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What Is Making? A Broad Definition Across Craft, Art, and Maker Culture

Making is a broad term for creating or changing things, from painting and pottery to electronics and digital projects. Its meaning depends on the practice and context.

By ThatPainter Team 4 min read
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Making is the act of creating or changing something through ideas, skills, tools, materials, or techniques. It can mean painting, pottery, weaving, electronics tinkering, or designing a digital artifact. In education and maker culture, the term often emphasizes self-direction, experimentation, problem-solving, and creating something meaningful to the person making it. There is no single definition that fits every context.

What does “making” mean?

In its broadest sense, making is a human activity: people work with materials, tools, bodies, ideas, and spaces to create or alter things. The result might be a physical object, a digital work, or a new way of understanding a material or process. Bath Spa University’s Material:Making group frames the question broadly, asking what making can be and how the roles of makers and tools change: Material:Making at Bath Spa University.

The word takes on a more specific emphasis in different settings. In a craft tradition, it may refer to skilled work with materials and inherited knowledge. In a classroom, it may describe a learner-led process of trying, revising, and sharing. In the contemporary maker movement, it often includes digital fabrication and electronics as well as hands-on craft.

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Why is there no single definition?

“Making” describes both an outcome and a way of working, and different communities prioritize different parts of that activity. A 2014 account by Jennifer Wyld describes a meeting of 30 participants who discussed what distinguishes maker experiences from adjacent activities but did not settle on one definition. That meeting was a discussion, not a representative survey of makers. Participants did identify self-direction and relevance to learners as important qualities: Does this count as making?

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An education-oriented definition from the UTeach Maker Advisory Group focuses on process, agency, and sharing: “Making is an iterative process of tinkering and problem solving that draws on a DIY mindset. Making is collaborative and allows for self-expression through the creation of a personally meaningful artifact that is shared with a larger community.” The wording is attributed to the advisory group in 2016: UTeach Maker: What is Making?

That is a useful description of one educational approach, not a rule that every maker must follow. Some making is solitary; some does not produce a finished object; and not every meaningful practice is organized around a DIY identity.

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Does making have to involve machines or electronics?

No. Machines, electronics, and digital fabrication are tools used in some forms of making, not requirements. Makerspaces may include electronics kits, Arduino or Raspberry Pi boards, 3D printers, and vinyl cutters, but the same broad idea can apply to work with paper, paint, clay, fiber, wood, or other materials. UTeach Maker lists those technical resources as examples of makerspace equipment; they are not a definition of making.

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A 2021 Journal of Engineering Education article notes that a common education-literature definition centers on collaborative, multidisciplinary creation of physical or virtual artifacts, often with modern manufacturing equipment. The authors also recognize other valid meanings, including traditional handcrafts such as pottery and weaving, and discuss their cultural significance in Native American communities. Treating equipment-centered making as the only kind would leave out important practices: Investigating culturally contextualized making with the Navajo Nation.

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How does making relate to painting and other creative work?

Painting can be making: the painter uses materials, decisions, and technique to create or transform an image. But the terms are not interchangeable in every conversation. “Painting” names a medium or practice; “making” is a broader term that can describe the activity of creating across media.

In an education or maker-culture context, the process may matter as much as the finished work. A painting project is especially likely to be described as making when the participant has meaningful choices, experiments with materials or approaches, solves problems, and develops an outcome connected to their interests. None of those qualities is a universal pass-or-fail test; they are useful ways to understand what a particular speaker means by making.

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Does this count as making?

Rather than draw a rigid line around particular tools or activities, consider what is happening in the project. These questions can clarify why someone might call an activity making:

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  • Purpose: Who chose the goal, and does it matter to the person doing the work?
  • Agency and iteration: Can the maker make decisions, try approaches, and revise the work?
  • Collaboration: Are people sharing skills, solving problems together, or learning from one another?
  • Outcome: Does the process create or change an object, image, digital work, or understanding?
  • Materials and tools: What does the activity involve, and how do those choices shape it?
  • Context: Is the practice part of a craft tradition, a learning activity, a community practice, or the contemporary maker movement?

These are comparison questions, not a formal taxonomy. A collaborative game-design project, for example, may have maker qualities when participants create an artifact, share expertise, and work in a self-motivated, relevant way. A pottery or weaving practice can also be making, even when its meaning is rooted in a cultural tradition rather than in a modern makerspace.

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What to take from the word

When someone says “making,” the most useful follow-up is often to ask what they mean in that setting. They may be talking about the broad human activity of creating, a learner-directed method, a specific craft practice, or a movement that uses tools such as 3D printers and microcontrollers. The shared idea is that people actively shape something; the materials, purpose, process, and cultural meaning vary.

For more on the maker-movement framing, see Travis Good’s What is “Making”? in Make: (January 28, 2013).

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