Making Space in the Makerspace: Building a Mixed-Ability Maker Culture Meryl Alper Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA [email protected] ABSTRACT organized makerspaces shape the social norms around making. The Maker Movement, while heralded for popularizing DIY Partly as a result of publications such as Make magazine (which culture, has recently drawn some critiques for the ways in which effectively branded the term “make”), websites such as the mass-marketing of maker culture partially obscures the social, Instructables.com, and events such as Maker Faire, some have cultural, and political implications of making. A number of described the growing commercial popularity of making as a educators, designers, and researchers are actively studying “Maker Movement” [6]. alternative approaches to maker culture, and specifically While credited for leading a popular renaissance of DIY culture, developing ways to broaden participation in DIY activities for the Maker Movement has recently been criticized for the ways in socio-economically, racially, and ethnically diverse youth. To which the mass-marketing of maker culture partially obscures the complement that initiative, this paper proposes the notion of a social, cultural, and political implications of making [7, 8]. Make “mixed-ability maker culture” as one approach to realizing a more and Intel recently commissioned a survey to determine the make- equitable, ethical, and sustainable culture of making that also up of the Maker Movement. Taking a random sample drawn from encompasses youth with disabilities. As an illustration of how Maker Faire exhibitors and Make magazine and newsletter mixed-ability maker culture might shape interaction design for subscribers, the survey found that 8 in 10 makers are male, their children with and without disabilities, this paper describes a median household income is $106,000, and 80% have a post- modified formulation of Resnick and Silverman’s popular graduate education [9]. While the Maker Movement may not metaphorical approach to designing children’s creative thinking characterize itself as political, there are clearly demographic tools, and its application to DIY tools, activities, and pedagogy. disparities between those who self-identify as markers and the population at large. Categories and Subject Descriptors The above survey also noted that 4 out of 10 respondents H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User indicated having children under the age of 17 living in the Interfaces; K.4.2: [Computers and Society]: Social Issues – household. There is a strong family- and child-friendly focus to Assistive technologies for persons with disabilities the Maker Movement. This complements an emerging initiative to incorporate DIY practices into formal and informal education General Terms [10]. A number of educators, designers, and researchers are Design, Human Factors. rightly concerned then with a possible “participation gap” that may exist for children with different backgrounds within maker culture. Jenkins et al. describe the participation gap as “the Keywords unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and Accessibility, children, disability, DIY, hacking, makerspaces. knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow” [11]. With the financial support of the 1. INTRODUCTION MacArthur Foundation, various teams studying digital media and As a contemporary embodiment of the ethos of do-it-yourself learning are actively developing ways to broaden participation in (DIY) projects and the creative practices of hacking [1, 2], DIY activities for socio-economically, racially, and ethnically “making” involves the hands-on creation of material things that diverse youth [12]. To complement that initiative, this paper require of the maker a blend of both physical manufacturing and proposes the notion of a “mixed-ability maker culture.” technical digital skills [3, 4]. “Maker culture,” if it can be characterized as a single entity, is an important part of making [5]. 2. MIXED-ABILITY MAKER CULTURE Maker culture consists of the behaviors, values, and artifacts By “mixed-ability maker culture,” I mean a collaborative culture commonly shared among those who identify as makers. Online within which people with and without disabilities can co-exist and and offline peer production, resource sharing, and collectively co-create as they work to maximize and develop their own skills. This includes making useful things for people with disabilities, as Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for well as getting people with disabilities involved in making. The personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are focus on “mixed-ability” draws on work from the interdisciplinary not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that field of disability studies in education, which seeks to confront copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy notions of diversity in learning that exclude disability, as well as otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, call into question clear boundaries between disabled and non- requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. disabled youth [13]. A mixed-ability maker culture is one that IDC’13, June 24–27, 2013, New York, NY, USA. Copyright 2013 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0010 …$15.00. embraces the differences not only between people who do and do not identify as having a disability, but also the wide range of following three specifications: 1) low floors (easy to start, short differences that exist among people with disabilities. learning curve for novices); 2) high ceilings (can accommodate increasingly complex projects); and 3) wide walls (many paths for Historically, there has been a great deal of hope around new self-expression, depending on a child’s interests and passions). In technologies being an equalizer for youth with disabilities [14]. developing these design principles, Resnick and Silverman Maker culture, and specifically 3D printing, also has huge considered “diversity of outcomes as an indicator of success,” implications for development of new assistive technologies. which means that a successful system is one useful to diverse Customized, lightweight, and easily replaceable systems open up children from different backgrounds with various learning styles. new possibilities for mobility and expression [15]. At the same time, youth with disabilities are rarely portrayed as cultural Considering the heterogeneous population of young people with producers within creative computing communities [16]. People disabilities (including mobility, sensory, cognitive, speech- with disabilities are also largely under-represented in science, language, and intellectual disabilities), Resnick and Silverman’s technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields [17]. Youth framework is a particularly useful starting point for approaching with disabilities potentially face an increasing divide in high-tech the design of DIY tools and activities for a mixed-ability careers if also excluded from making and makerspaces, which are audience. Their framework emphasizes that children start projects increasingly oriented towards STEM learning [10]. Disability also having had different life experiences, grow up in unique contexts, intersects with race, ethnicity, income, gender, and sexuality in and have a wide range of possible learning outcomes. various ways. Those complex intersections and the challenges they pose for young people and their participation in making When employed as a framework for designing accessible maker merits more attention. tools, activities, strategies, and spaces, low floors, high ceilings, and wide walls take on nuanced meanings. When applied to the This participation gap is detrimental not just to children with domain of youth with disabilities, Alper, Hourcade and Gilutz disabilities, but also to the larger world potentially denied access contend that specific dimensions need to be taken into to the things these young people know, the way they know them, consideration: low floors with ramps (for participation), high and the things they may build. The irony is that the technological ceilings and tall ladders (for expression), and wide walls and world as we know it has actually been fundamentally shaped by frames of interests (for personalization) [23]. youth with disabilities who found their way around complex systems. For example, in the 1950s, blind youth were among the Besides offering an alternative take on those three dimensions, first to discover that they could hack the telephone system using Alper et al. also suggest adding a fourth specification to Resnick perfect pitch to trigger automated switches, a phenomenon known and Silverman’s framework: reinforced corners. By this, the as “phone phreaking” [18]. They became central figures in the authors mean supporting the creative pursuits of young people who may do best at the ground floor, the highest reaches of the history of hacking, and have been directly cited by Apple founder Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as highly influential [19]. ceiling, and/or the widest parts of the wall depending on the context. The following subsections describe this modified Analyzing maker culture requires us not only to look closer at the framework, and offer ways in which the utilization of this materials, techniques, and activities that constitute