Make Making Sustainable: Exploring Sustainability Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities in Making Activities
🤖 AI Summary
This study uncovers the latent environmental costs—particularly material waste—arising from rapid prototyping in maker communities, examining grassroots maker spaces and research-oriented laboratories as contrasting contexts. Using semi-structured interviews with diverse stakeholders, thematic coding, and cross-case comparative analysis, we systematically identify waste patterns, governance gaps, behavioral drivers, and institutional barriers. We introduce the first HCI-informed analytical framework for sustainability challenges in maker ecosystems, yielding a three-tiered design framework for sustainable fabrication: (1) eco-conscious tool development, (2) circular infrastructure redesign, and (3) embedded educational interventions. The study synthesizes four core themes and actionable insights, offering practitioners evidence-based guidelines for sustainable tool design, resource-loop infrastructure implementation, and literacy-integrated pedagogy—thereby advancing a paradigm shift in making practices from “efficiency-first” to “sustainability-oriented coexistence.”
Application Category
📝 Abstract
The recent democratization of personal fabrication has significantly advanced the maker movement and reshaped applied research in HCI and beyond. However, this growth has also raised increasing sustainability concerns, as material waste is an inevitable byproduct of making and rapid prototyping. In this work, we examine the sustainability landscape within the modern maker community, focusing on grassroots makerspaces and maker-oriented research labs through in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders involved in making and managing making-related activities. Our findings highlight four key themes: the various types of"waste"generated through the making process, the strategies (or lack thereof) for managing this waste, the motivations driving (un)sustainable practices, and the challenges faced. We synthesize these insights into design considerations and takeaways for technical HCI researchers and the broader community, focusing on future tools, infrastructures, and educational approaches to foster sustainable making.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Sustainability in maker activities
Waste management in making
Challenges of sustainable making practices
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Sustainability in maker movement
Waste management strategies
Future sustainable making tools
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
