The Maker Movement is an emerging and developing sub-culture that values the tinkering, hacking, re-making, and creating of technical artifacts. Makers are rich in creative confidence, with expertise in the ability to learn new skills as needed rather than already possessing immediate solutions to the problems that they encounter.2 Creative confidence, in terms of Design Thinking, can be summed up as a failure positive mode of learning where the creator trusts in their own ability to solve problems.3 This confidence comes from an understanding that problems have many solutions, and through practical experience, one can learn those solutions. Making comes from an imaginative, creative mind-space, and is often done outside the confines
of established engineering education curricular activities.4 Making has a do-it-yourself ethos and is historically rooted in efforts like Popular Mechanics magazine who demystified everyday stuff for hobbyists and the Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools 5 who surveyed everyday tools for the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Additional real-world touchstones are the growth of Radio Shack stores and the 1980s television program MacGyver where the lead character would resolve each episode’s predicament by fashioning an escape plan out of found objects.6 Technology and sharing of information via the Internet has greatly increased the ability for smaller communities with shared interests to coalesce and grow.
The label “Maker” is a self-determined one assigned by affinity to or involvement in a larger Maker community. Both our interviewees as well as the founder of MAKE Magazine, Dale Dougherty, would suggest that all people can be makers, with self-identification as a Maker and the desire to tinker being the only real criteria.7 Makers are do-it-yourself-minded individuals participating in informal communities (doing-it-with-others) that support and celebrate building and prototyping technical proof-of-concept exploration and ad-hoc product development. A Maker is a modern-day tinkerer and hands-on doer and fashioner of stuff. The range of expertise could be large but novices and experts alike share an enthusiasm and appreciation for building and creation. Individuals and groups embark on projects of all sorts, led primarily by their interests and curiosities, informed by their skills or the skills they want to learn. For example, one might make creative efforts like fire-breathing robots as performance art, combining contributions from community members with electrical, mechanical and embedded systems know-how. Makers exemplify the collaborative model of additive innovation by seeking and offering inspiration in their community, sharing and learning recipes with others, iterating on their own designs, and sharing artifacts of their designs back with the community to inspire others.8
Makers participate in communities of practice,9 gathering with like-minded individuals and groups to learn skills and share interests and affinities. They populate maker spaces and hacker spaces10 and use commercial ventures like Tech Shop11 to gather with other Makers. A significant part of such participation is to benefit from opportunities to continue learn from, teach and mentor other Makers.