Democratizing technology: pleasure, utility and expressiveness in DIY and maker practice

By Theresa Jean Tanenbaum, Amanda M. Williams, Audrey Desjardins, Karen Tanenbaum. International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2013

478 citations recorded by the source corpus.

DIY, hacking, and craft have recently drawn attention in HCI and CSCW, largely as a collaborative and creative hobbyist practice. We shift the focus from the recreational elements of this practice to the ways in which it democratizes design and manufacturing. This democratized technological practice, we argue, unifies playfulness, utility, and expressiveness, relying on some industrial infrastructures while creating demand for new types of tools and literacies. Thriving on top of collaborative digital systems, the Maker movement both implicates and impacts professional designers. As users move more towards personalization and reappropriation, new design opportunities are created for HCI.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/155379ab94e87ee9cf7648eb53dfc8749887eee7

Citations in the corpus

• Tensile strength of commercial polymer materials for fused filament fabrication 3D printing (2017, unknown): “This growth is being fueled at the consumer level because 3D printers have been proven to be an economically beneficial purchase for the developed-world middle-class [8] and those in the maker community [11-13].”
• The effects of PLA color on material properties of 3-D printed components (2015, unknown): “In addition, the appeal of democratized manufacturing has been moving from an exclusively hobbyist idea to become more commonplace [10].”