Beyond the Makerspace

Front matter

i TEha Qd

Pus. emm

CoRDDPbEbnD: BETA

Contents

Acknowledgments vil Introduction: Making I ONE: Relational Rhetorics IO TWO: Stories 27 THREE: Spatial Manipulations 48 FOUR: Disequilibrium 66 FIVE: Community go SIX: Teaching 108 Conclusion: Futures 128 References 135 Index 145

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11724511

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Making

Making is not new, but it is having a moment. That moment is the global maker movement that arose at the turn of the millennium. The beginnings of the contemporary movement are often associated with the first publication of Make: Magazine in 2005 by the entity now known as Make Community LLC and formerly known as Maker Media Inc., an investor-funded company that went out of business in June 2019 and was reconstituted as a member-funded organization in July 2019 (Dougherty 2019). Attendance at maker faires, Make Community-branded conventions featuring local makers, increased from 22,000 in 2006 to more than 1.4 million in more than two hundred cities worldwide in 2016 (Maker Media 2017). Many more cities across the world are home to makerspaces, which are workshops that offer access to and training on fabrication technologies like 3D printers and laser cutters, often with a focus on education and entrepreneurship. In the United States, President Barack Obama highlighted the maker movement when the White House hosted a maker faire in 2014 and a National Week of Making in 2015.

In other words, by 2014, the contemporary maker movement was well established, and multiple makerspaces had materialized (and dematerialized) in Seattle, where I lived at the time. But *makerspace" was a new word for me when I heard it in a conversation at an academic conference in October 2014, and I used my phone to surreptitiously search the web for a definition because it seemed like a word I should already know. Later that same evening, I searched the web again, this time for “Seattle makerspace," because I wanted to know if I could find one near me. The first promising result from my Google search was SoDo Makerspace, located in Seattle's South of Downtown (SoDo) neighborhood. I was intrigued, but also intimidated. After all, I had only just learned a word that many other people seemed to already know, and I had no background in engineering or design. For most of my life, I had thought of myself as a writer—it was always my focus in academic work, and all my jobs after graduating from college had been about writing. How would a writer fit into a makerspace?

I finally visited SoDo Makerspace a few months later, in February 2015. L arrived on a Saturday for an open tour advertised on the website. When I arrived and met Eric Renn, the founder and CEO of the makerspace, I was caught off guard by his first question: “So, what do you want to make?" I couldn't answer the question, because I had no idea what I could make. I left the tour dazzled by all the machines and objects I'd seen, and I was especially preoccupied with Eric question. Despite my struggle to answer it in the context of an unfamiliar space with intimidating machines, that question—What do you want to make?—resonates with questions that writers, writing teachers, and writing researchers have been asking for a long time.

I began this book project in an attempt to answer Eric's question, along with my own questions about making, the maker movement, and makerspaces. In 2015, I set out to conduct a longitudinal, ethnographically informed case study of a Seattle makerspace in order to gain a rich understanding of a local instance of this global phenomenon. I wanted to understand what (and whose) values and practices we are taking up and what boundaries we mark when we identify as makers or when we turn a writing classroom or a library space into a makerspace. The boundaries of what counts as “writing” and who counts as ^writer"— particularly in relation to what counts as “making” and who counts as *maker"—have long been the concern of scholars across several areas of rhetoric and writing studies, including cultural and feminist rhetorics, material rhetorics, digital rhetorics, multimodal composition, and professional and technical communication. ‘These areas come from different epistemologies and theoretical traditions, but they share a recognition that boundaries between discursive and material (and between human and nonhuman) are negotiated and marked, rather than given.

This book takes up these conversations and focuses on relations and boundary-marking practices in acts of making—especially what counts as making and who counts as a maker. These boundaries are not fixed or

Introduction + 3 absolute, but are marked (and re-marked) through relations and interactions among people, things, technologies, communities, meanings, spaces, and disciplines. In other words, boundary marks and relations both shape and are shaped by what gets made (and what doesn’t), by whom, and for whom. Analyzing and understanding these marks, then, can help researchers, teachers, and practitioners make informed decisions about why and how to engage with the maker movement in our communities.

