Research on the Adoption of the Maker Identity in a Small-Town Hackerspace
* Research: Becoming Makers: Hackerspace Member Habits, Values, and Identities. By Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell. Journal of Peer Production, Issue #5: Shared Machine Shops,
Summary
1.
"This paper explores factors that lead to individuals’ adoption of the maker identity reproduced by a small-town hackerspace. This paper presents the findings of a 15-month ethnography of the hackerspace and a series of targeted interviews focused on the self-made tools of that hackerspace. These findings indicate that the formation of our subjects’ maker identities are shaped heavily by the individual’s ability to: use and extend tools; adopt an adhocist attitude toward projects and materials; and engage with the broader maker community. We also consider how a maker identity manifests itself in both making processes and visual stylizations of projects. We present and explore the formative roles of materials, the significances of imprecise tactics such as “futzing,” and the role of the hackerspace as a special place where “normal” attitudes and practices are suspended in favor of an alternative set."
2.
"The present work contributes to the growing body of research on making through an empirical study of the development of the maker identity shared by members of a small town hackerspace. We access this identity formation through a long-term engagement with the hackerspace, as well as through targeted interviews focused on the ad hoc production tools fashioned by the hackerspace’s members. These tools are often lightweight, off-beat, inexpensive, unpolished, and pragmatic. They showcase makers’ spontaneity, intuition, style, and their familiarity with the hackerspace and the materials, tools, and other resources it has to offer. Often they highlight their makers’ frustration with the limits of existing tools and therefore they reflect not only purposefulness but also an expression of the maker in that moment. Interestingly, we have found that in some cases what hackers call “tools” are not even tools at all, at least not in any obvious sense, which suggests that among other things hacking involves re-conceptualizing certain basic vocabulary. These self-made tools provide a unique level of access to understanding more deeply the individual’s claims to the maker identity. We argue that the formation of this maker identity is informed by three primary factors in this hackerspace: 1) the development of a tool and material sensibility; 2) the cultivation of an adhocist attitude as an approach to making in general; and 3) engagement with the maker community, both in the space and on a larger scale."
Excerpts
Maker Identity
By Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell:
What is "a 'Maker Identity: With this, we refer to a plurality of identifications with the modern maker movement, from people who perform DIY home repair and craft activities, to people who subscribe to Make magazine or regularly peruse Instructables.com and imagine building projects, even if they never do. Our conceptualization of the maker identity is influenced by related characterizations described as the Expert Amateur (Kuznetsov & Paulos 2010), the Everyday Designer (Wakkary & Tanenbaum 2009), Makers (Anderson, 2012), and Hackers (Levy, 2010). Each of these identities describes people who build things for themselves, sometimes as part of an anti-consumerism statement, but often for a practical outcome. We view each of these identities as variant formulations of a potential maker identity, which we define throughout this paper as incorporating a collection of attitudes, skills, behaviors, practices, and expressions around DIY activities.
We distinguish the more general maker identity from what we refer to as an “established” maker. Maker-ness manifests in degrees, which range from one who occasionally participates in DIY activities and can consider herself a maker, to one who regularly and actively creates her own situations for DIY activities, who we would consider to be more established." (http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewed-articles/becoming-makers-hackerspace-member-habits-values-and-identities/)
Tools
By Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell:
"This study relies on three separate formulations of “tool.” The first is our everyday understanding of “tool,” which we used early on to recognize the importance of the roles tools, specifically homemade tools, played in the space. We saw this kind of making as one that separated the kinds of making found in the hackerspace from forms that can exist easily outside of the space and, therefore, as a way in to investigating the process of becoming an established maker in this context. In this operational definition, an artifact is a tool if it is used in a process of creation separate from its own creation. In other words, we identified these tools based on whether they were used by the maker to create other artifacts.
The second formulation of “tool” is based on an emic account of the concept from the hackers themselves. When we began interviewing the members about the tools they have created in the space, we were careful not to impose our interpretations of what constitutes a tool, instead allowing them to interpret what “tool” meant for them and judge which of their projects would count. This allowed us to expand on our own notion of “tool” while staying true to an insider’s perspective of the concept. As noted in the introduction, the emic account of “tool” surprised us, because it seemed much more inclusive than we anticipated.
This surprise prompted us to consider formulations of “tool” available in the research literature, which constitutes our third formulation. This literature includes works about tools from sociology, education, architecture, art, critical theory, and information design. Tools are instruments we encounter and use to accomplish tasks. Art historian Howard Risatti (2007) defines tools as “something used directly by the hand with an intention to make something by doing something to material” (49-50, emphasis in original). They are instrumental and have a pragmatic function, since they are used to make other things. A tool to McCullough (1988) is “a moving entity whose use is initiated and actively guided by a human being, for whom it acts as an extension, toward a specific purpose” (68). Tools are manually operated and are in Risatti’s words, “kinetically dependent” in that they require us or something else to activate their function (2007, 51). When such an operation stops, tools cease to work; accordingly, a tool is “something with a ‘tooling’ potential and that a thing becomes a tool in the process of being put into action, of being put to ‘work’” (Risatti 2007, 43, emphasis in original). Synthesizing, these formulations suggest that tools are material objects that are put to work through intentional human action, and that their potential is latent except when they are used.
