Maker Culture and Society

Abstract

Maker culture is a subculture based on crafts and the making, repairing, and altering of physical objects, and is particularly associated with modern technologies like 3D printing and open-source hardware. A descendent of the Arts and Crafts Movement and DIY culture, and part of a larger cultural trend favoring hands-on activities and skilled labor over outsourcing labor to professionals, maker culture revolves around makerspaces, public or semi-public spaces of shared equipment and skills. Though the culture itself is predominantly male, making encompasses numerous crafts like quilting and needlepoint that are more frequently pursued by women.

Overview

Maker culture is a subculture centered on making and tinkering with physical objects, especially electronics and other modern technologies but including older skills like woodworking and metalworking. Culturally, maker culture is related to DIY culture, hacker culture, the open-source movement, and the rise of artisan industries in the twenty-first century. It emphasizes active learning and "cookbooks," meaning specific instructions for building a given thing that can be followed successfully by anyone with a minimum skill set and comprehension level.

Educators have developed an interest in maker culture as a source of pedagogical tools. Articles published in Make Magazine demonstrate the variety of interests in maker culture: using a motion control camera slider to capture time-lapse video, hacking e-paper, building a lighting detector, crafting a turkey-shaped centerpiece from fabrics, and using an Altoids tin to prevent electronic hacking of car doors equipped with keyless entry.

Maker culture often centers around a makerspace set aside for the sharing of equipment and skills, and certain ethical principles. Makers emphasize active learning and self-sufficiency—the individual seeking out hands-on knowledge for themselves, asking others for instruction or tips rather than to do the work for them. There is also a frequent emphasis on more sustainable practices, including upcycling older equipment or discarded materials. As makerspaces indicate, maker culture is influenced by older collaborative economies like food coops and car-sharing. The National Maker Faire, a temporary large-scale makerspace with speakers and vendors, has been held annually since 2006. The website Boing Boing and its founder Cory Doctorow have also been significant promoters of maker culture, while websites like Thingiverse have helped disseminate open-source hardware designs.

Further Insights

Arts and Crafts. Maker culture's roots are in the Arts and Crafts Movement that began in mid-nineteenth century Britain as a revival of skilled labor and handmade goods. The movement was a reaction to factory production and spread throughout Europe, North America, and Japan into the 1920s. The Arts and Crafts Movement advocated for economic and social reforms in line with anti-industrialism, and contributed revivals of romantic and folk styles in the fine arts until the rise of Modernism in the 1930s. But the movement continued for several decades thereafter, and continued to inform town planning and architecture. The American Craftsman or Craftsman style house was the most popular in new American homes from about 1910 to 1925 and continued to be influential; bungalow and Mission Revival homes, as well as many Tudor and Federation style homes, remain as landmarks of the Arts and Crafts Movement's influence, while Frank Lloyd Wright became its best-known architect.

The anti-industrialism of the Arts and Crafts Movement finds its analogue in the anti-consumerism and anti-professionalism of the DIY movement, with the communes and other intentional communities of the 1950s and 1960s as one of the bridges linking them. In these self-sufficient communities, skills that modern America was outsourcing to professionals, skilled laborers, and businesses—cooking and baking, carpentry, plumbing, gardening, farming, auto repair, education, even home construction—had to be learned by individuals in order to contribute to their small communities.

While the Arts and Crafts Movement was in at least some senses anti-modern, the concerns of many communes were more pragmatic, rejecting not necessarily modern innovations themselves so much as the need to participate in the larger mainstream culture. DIY culture owed a little to each. Originating in or alongside the punk subculture of the 1970s, DIY—"do it yourself"—emphasized self-sufficiency, either in a specific area or as a lifestyle. The DIY music of punk eschewed the need for music professionals: music was home-recorded, "concerts" could be held in neighbors' basements or barns, and instruments could be played without significant technical skill. Many of the major bands of the culture began with at least one member having no particular skill at all on their instrument, learning it as they went.

Computers. Concurrent with the DIY culture of the 1970s, the computer hobbyist community was taking advantage of recent advances in computer technology that made faster, more powerful computing cheaper than ever before. Computer "hobby kits" had been sold since the 1950s, consisting of the electronic components necessary for an interested and skilled hobbyist to build a computer at home. In the 1970s, computing became sophisticated to the point that hobbyists could make computers that were useful enough to be sold commercially. The hobbyist community was responsible for the microcomputer revolution that, in the subsequent decade, made the personal computer a common household item. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, founders of Apple Computers, were members of the hobbyist community, as was Microsoft's Bill Gates. Teenagers and college students were able to hone their skills to a level beyond what many professionals possessed.

