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 study presents results from a programming day initiative that was developed to increase digital competence among teacher students. The results show an increased understanding of materials and toolkits available, but also gather data on the teacher students own perceived digital competence and how it changed through a hands-on workshop setting. The presented case exemplifies how even a limited deployment of toolkits in teachers’ education can help problematize complex issues and provide a low threshold entry to demands around digitization.

Making culture is a research anthology focusing on children’s and young people’s leisure culture. Nineteen researchers from the Nordic countries have been invited by the Nordic Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis (Kulturanalys Norden) to explore, describe and analyse how children and young people act as cultural ‘doers’. The anthology provides researchers, policymakers and practitioners with insights and analyses on children’s and young people’s culture.

This thesis explores interaction between humans, materials, and machines, in the context of makerspaces. The concept of making describes a practice that deals with new technologies in combination with craft to create artifacts in physical, digital and hybrid forms. Despite substantial research, there is still a need to examine what practices of making have to offer to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. This particularly concerns investigations of the close relations between the multitudes of different activities, materials, machines and things in such shared spaces.

Making is discussed as a practice of importance for interaction design and conceptualised as involving a particular mindset when engaging with materials and machines. Based on this, my work argues that the phenomenon calls for a deeper reflection on recent movements on material interaction and materiality on the one hand, and perspectives on machine interactions on the other. I explore how situated and embodied practices can be revealed in investigations of makerspace activities. Further, my work describes how makers experience and make sense of the materials and machines that populate makerspaces. Finally, I map out how insights on experience and practice with machines and materials can be conceptualised in a way that become useful for contemporary interaction design practices.

The presented research builds on four qualitative studies, in which I draw on investigations in the makerspace and combine an ethnographic approach with participant observation, design methods and contextual inquiry. The resulting five collaboratively written papers frame making as an experience in itself and discover particular ways of making sense of materials. Further, we study embodied and situated dimensions of 3D printing, as well as practices concerning modding and the maintenance of machines and explore how practitioners may develop a maker mindset. The papers contribute with a set of conceptualisations such as “material literacy” when taking artifacts apart, “machine sensibility”, which practitioners show in their interaction with 3D printing, and the “pliable machine” that emerged from studying modding of a laser cutter. These conceptualizations highlight new aspects and perspectives of maker activities and interactions previously less accounted for.

Making is ubiquitous. We all make things. Or maybe we don’t. But we could. The equipment is there, the tools and the skills can be learned. The expertise and the spaces shared. However, despite popularly stated, not everyone is a maker. Who gets to participate in making and what sites and voices are excluded? This short paper provokes questions on the interest in making, the continuous notion of empowerment and demands to #failharder.

Electronic components and computational artifacts tend to have a short lifespan. When they age, they become obsolete and lose their value and meaning. In a case where members of a makerspace investigate an old artifact with electronic components, we use the notion of forensics to describe how the lost meanings of discarded objects can be revived, and how the acts of inquiry around these objects and materials also bring new meaning to the objects at hand. This points to an alternative perspective on the transiency of electronic materials, where the focus is not on prolonging their lifespan, but rather on how such objects and materials can become meaningful after their “death”.

Maker and DIY cultures, as well as the trend towards personal fabrication have gained recent visibility in HCI research. While first reflecting on makers as a new user and “social actor”, current rhetoric has shifted towards the maker movement’s potential for empowerment and democratization. By focusing on places and the organization of personal fabrication we are drawing lines between amateur vs. professional, and home vs. work settings as well as leisure vs. educational motivations. Here we discuss and map out the characteristics of semi-professional places for making in the light of a small study from a hackathon event.

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.

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.

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.

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.