Such a description of tools reveals three additional characteristics about the relationship between tools and tool users: that tools direct our sensual engagement, that they require practice for mastery, and that identifying the right tools for the tasks at hand demands reasoned judgment. These activities are necessarily context and medium-dependent. As an example, consider a well-equipped shed and in exactly what ways it is conducive to gardening. Through practice, a gardener knows how to operate a single tool for a particular medium, and when necessary, can select appropriately a combination of different instruments (e.g., lopping shears, pole pruners, hedge shears, and pruning saws, etc.) to trim overgrown branches. For McCullough (1988), tools “come to stand for the processes. This symbolic aspect of tools may help you clarify your work…Holding a tool helps you inhabit a task” (61). There is a reciprocal relationship between work and the tools that are used to make it (Gelber 1997).
Tools are also prosthetic, because they extend and enhance human capabilities. Sennett (2008) makes a distinction between replicant and robot tools. Replicant tools mimic human abilities while supplementing and amplifying them in specific ways. A spatula is a replicant tool because it expands our capacity for heat tolerance, allowing us to handle food beyond the body’s natural ability, while nonetheless mimicking the manual behavior of flipping and arranging objects on a surface. A robot tool is “ourselves enlarged: It is stronger, works faster, and never tires” (Sennett 2008, 84-85). A car can be seen as a robot tool because its power moves us quickly, and we tire of riding in it far sooner than it tires of transporting us.
In addition to extending our physical capabilities, tools also position us in the social world. As Illich (1980) writes, “An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters…To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning” (22). Tools are thus future orienting, providing mechanisms for users to envision and then to bring about future worlds.
Summarizing this research, tools connect human understanding to the material world through the possibility of change; they extend or augment, sometimes radically, human capabilities; they require us to change our physical behaviors, skills of imagination, and judgment to learn how to use them well; and, if all of this happens, they empower us to envision and pursue new futures. We argue that the development of this kind of tool sensibility is an integral part of becoming a maker, as it has a profound impact on an individual’s perception of their abilities. Research on hacker’s and maker’s tool use can reveal much about how an individual develops such an identity, and because, as we will demonstrate, self-made tools are especially expressive of their makers, their creation and use is an especially fruitful area for empirical inquiry." (http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewed-articles/becoming-makers-hackerspace-member-habits-values-and-identities/)
Adhocism
By Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell:
"Our interest in the concept of adhocism began as the result of our observations in the hackerspace, where maker activities could be characterized as informal and ad hoc. Rather than plan an entire project, they often relied on an assumption that they would be able to solve problems as they arose, and worked with more generalized guidelines informed by their experiences in the hackerspace. After many months of ethnographic work and the building of our emic understanding of the ad hoc activities in the space, we began to develop an etic understanding of adhocism, which we were then able to use as another lens for studying the tool making activities and behaviors of the makers.
Architectural theorist Charles Jencks and architect Nathan Silver (2013) define adhocism as “a principle of action having speed or economy and purpose or utility, and it prospers like most hybrids on the edge of respectability” (vii). Throughout their book, adhocism is presented simultaneously as a legitimate production strategy and as its own product style for finished products, be they architectural designs or NASA’s space equipment. As a production strategy, adhocism focuses on efficiency, economy, approximation, adaptability, and pragmatism, often drawing on “an available system in a new way to solve a problem quickly and efficiently” (Jencks & Silver 2013, vii). As a product style, adhocism visually foregrounds the juxtaposition of these available systems, making explicit their connections and differences while showcasing their hybridity. Our conception of adhocism for this study focuses primarily on the former characterization. It is also influenced by the work of Lucy Suchman (1987), enabling a consideration of the situatedness of the maker’s actions without necessarily labeling the adhocism we observe in those actions as intentional. The notion of adhocism as revealed in this hackerspace is closely associated with the maker’s judgment throughout the making process—the judgment required to choose appropriate tools or methods to complete the project, the judgment used to decide whether to purchase or make a required piece of the project, and the judgment used to determine if the maker has the required competencies to complete the project. An adhocist project is not planned out ahead of time, but carries the assumption that each piece of the problem will be figured out as it becomes important. There is an overall sense of the big picture of the project, but it is seldom expressed as more than just a sense. As we have seen throughout this study, the adhocist attitude common to many of the projects we investigated is more than simply an approach but is also an identity expression: “we work in this way because we can.” (http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewed-articles/becoming-makers-hackerspace-member-habits-values-and-identities/)
From the Concluding Discussion
By Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell:
"In this article we have presented one kind of maker out of many possible variations, focusing on the process these individuals go through to develop and cultivate their “maker-ness.” We presented three primary concepts that stand out in our data as primary drivers of the formation of a maker identity: the development of a tool and material sensibility that relies on an extensive engagement and practice with tools and materials to learn how to use them well, how to judge which tools are appropriate for which situations, and to understand how to use available materials appropriately; the cultivation of an adhocist attitude, which involves learning to trust one’s intuitions and judgments through a maker process and adopting practical approach to project building and learning; and developing a sense of community engagement with other makers. These characteristics set “established” makers apart from the more generalized kind of maker, who can adopt the identity after their first Instructables walkthrough or the first time they learn to use a sewing machine. What we have found is that the process of becoming such an established maker seems to rely less on inherent abilities, skills, or intelligence per se, and more on adopting an outlook about one’s agency. We believe this process of becoming an “established” maker can be usefully applied to other situations, particularly those that involve individuals who have not traditionally felt empowered. To instill such a creative sensibility, along with the practical skills to act on it, appears to be one of the primary purposes of the hackerspace—an intriguing idea for researchers seeking to understand these spaces and extend their creative practices beyond their walls." (http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewed-articles/becoming-makers-hackerspace-member-habits-values-and-identities/)