The computer hobbyist community was naturally closely related to the hacker culture at MIT, which in the 1960s was one of a small number of academic centers intimately interconnected with the computer industry. Since at least the 1960s, and probably earlier, a "hack" at MIT has been a specific kind of prank characterized by playfulness, creativity, or technical difficulty—as well as anonymity. Famous hacks included burning the letters MIT into the field in the middle of a Harvard-Yale football game, taking apart and reassembling a tractor in the dean's office, and stranding a police car on top of the campus's Great Dome. Hacking in this sense initially had nothing to do with computers; rather, this prankster sense of the term and culture carried over into computer culture, where it was applied to clever computer users who exploited software and hardware limitations toward, traditionally, playful ends.

Radio Shack, a chain of electronics stores, played a major role in the development of maker culture. Founded in 1921 to sell radio parts to the radio hobbyist community, itself the antecedent to computer hobbyists, by the 1080s Radio Shack had hundreds of stores and carried thousands of electronics goods and parts. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, in particular, Radio Shack supplied makers around the country with electronics parts, and encouraged technology skill development in children through the sales of child-appropriate hobby kits. Children could build their own radios, doorbells, and electronic musical instruments; adults could build electronics to install in their homes or cars, as well as jury-rigging computers they assembled themselves from parts.

Cuisine. Another movement closely related to the rise of maker culture is the revolution in cooking and consumables that transpired in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Fueled in large part by the Internet and concerns about personal health and sustainability, American kitchens embraced their central role in both family and social gatherings. As the Arts and Crafts Movement reacted against factory production of household goods, "foodies" reacted against the industrial canning and packaging of food and beverages, opting instead for high-end coffee beans, microbrews, boutique chocolate, and organically grown meat and produce. Cooks drew inspiration from the Slow Food and local food movements and a proliferation of farmers' markets.

Charcuterie (the preparation of meats, as in sausages and pates) and artisanal bread baking, which had rarely featured in home kitchens since before World War II, flourished as hobbies. More home cooks began making their own yogurt, cheese, and fermented foods like pickles or kimchi. Equipment and ingredients once found only in professional kitchens became available in hobbyist models or quantities for the first time.

The "foodie movement" of the twenty-first century changed American tastes and food practices more dramatically than anything since the introduction of the microwave oven. Most important, like maker culture, DIY culture, and the Arts and Crafts Movement, it was the first significant shift in cooking that moved away from labor-saving and labor-shifting, and instead encouraged cooks to devote more time and attention to their food.

Issues

Handicrafts are objects created by hand or using simple tools. Now often specialized skills or hobbies, handicrafts once made up most of the manufacturing sector: "manufacture" literally means "to make by hand." Some of the common handicrafts include quilting, embroidery, cross-stitch, crochet, needlepoint, carpentry, glassblowing, metalwork, pottery, woodworking, and scrapbooking. Note that a number of these crafts are traditionally female-coded—that is, things like quilting and needlepoint were traditionally grouped with the work done by women, especially mothers and homemakers, whereas crafts like metalwork and carpentry were traditionally trades, practiced by men outside the home as their paid occupation.

The gender defined differences among different kinds of crafts has nothing to do with inherent characteristics of the crafts themselves, but with the social, cultural, and economic norms that created the context surrounding them. Nevertheless, maker culture, and discourse about maker culture, is sometimes criticized for focusing on male-coded crafts. While Make magazine, the best-known and most popular magazine covering maker culture, provides coverage to all kinds of crafts, a survey the magazine conducted in 2012 found that 80 percent of respondents were men, with a median age of 44 and a median household income of $106,000. Arguably, this bears less on the real demographics of "maker culture" and more on the demographics of who self-identifies as a maker—a subset that leaves out many of the women engaged in quilting, cross-stitch, and other fabrics crafts, all of which have enjoyed a revival in the twenty-first century.

