

presents serious challenges to effecting change in the interest of sustainability. He

quotes Lewis [2008] on this point: “A central feature of the neoliberal focus on self-

regulation involves the displacement of questions of social responsibility away from

government and corporations onto individuals and their lifestyle ‘choices’” [Lewis,

2008, p. 226, as quoted in Dourish, 2010, p. 4]. Dourish comments that “framing

sustainability solely in terms of personal moral choice in a marketplace of

consumption options may obscure the broader political and regulatory questions that

attend significant change” [2010, p. 4].

We argue that by celebrating maker culture in terms of an individual and apolitical

form of empowerment, the discourse obscures the otherwise obvious challenges that

makers face and directs the conversation in a way that is counterproductive to the




~~ Libre version ~~

goal of subverting obsolescence, again understood not merely as bad for the

environment but also as antithetical to purported values of makers and maker

researchers in HCI alike. Due to these discursive limitations, there is a danger that

only the most corporate friendly aspects of DIY cultures will receive attention inresearch while more contestational practices are pushed to the margins. And as a

result, HCI’s desired linkage between “the maker” as construction of technology use

and meaningful social change runs the risk of being mere hype, an intellectual fad

that itself risks obsolescence. To avoid this outcome, we propose several ways that

HCI can work to widen the discourse below.

CONCLUSION5.

In the opening of this essay, we claimed that HCI researchers have in the past

decade constructed a subjectivity of information—the maker—and identified for it a

range of needs (which the HCI community is poised to identify and address) and

capabilities (which the HCI wants to support). As we have shown through our

analysis, research on the maker has framed these capabilities in terms of material

empowerment and the power to effect positive social change (commonly framed interms of democratization of technology, but also in other ways, including

sustainability). In short, HCI researchers (a) have proposed that we think about this

kind of technology use according to a new construction of the user: “the maker”; and

(b) have legitimated the field’s service to the maker based on the promise that this

maker will do social good. Based on trends in published research, public discourse

about technology, and common sources of funding for HCI (industry and

government), it seems safe to say that the first half of this agenda (a) has been a

success. The question the community should take on now is this: given that the

maker is legitimated as a certain kind of technology user, can this maker actually do

any social good? How will we know whether this maker has done more good than

harm? How exactly can our labor bring about more of the former than the latter?

Neither a celebratory rhetoric nor even playing to our traditional strengths (e.g.,

designing to improve usability and functionality) nor our emerging strengths (e.g.,

bringing more material sophistication into the design of information systems) will

answer these questions. In contrast to the optimism of much of HCI, our analysis of

making in relation to the social problem of sustainability reveals that makers are in

fact subjected to far more than technical issues, such as usability, as constraints to

their success: legal, economic, physical, and other constraints, some of which are

quite complex, also apply. (And beyond the social problem of sustainability, HCI

researchers need to be equally alert to the constraints imposed by other social

problems, such as economic injustice, racism, and sexism.)

Now, HCI cannot fix or intentionally transform any of these social structures. HCI

cannot sanctimoniously point fingers at corporations that seek economically viable

strategies to do their business, as if every CEO can merely snap her fingers and root

out obsolescence from her business model. Nor can HCI point fingers at racists andsexists and thereby eliminate digital divides or establish a utopian democracy. But

neither can HCI put its head in the sand and pretend that making will somehow be

exempt from these structures and their profound constraints. Therefore, merely

technical solutions (e.g., of usability or digital materiality) are not going to support

makers to bring about the social progress that researchers have promised they could.

Thus, we propose that in addition to continued work on technical solutions (such as

improving usability, cost, functionality, material considerations, etc.), HCI should




~~ Libre version ~~

lend its efforts to helping create sociotechnical solutions. In this we claim neither

that HCI alone can bring about the needed interventions, nor that we have

anticipated all the ways that HCI could contribute. We do believe that our discourse

analysis of the maker, specifically when set into dialogue with research onsustainable interaction design, brings into view certain strategies that could help.

