Abstract
This paper reports the findings of a doctoral research project that aims to generate a deeper understanding of the experience of people who design and make things at home as a form of leisure. People considered in this research make furniture, jewellery, model engineering projects, canoes and cars. The fallacy that the sensations of the embodied practitioner are derived entirely from the moment of the act of making is avoided by understanding making as a ‘practice’. This allows us to consider actions of the maker not as autonomous, but temporally and spatially situated within a dispersed network of people, artefacts and environments. Drawing upon Flow Theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991) and Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 1985), the paper concludes that it is the careful control and mastery of these elements that allows the amateur maker to achieve the feelings of competence and autonomy that makes their engagement with materials intrinsically rewarding and psychologically fulfilling, and sustains their enthusiasm for practices with few external rewards.
Keywords
Making, Amateur, Embodiment, Practice, Motivation
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2011.103
Citation
Jackson, A.(2011) Understanding the Experience of the Amateur Maker, in Niedderer, K., Mey, K., Roworth-Stokes, S. (eds.), EKSIG 2011: Skin Deep - Experiential Knowledge & Multi-sensory Communication, 23–24 June 2011, Farnham, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2011.103
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Understanding the Experience of the Amateur Maker
This paper reports the findings of a doctoral research project that aims to generate a deeper understanding of the experience of people who design and make things at home as a form of leisure. People considered in this research make furniture, jewellery, model engineering projects, canoes and cars. The fallacy that the sensations of the embodied practitioner are derived entirely from the moment of the act of making is avoided by understanding making as a ‘practice’. This allows us to consider actions of the maker not as autonomous, but temporally and spatially situated within a dispersed network of people, artefacts and environments. Drawing upon Flow Theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991) and Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 1985), the paper concludes that it is the careful control and mastery of these elements that allows the amateur maker to achieve the feelings of competence and autonomy that makes their engagement with materials intrinsically rewarding and psychologically fulfilling, and sustains their enthusiasm for practices with few external rewards.