Communities of making have been at the center of attention in popular, business, political, and academic research circles in recent years. In HCI, they seem to carry the promise of new forms of computer use, education, innovation, and even ways of life. In the West in particular, the maker manifestos of these communities have shown strong elements of a neoliberal ethos, one that prizes self-determination, techsavvy, independence, freedom from government, suspicion of authority, and so forth. Yet such communities, to function as communities, also require values of collaboration, cooperation, interpersonal support—in a word, care. In this ethnographic study, we studied and participated as members of a hackerspace for 19 months, focusing in particular not on their technical achievements, innovations, or for glimmers of a more sustainable future, but rather to make visible and to analyze the community maintenance labor that helps the hackerspace support the practices that its members, society, and HCI research are so interested in. We found that the maker ethic entails a complex negotiation of both a neoliberal libertarian ethos and a care ethos.

1. The Proper Care and Feeding of Hackerspaces:
Care Ethics and Cultures of Making
Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell, Jeffrey Bardzell
Cultural Research In Technology (CRIT) Group
Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing

2. Motivations & Contributions
Much of the making research in HCI implicitly focuses on
individual makers and their skills
This espoused libertarian ideology does not explain the
everyday interactions required to sustain a community of
makers
Care ethics analysis of community maintenance work to
better understand the social environment of hackerspaces

3. Agenda
Overview of care ethics
Research approach and field site
Care in the hackerspace
Summary and conclusion

4. Care Ethics: Brief Primer
Care ethics is a moral theory that emerged from the
Kohlberg-Gilligan debate
Alternative ethical standpoint to justice ethics (abstract and
universalized principles of morality), focusing instead on
particular contexts and the interdependence of people
Our theoretical framing moves beyond universal / justice /
masculine vs. particular / care / feminine dichotomies

5. Care Ethics: In HCI and STS
Ethos of care in STS (de la Bellacasa, 2011)
Designers as “custodians of care” (Light & Akama, 2014)
Care ethics-based, emancipatory, utopian view of participatory
design and ubiquitous computing (S. Bardzell, 2014; 2015)

6. Care Ethics: Our Work
Maintenance work and care labor in
maker communities
Striking a Balance
INTERDEPENDENT
COMMUNITY MEMBER
(recognize and respond to
the needs of others)
RATIONAL HACKER
(abstract, rule- and
contract-driven)

7. Research Approach
A 19-month ethnography
(10/2012–05/2014)
A Midwestern US college
town hackerspace (Null Alpha)
250 total hours of direct
contact, including co-making +
over 15 hours of targeted
interviews
Data: Field notes, photos,
recordings of events

8. Care in the Hackerspace

9. Korth’s Typology of Care-In-Action
Overt-
Implicit
Covert-
Implicit
Overt-
Explicit

10. Overt-Explicit Care
Recognizable by the
participants present
for its enactment, and
responded to as an act
of careOvert-
Implicit
Covert-
Implicit
Overt-
Explicit

11. Overt-Explicit Care
“I really like to see someone be able to work on their own
after I’ve helped them […] I’m very glad that I’ve been able to be
helpful to a lot of people in a lot of different areas.”
-Andrew (M, mid-30s)

12. Recognizable as care,
but what makes the
action “caring” is NOT
foregrounded in the
interaction.
Overt-Implicit Care
Overt-
Implicit
Covert-
Implicit
Overt-
Explicit

13. Overt-Implicit Care
Karen [to Ben]: “You don’t realize how hard it is to run a
consensus organization, and we do it so well. So many
[other consensus organizations] fail early.”
—Karen (F, mid-30s); Ben (M, late-20s)
Mike [to Ben]:“And we’ve had a couple of tough votes too,
[we] haven’t just been coasting!”
—Mike (M, early-40s); Ben (M, late-20s)

14. Caring acts that “must
hide in the discourse
in order to avoid
undermining [their]
own caring potential”
(Korth, 2003)
Covert-Implicit Care
Overt-
Implicit
Covert-
Implicit
Overt-
Explicit

15. Covert-Implicit Care
“I’ve been impressed, and this has come to mind a couple times,
[with] how many questions I’m able to ask, and some of them
seem very very simple, and I’ve yet to have someone
look at me, like ‘you don’t know what that is?’
Everyone has been so willing to share what they know or help
me figure out how to find the answer that I’m looking for.”
— Justin (M, mid-30s)

16. Hacker Ethic and Care
Overt-Explicit
volunteering, teaching, donating time and resources
Overt-Implicit
welcoming, encouraging, empowering new members to
take charge
Covert-Implicit
listening, downplaying expertise, validating the hacker
identity of another, support

17. Negotiated Ethic in Tension
The ethos of this community complexly includes
both the explicit, hacker ideals of individualism
and the hidden-yet-enacted ideals of
interdependence, support, and community.
Being a “rational hacker” vs
an “interdependent community member”

18. Everyday Tensions
“Anyone can be a maker”
ethos of empowerment
helping visitors
patience with “simple” questions
playing down expertise
but this obscures the systematically excluded

19. Care in Service of the “Hacker Ethic”
“Our door is always open
to anyone who wants to come”
espoused blindness toward gender and
gender expression, race, sexual orientation,
and other differences

20. Summary & Conclusion
An analysis of the care and care ethics involved in these
communities help make visible how they operate on the ground
The ethic at play in the hackerspace is one that negotiates
between the explicit, libertarian ideology of maker culture and
an implicit ethic of interpersonal care and community
Care ethics reveals barriers to be less about skills and
more about the social environment and interpersonal
differences innate to these communities

21. Acknowledgements
The following individuals:
Colin Gray, Gabriele Ferri,
Shannon Shenck, Shad Gross,
Nancy Smith, and our
anonymous reviewers
And the following organizations:
The National Science Foundation
Intel ISTC-Social Computing
Program

22. Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell, and Jeffrey Bardzell
altoombs@indiana.edu | selu@indiana.edu | jbardzel@indiana.edu
The Cultural Research in Technology (CRIT) Group
http://crit.soic.indiana.edu
Thanks and Q & A