An obvious starting point is the advocacy of new policies and laws that recognize the

social benefits of making and therefore that explicitly protect socially beneficial

maker practices. Analogously, the Fair Use Exception to U.S. Copyright Law

recognizes that education has social benefits and, in a limited but effective way,

allows educational institutions to use others’ intellectual property without subjecting

them to licensing fees. That makers are not merely physically, but legally prevented

from devising ways to extend the lifespans of electronic devices—whose components

are destructive to acquire and dispose of—is counterproductive not merely to makers

but also to the public good. HCI researchers are relatively well connected to industry

leaders and policymakers and thus have some agency in advocating for these kinds of

laws.

Another possible starting point is to better operationalize hacker values and, wherepossible and appropriate, to include them among core computational values.

Analogously, Computer Science enshrined interoperability as a core computational

value, even though it obviously mitigates against the sorts of proprietary systems

that strong business models can be built off of. And yet, industry has found

economically viable and publicly beneficial ways to work with interoperable systems.

Could HCI as a research community develop operationalizations of hackability and

integrate them into ISO standards, government policies, and undergraduate

textbooks?

HCI researchers will need partners for some of this work. Obviously, industry will

need business models that reward the design and marketing of hackable systems.

Public school education may need to change to create citizens with sensibilities and

skills for hacking. But the development of business models and education policy is

not HCI’s primary purpose or strength. Thus, part of our work is to create openingsthat allow our expertise to partner with other forms of expertise to achieve these

goals.

Perhaps even prior to acting on the opportunities HCI researchers have to

contribute to the changes to our sociotechnical world, we see opportunities for HCI

researchers to adjust our own discursive practices to position ourselves better for this

kind of work. One of the goals of discourse analysis generally is to reveal ways that

the discursive grammars in which scholars work sometimes foreclose whole areas of

statement or work. For a scholarly community, a key way this happens is through

practices of legitimation that recognize certain theories, methods, or domains as

important, timely, interesting, etc., and others as passé, fluff, or someone else’s

problem. The reflexive stance within/toward HCI advocated in recent years, e.g.,

[Dourish et al., 2004], is a start, and discourse analyses of key concepts (such as the

present research) contribute to such a stance.

Relatedly, it is increasingly clear that the anodyne uses of words like “democracy,”

“empowerment,” “participation” and “progress,” common in HCI research are no

longer adequate to our internal needs. Research in participatory design over the

decades has overwhelmingly shown how difficult it is in reality to achieve any of

these goals; as HCI authors and peer reviewers, we can be alert to the consequences

of casually throwing around terms like “democracy” and “empowerment,” i.e., that




~~ Libre version ~~

doing so likely contributes to neither. Among other things, we can improve the

sophistication with which we assess the extents to which a design project, users,

makers (etc.), are contributing towards and/or undermining these core values.

As a part of such a project, the community would benefit from more research thatseeks to understand the ideological complexity of making—if not making as a logical

abstraction, then making as it is embodied in concrete practices by actual people in

actual situations. How does making resist and also perpetuate various forms of

oppression and domination? Like most practices, making likely resists and

perpetuates forms of domination at the same time. What are the emancipatory

potentials of making, how do we work to support them, and how do we know when we

are successful? How can we unconceal from ourselves the ways that making

perpetuates values we do not stand for?

We continue to believe that making is an exciting development for HCI researchers,

and the individual users, social policies, and industry innovators whom we support.

Making has achieved a critical mass, in that researchers and the public alike take it

seriously and view it with excitement. By HCI’s own account, making also has

potential to do social good, but the precise mechanisms through which this willhappen need elucidation and sociotechnical support. We hope this study has shown

some ways that our standard ways of doing things in HCI introduce impediments to

that project, but also that this community already has the wherewithal to counter

these impediments and support makers beyond usability and material empowerment

to better achieve their potential to do social good.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was funded by NSF IIS Creative IT (#1002772) and the Intel Science and Technology Center

for Social Computing. We thank Kia Höök, our anonymous reviewers, and Eli Blevis for their feedback on

this work.

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