ABSTRACT
People make meaning through making. They also gain pleasure from doing so, “a joie de faire” that Ellen Dissanayake argues from a biobehavioral position (40). Faythe Levine, author of Handmade Nation, contends that through making and crafting people can come to realize that “they have the power to make their lives what they want them to be through simple personal choices” because making things, “anything, with your hands is a quiet political ripple in a world dominated by mass production” (Levine 58). Making and crafting, and educating about them, is a global movement, a “do-ocracy” of people who take action to make because people are happier when they are “doing or making things for themselves” (Gauntlett 226). Gauntlett talks about making as a social activity that connects people, much as Davies found in her study of maker and hackerspaces. With authors of one report finding that as of 2012 almost half of people in the United States engaged in some form of craft (Davies 16) and 40 million U.S. Americans were part of what Richard Florida has termed “the creative class” (Hatch 52), making and crafting are part of the zeitgeist of this moment in time.