Consider, for example, that the boundaries that separate a human maker from a 3D printer are re-marked in a moment when the human uses her hand to help the machine feed plastic filament into its extruder as the machine prints. A writer who has previously not been regarded as a maker experiences a re-marking of boundaries as he learns and proves he can operate 3D printers and, in turn, is recognized as a maker. A researcher who had never seen a 3D printer before she started studying a makerspace notices that her early field notes relate what people are saying about 3D printers rather than what they are doing with 3D printers, but as she learns and becomes more familiar, the boundaries of her observations are re-marked to focus more on actions and processes, and not just words. And when a makerspace feels like a “total dudefest” (in the words of a man who lamented that fact to the only woman present in a makerspace that day), or is inaccessible to a person with a disability, then the boundaries of what is possible are opened up for some bodies, but closed down for other bodies. In other words, despite the name “makerspace,” neither “maker” nor “space” is a given, but is continually and differently negotiated by different bodies. We must answer for these boundary marks in the theories, traditions, and practices of making we privilege in our communities, institutions, and classrooms.

Indeed, people who do not work in or interact directly with the maker movement are increasingly likely to encounter definitions of “making” and “maker” that are influenced by the maker movement in professional, community, and educational contexts. Public libraries and libraries in educational institutions are creating their own makerspaces, and the maker movement has attracted scholarly and pedagogical interest across disciplines and areas, including digital humanities, education, human-computer interaction, library and information science, business, and rhetoric and composition. In rhetoric and composition, my primary field, there is growing interest in making and makerspaces, as evidenced in increased representation in recent calls for proposals for conferences and collections and in the work of a growing body of researchers and teachers, including

Krystin Gollihue (2019), Maggie Melo (2018), Jentery Sayers (2017), David Sheridan (2010), John Sherrill (2014), Jason Tham (2019), and Stephanie West-Puckett (2017).

While this project engages primarily with perspectives on and studies of the relatively new maker movement, there are long histories and traditions of making that precede contemporary trends. As John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Duleesha Kulasooriya (2013) explain,

For millennia, people have been manipulating objects to suit their needs and transform the world around them. Our built world and the many inventions and innovations that populate it are testament to the long history of making. What is new is how modern technologies, globalization, and cultural shifts are enabling and motivating individuals to participate in making activities and removing barriers all along the value chain, from design and prototype to manufacturing to selling and distribution. (3)

Hagel, Brown, and Kulasooriya position the maker movement as the “next generation of inventing and do-it-yourself" (1), suggesting a lineage in twentieth-century hobby shop culture and the DIY movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Faythe Levine and Courtney Heimerl (2008) trace the maker movement through traditions of crafting and design beginning with the Arts and Crafts movement of the twentieth century. Jessamyn Hatcher and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu (2017) more pointedly tie the contemporary maker movement to “the rise of neoliberalism, when problems of deindustrialization . . . were no longer addressed primarily through collectives—whether government, policy institutes, or unions—but instead devolved to individuals and businesses" (274). While the contemporary maker movement is situated in a specific technological, economic, and sociopolitical context, making resonates across time and contexts, as scholars of material culture like Tim Ingold have observed. Ingold (2013) defines making as *a process of correspondence: not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming" (31). My study of a makerspace traces processes of becoming-through-making that include objects, bodies, technologies, relationships, and spaces.

