Maker Identity

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Description

By Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell:

What is "a 'Maker Identity: With this, we refer to a plurality of identifications with the modern maker movement, from people who perform DIY home repair and craft activities, to people who subscribe to Make magazine or regularly peruse Instructables.com and imagine building projects, even if they never do. Our conceptualization of the maker identity is influenced by related characterizations described as the Expert Amateur (Kuznetsov & Paulos 2010), the Everyday Designer (Wakkary & Tanenbaum 2009), Makers (Anderson, 2012), and Hackers (Levy, 2010). Each of these identities describes people who build things for themselves, sometimes as part of an anti-consumerism statement, but often for a practical outcome. We view each of these identities as variant formulations of a potential maker identity, which we define throughout this paper as incorporating a collection of attitudes, skills, behaviors, practices, and expressions around DIY activities.

We distinguish the more general maker identity from what we refer to as an “established” maker. Maker-ness manifests in degrees, which range from one who occasionally participates in DIY activities and can consider herself a maker, to one who regularly and actively creates her own situations for DIY activities, who we would consider to be more established." (http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewed-articles/becoming-makers-hackerspace-member-habits-values-and-identities/)