What do makers and crafters have to teach us about the world, ourselves, and technology? People are driven to customize their objects and build things. People also spend copious amounts of time tinkering with the things they own. Groups often get together to share these techniques for building, modifying and embellishing artifacts, and vibrant social communities develop as a result. All of these activities are part of a rich do-it-yourself (DIY) tradition. The contents of this book are drawn from a workshop that we organized for the 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009). Many members of the CHI research community (not just the editors of this book) already participate in and write for grassroots DIY communities as well. We wanted to provide a forum for participants in these overlapping communities to collaborate around DIY issues and support ongoing research on DIY practice in ways that may be more visible to HCI practitioners and researchers.

What do makers and crafters have to teach us about the world, ourselves, and technology? People are driven to customize their objects and build things. People also spend copious amounts of time tinkering with the things they own. Groups often get together to share these techniques for building, modifying and embellishing artifacts, and vibrant social communities develop as a result. All of these activities are part of a rich do-it-yourself (DIY) tradition. The contents of this book are drawn from a workshop that we organized for the 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009). Many members of the CHI research community (not just the editors of this book) already participate in and write for grassroots DIY communities as well. We wanted to provide a forum for participants in these overlapping communities to collaborate around DIY issues and support ongoing research on DIY practice in ways that may be more visible to HCI practitioners and researchers.