Some of this disparity between who is actually a maker in the United States and who is identified as a maker may be due to the centering of maker culture on makerspaces, also known as hackerspaces or fab (fabrication) labs. Makerspaces are typically community-operated, often nonprofits, and are open to the public for the purpose of sharing equipment and skills. Originally focused on computer equipment, when hackerspaces were the norm of makerspaces, makerspaces now often include machine shops, woodworking equipment, electronic instrumentation, large-format printers, laser cutters, and 3D printers. While there is nothing about these activities that would explain gender disparity, such cultures are notoriously male dominated.

Just as computer hackers often supported the open-source software movement—the creation and advocacy of software that is free to use and modify—so has the maker movement supported open-source hardware, consisting of freely available schematics and other design data for building equipment, which may (depending on the type of equipment) run open-source software. The costs for buying equipment for makerspaces is often crowd-funded, using services like Kickstarter, in addition to charging membership fees. Some makerspaces are publicly funded; since the 2010s, some public and academic libraries have offered makerspaces, including the Idaho Commission for Libraries and the Louisville Free Public Library.

Terms & Concepts

Crafts: A profession or hobby that requires skilled labor; in particular used to describe the small-scale production, repair, or maintenance of goods.

DIY: "Do It Yourself," an anti-consumerist ethic and subculture that emphasizes self-sufficiency; while especially applied to manual labor and skilled crafts that can be self-taught, the punk and riot grrl music scenes were deeply impacted by the DIY principle, from shows held in private residences and recordings made with home equipment to the riot grrl movement's embrace of cheaply produced periodicals called zines.

Hacker Culture: The subculture of playful exploitation of computer software systems; within the hacker community, "cracker" has long been the preferred term for the more familiar sense of hacker as in someone who exploits weaknesses in computer security systems. The more neutral sense of "hacker" is related to the tradition of anonymous pranks on the MIT campus, which dates to at least the 1960s.

Maker Culture, Maker Movement: Philosophically related to hacker culture, maker culture revolved around the making or transformation of physical goods, sometimes posited as a reaction to the increasing shift of activity in mainstream America from the physical to the digital.

Maker Space or Makerspace: A space set aside for making or tinkering with physical objects, especially one open to multiple people (either the general public or members), where tools, ideas, and skills are freely shared.

Upcycle: The reuse of materials, whether used/broken goods or by-products of other processes, to create more valuable goods; sculptures and mixed media using found objects, refurbishing electronics, and using industrial textile waste as a base material for clothing or other textile goods are all typical examples.

Bibliography

Forest, C. R., Moore, R. A., Jariwala, A. S., Fasse, B. B., Linsey, J., Newstetter, W., & ... Quintero, C. (2014). The invention studio: A university maker space and culture. Advances in Engineering Education, 4(2), 1–32.

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Cohen, J. J., Monty Jones, W. J., Smith, S. S., & Calandra, B. B. (2017). Makification: Towards a framework for leveraging the maker movement in formal education. Journal of Educational Multimedia & Hypermedia, 26(3), 217–229.

Compton, E., & Walker, S. (2014). Idaho libraries creating a maker culture. Children & Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children, 12(3), 3–4.

Dixon, N., Ward, M., & Phetteplace, E. (2014). The maker movement and the Louisville Free Public Library. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 54(1), 17–19.

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"There simply is no unified hacker movement." Why we should consider the plurality of hacker and maker cultures: Sebastian Kubitschko in conversation with Annika Richterich and Karin Wenz. (2017). Digital Culture & Society, 3(1), 185–195.

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Suggested Reading

Hepp, A. (2016). Pioneer communities: Collective actors in deep mediatisation. Media, Culture & Society, 38(6), 918–933. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=117794380&site=ehost-live

Merrill, B. (2015). Recommended if you like: Scenes, maker culture, and music sociology. Symbolic Interaction, 38(2), 309–311. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=102289786&site=ehost-live

Niemeyer, D. J., & Gerber, H. R. (2015). Maker culture and Minecraft: Implications for the future of learning. Educational Media International, 52(3), 216–226.

Qunzhen, Q. (2017). Maker, maker space and maker culture construction. Asian Agricultural Research, 9(1), 87–90.

St John, G. (2018). Civilised tribalism: Burning man, event-tribes and maker culture. Cultural Sociology, 12(1), 3–21. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=127764384&site=ehost-live

Wen, W. (2017). Making in China: Is maker culture changing China's creative landscape? International Journal of Cultural Studies, 20(4), 343–360.