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 fields 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:

1. INTRODUCTION

Since the emergence of HCI as a discipline, the user has played a central role in the
fields theory and rhetoric. Drawing on Foucaults theory of discourse, Cooper and
Bowers [1995] argue that the user can be seen as a key discursive construct used to
legitimate the fields 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-yetunderstood 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 that
users, as cognitive agents, could be best understood and represented by Cognitive
Psychologyin 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.
Authors addresses: D. Roedl, S. Bardzell, and J. Bardzell. School of Informatics and Computing. Indiana,
University, Bloomington; email: droedl@indiana.edu
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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. HCIs 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 left
angry, 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 its discursive turn toward social actors. They found
that while these texts criticized the nave 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 this
discursive 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 HCIs
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 HCIs
traditional conception of the user. This discourse is also often accompanied by
claims that the maker, as a specific configuration of a technological subject, is
particularly 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

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.
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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/or
more 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 HCIs core discursive construct. We ask, how does the
maker reframe HCIs 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 HCIs 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, relevantthat is, what counts as a contribution. Our choice to
focus on making in relation to sustainability helps scope and lend coherence to our
inquiry, while also foregrounding one instance of the central underlying discursive
relationthe maker and its purported connection to social progressthat
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 problemsand 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 cant, 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-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).
2. METHODOLOGY

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
Foucaults 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 systematically

form 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 ones 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 studiessuch as the underlying ideologies and forms of
privilege that making perpetuatesare 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 exclusionand 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 nave 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 HCIs rhetoric
about 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 and
consequences 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 our
work. 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 particularthat 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 HCIs 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. For
example, 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 our
analysis. 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 the
importance 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.
3. THE MAKER IN HCI DISCOURSE

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 progress
shapes 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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3.1 Genealogy of Key Terms and Themes

We begin with a genealogy of how the rhetorical move from users to makers has
emerged in HCIthat 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 necessarily
interpretative, 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 nave.
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 digital
materials 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 HCIs notion of the nave 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
Suchmans 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
appropriabilitythe goal of designing flexible technological systems that support
processes 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 theoretical
concepts 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 the
development 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 vocabulariesor those borrowed from
craft and appropriation studiesto 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 goods
are 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 second
notion 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 HCIs notion of the nave
user. 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.
3.2 Making and the Rhetoric of Technoscientific Progress

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 the
maker as new and alternative constituency for HCI (and as a critique of usercentered design), it does so by appealing to HCIs 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.
3.3 Makers as Materially Empowered Subjects

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], carmodding [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 to
technology.
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 invest
time 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 objects 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 ones sense of
self [Akah and Bardzell, 2010, p. 4022]. Rosner and Bean [2009] observe that
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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 greater
attachment 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 objects perceived meaning
and beauty [p. 23:14]. This is related to Nelson and Stoltermans [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 ones identity.
3.4 Makers as Socially Progressive Subjects

Here we describe several ways in which maker culture is characterized as a social

movement 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 ones 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 maker
culture 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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Todays 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 thoughit
strengthens and highlights interconnectedness and community fabric [p. 245]. Lowcost, 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 a
design can easily be shared, studied, produced, and further modified or combined. It stands in
contrast to both craft processes, in which modifications likely dont 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, or
appropriation 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 19th 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: todays DIY cultures reflect the anti-consumerism,
rebelliousness, and creativity of earlier DIY initiatives, supporting the ideology that
people 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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D. Roedl et al.

[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. For
example, 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 and
homogeneity. 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.
3.5 The Reconfigured Role of HCI

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 nave 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 to
suit their purposes, independent ofand sometimes in direct opposition tothe
designers 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 represented
through 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 Engineeringa collection of disciplines all
centrally concerned with materiality, which again is one of the defining features of
HCIs maker.
3.6 Criticism Obscured by Celebratory Rhetoric

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 mechanisms
through 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 deemphasized, by the pressure to adhere to HCIs 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 by
celebrating 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 HCIs 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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D. Roedl et al.

sense. The common theme is that acts of making empower individuals to develop
technological skills, personalize their products, and to experience a sense of selfsufficiency. 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 womens labor compared to
mens, or the innovations of makers in the West vs. Asia or Africa?
Research on making often doesnt 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 onand with some energyis the
material dimensions of making. We already observed that many of the disciplines
brought into HCI to support makingMaterial Culture, Hardware Engineering,
Crafts, and Feminismall 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 resourcesincluding physical materials, maker
magazines, and so forthare 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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4. THE MAKER AS SUBJECT OF DESIGNED OBSOLESCENCE

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 one
another and suggest ways that each can move beyond its current discursive
limitations.
4.1 Designed Obsolescence and Critiques of the User

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 Apples 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
designs entanglements with capitalist economics and consumer culture. These
critiques call into question HCIs 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 fields 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 service
of 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 Borgmanns [1984] notion of the device
paradigm to critique HCIs 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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D. Roedl et al.

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 are
constantly 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 HCIs 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 HCIs 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 Brynjarsdottir 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 HCIs 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 usercentered 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 tends
to obscure the ways that peoples 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.
4.2 Making as Resistance to Obsolescence

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 direct
contrast 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 of
invention 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 manufacturers 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 ordinary
people 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, easyto-use products,) or by creating new and better online platforms for the social
dissemination of DIY knowledge and resources.
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D. Roedl et al.

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 that
shape the problem of obsolescence.
4.3 Obscured Politics of Resisting Obsolescence

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 to
access 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 productsrather than more common
Phillips styleis 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
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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 the
fact 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 repair3.
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 Apples regular updates to its tightly
controlled 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
Apples 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];

http://www.ifixit.com/blog/2011/01/20/apples-diabolical-plan-to-screw-your-iphone/
http://ifixit.org/right
4
http://lifehacker.com/how-to-speed-up-a-slow-aging-iphone-or-ipad-1242952403
5
For background, see: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/03/heres-how-legalize-phone-unlocking
3

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D. Roedl et al.

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 repair
and reuse, the implications are commonly framed according to HCIs 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 obsolescencea move that obscures the insidiousness of obsolescence as
a pervasive business strategy and HCIs 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 into
frequent 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 1920s,
so-called father of PR, Edward Bernays famously leveraged feminist activism as a
way to sell more cigarettes to women [Ewen, 1996]. In the 1960s, 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
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example, Lara Houstons 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 of
tinkering 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 times
been 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 selfregulation 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
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D. Roedl et al.

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 in
research while more contestational practices are pushed to the margins. And as a
result, HCIs 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.
5. CONCLUSION

In the opening of this essay, we claimed that HCI researchers have in the past
decade constructed a subjectivity of informationthe makerand 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 in
terms 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 fields 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 and
sexists 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
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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 on
sustainable 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 deviceswhose components
are destructive to acquire and dispose ofis 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, where
possible 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 HCIs primary purpose or strength. Thus, part of our work is to create openings
that 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 pass, fluff, or someone elses
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
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D. Roedl et al.

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 that
seeks to understand the ideological complexity of makingif 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 HCIs own account, making also has
potential to do social good, but the precise mechanisms through which this will
happen 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 Hk, our anonymous reviewers, and Eli Blevis for their feedback on
this work.

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