Learning CNC Milling: A Gendered Account on "Everyone," Skill and Expertise in DIY Digital Fabrication

• In Event: No Paper, No Pencil, No Tape Measure: Situated Craft Practices, Computation, and Automation

Abstract

Cultures of making, hacking, and digital fabrication, along with contemporary craft and DIY, have been lauded as increasing ‘everyone’s’ skills and expertise through hands-on practice. Cultivated environments such as maker festivals, shared machine shops, educational programs in libraries, and online exchange formats reinvigorate this impression. Meanwhile, the growing maker communities and cultures stipulate a level of complexity and proficiency to demarcate their activities from a perception as “serious leisure” (Maines, 2009). They become associated with a confirmative, gendered image of technical and scientific practices. Similar strategies have been observed in the editorial practices of Wikipedia which advertises heterogeneity yet its infrastructure follows a historically conservative (male) understanding of expertise, authority, and technical knowledge (Ford & Wajcman, 2017).

This paper examines the reconfiguration of expertise in DIY maker and digital fabrication cultures. It argues that maker cultures cultivate their own ‘ecologies of expertise’ that are local, skill-based, contingent and situated. The paper asks: What configures skill-based ‘maker’ expertise? How do other-than-technical and design skills operate in practice? To illustrate my argument, I draw on field notes and vignettes from my personal experience of learning CNC milling through four different training programs at makerspaces. By engaging with scholarship in STS, history of technology, HCI, design studies, and feminist technoscience on different forms of expertise, questions of legitimacy, and skill acquisition through participation, the paper challenges the idea of empowering ‘everyone’ through making with a discussion of the implicit gendering of technical skills.

Author

• Yana Boeva, Nuremberg Institute of Technology