This paper analyses a series of events in which a discarded box found in a garbage room is examined and taken apart in the context of a makerspace. The participants' inquiry provided a rich and multifaceted experience in various settings, including puzzle-solving, exploring physical and digital materials, engaging people with different skills. The social engagements with and around the artifacts brought certain interpretative aspects to the fore. Situated acts of interpretation worked as ways of building a coherent narrative and a meaningful experience. In the paper, we highlight the relationship between on the one hand the subjects' skills and motivations to understand and make sense of the technology at hand which we call material literacy, and on the other hand the specific material qualities that encourage or trigger certain interpretations and experiences. The qualities we discuss are: opacity, risk, authenticity, uniqueness, age, and hybridity. This study allows us to reposition the contemporary understanding of makerspaces beyond that of being places for innovation and learning.

Three-dimensional printing is widely celebrated as enabling open design and manufacturing practice. With easy-to-use techniques such as automated modeling, fabrication machines ostensibly help designers turn ideas into fully fledged objects. Prior HCI literature focuses on improving printing through optimization and by developing printer and material capabilities. This paper expands such considerations by asking, how do 3D printing practitioners understand and create “printability?” And how might HCI better support the work that holds together printing workflows and changing ecosystems of materials and techniques? We conducted studies in two sites of open design: a technology firm in Silicon Valley, California and a makerspace in Stockholm, Sweden. Deploying workshops and interviews, we examine how practitioners negotiate the print experience, revealing a contingent process held together by trial and error exploration and careful interventions. These insights point to the value of tools and processes to support articulation work, what Strauss and colleagues have called the acts of fitting together people, tasks, and their ordering to accomplish an overarching project. We show that despite the sought-after efficiencies of such manufacturing, 3D printing entails articulation work, particularly acts of alignment, exposing messy modes of production carried out by a varied cast of practitioners, machines, and materials.

This paper offers a conceptual contribution to understand 3D printing practice. We have studied conversations between 3D printing practitioners who discuss failed and discarded printed artifacts and analyzed how they make sense of the printing process. Based on findings of interactions with the machine itself, materials used, and designs applied, this study contributes to the field of HCI by highlighting the embodied and situated dimensions of 3D printing. Introducing the concept of machine sensibility, we characterize our findings around: i) assessing printability, ii) monitoring and intervening and iii) reading the prints. We use the term machine to highlight the importance of understanding the materiality of the 3D printer, and sensibility, to address critical interactions and abilities that surfaced in studying this practice. The concept allows researchers to put 3D printing practice in the context of contemporary interaction design research and helps to understand challenges of material-machine-design interdependencies.

Making has with its mindset and hands-on agenda found ways into all levels of education. From primary school to higher education, in after-school curricula and public places of learning, making has made a considerable impact. In early childhood education, teachers and their professional development are however less in focus. We present a municipality-driven project of training nine preschool teachers with a maker mindset. Our data builds on teachers' experience and practice, shared in two workshops and 16 blog posts. The pedagogues' reflections of their own and learners' actions make way for how making' impacts them as educators. We use Resnick's four P's: Projects, Peers, Passion, Play and contribute Places and Presentation as additional elements of creative learning. We show that developing a maker mindset entails openness, curiosity, co-creation, responsiveness and the willingness to include technology and materials into professional practice, which is key towards becoming a maker pedagogue.

As digital fabrication machines have become more accessible and widely available, practitioners in maker communities have become increasingly responsive to the opportunities to achieve bespoke modifications, known colloquially as modding'. Drawing on interviews with five experienced makers who engage in modding a laser cutter, along with ethnographic observations of maker-machine interactions, we analyse makers' experiences and war stories' to frame modding as a prevalent but less explored maker activity. We highlight how makers care for machines, how they cope with risks when engaging in modding, and how mods are essentially creative projects. Based on our findings, we present the conceptualisation of the pliable machine' - a socio-technical system constituted by, (1) an accessible machine that can be altered, (2) maker skills that go beyond intended use, and (3) a surrounding maker culture' of caring, sharing and experimentation. Treating the machine as a material offers an alternative perspective on our interactions with technology; we show how the laser cutter becomes pliable in the hands of those who mod.