Making within limits

Abstract

Cultures of making have received broad attention within HCI studies of design and material production, surfacing the uneven social and political consequences of maker visions. Less explored but equally important in this scholarship is what it means to make within limits: what makers' tools would look like if they took seriously concerns for resource scarcity, provenance, and disposal. Deploying a mix of ethnographic and design methods, this paper identifies salvage practices as a core but under-recognized resource within an academic makerspace. To help open the conversation around making within limits, we propose a series of tools for salvage fabrication, an alternative design concept that emphasizes the interconnected material flows into and beyond local processes of material production.