In engaging with a local instantiation of the contemporary maker movement, this project builds on an emerging, cross-disciplinary body of work that examines the marking of difference in rhetorical practices of mak-

Introduction * 5 ing. At the heart of this work is an understanding that neither the maker movement nor the technologies and objects associated with it are neutral. Rhetoric and composition scholars like Cynthia Selfe and Richard Selfe (1994), Adam Banks (2006), Angela Haas (2012), Laura Gonzales (20182), and Jody Shipka (2011) have argued that technologies and our bodies' interactions with them are culturally situated. As Shipka (2011) argues, ^We need to consider what is at stake—who and what it is that we empower or discount—when we use the term [“technology”] to mean primarily, or worse yet, only the newest computer technologies" (2 1). Furthermore, digital humanities scholar Jentery Sayers (2017), emphasizes the importance of redressing "the normative assumptions and effects of popular maker cultures—usually white, cisgender, straight, male, and able-bodied"— through critical interventions in and practices of making (7). And Debbie Chachra (2017), a materials scientist and engineering educator, makes a case against identifying as a “maker” because the “cultural primacy of making, particularly in tech culture—that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, repair, analysis, and especially caregiving—is informed by the gendered history of who is credited with making things, and, in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home" (319).

In fact, by its own account—and despite efforts to the contrary from some within the movement—the maker movement skews heavily toward male-identifed people. According to Maker Media' (2015) press fact sheet, 81% of the readers of Make: Magazine identified as male. And 70% of attendees at the 2014 Bay Area Maker Faire identified as male. Similarly, in Hackster.io’s (2016) maker survey (in partnership with technology giants such as Intel, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Arm) of more than three thousand people across 104 countries, fewer than 7% of respondents identified as women. (Interestingly, neither Maker Media nor Hackster.io reported on race/ethnicity.) Additionally, scholars like JooYoung Seo and Gabriela Richard (2018) and Katherine Steele, Maya Cakmak, and Brianna Blaser (2018) point out the ways in which makerspaces and maker technologies can exclude people with disabilities, particularly when people with disabilities are not included in the process of planning and designing these spaces. While some identify makerspaces and maker practices as opportunities to bring underrepresented groups, such as women, into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (S'TEM) fields (Blackley et al. 2017), others point to women's exodus from male-dominated makerspaces and hackerspaces to form women-centric spaces that promote feminist ways of making and collaborating (Fox, Ulgado, and Rosner 2015). The attention of these scholars to the underrepresentation of women in the mainstream maker movement resonates with the observations of scholars like Anne Balsamo (2011) and Sasha Costanza-Chock (2020) who trace broader accounts of erasures and exclusions of women and marginalized communities in technological innovation and design. For these reasons, I am wary, like education scholars Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escudé (2016), of the *uncritical adoption of branded versions of making, particularly with regard to their implications for education equity" (2 10).

Building on this scholarship, my observations and experiences from a makerspace, and the perspectives of the people with whom I worked, this book models a relational framework for understanding and participating in acts of making. This framework operates at multiple levels: the making and remaking of knowledge across theories, perspectives, and experiences; the making and remaking of bodies, relationships, meanings, technologies, and the makerspace itself; and the making and remaking of practices across local maker communities, the global maker movement, and maker-inspired pedagogies. At each level, I highlight relations and boundary marks that are dynamic, collaborative, multimodal, material, and culturally situated. In other words, while this book is a study of acts of making in a makerspace, it is also a study of how the boundaries of “maker,” “making,” and “knowledge” both shape and are shaped by relations among bodies, technologies, traditions, materials, things, and spaces. As a project that works across disciplines and across theory and practice, the book offers implications and applications of this relational framework for people who identify as makers, as well as community strategists and technical communicators, and also for writing teachers committed to supporting students’ interests, backgrounds, and rhetorical skills.

Chapter Overview

The first portion of the book articulates a relational framework for making that includes making knowledge about making. Chapter 1 situates rhetoric and/as making, and it assembles understandings of relationality that guide my work. This chapter also introduces relational rhetorics as a way of participating in and accounting for relationships with and among bodies, spaces, theories, perspectives, and experiences. The theories, methodologies, practices, and relationships in this project are as much a part of the study phenomenon as the acts of making I examine. Drawing on traditions

Introduction + 7 across epistemologies, Chapter 2 offers stories as a method/ology for relational rhetorics that offers not only my accounts and interpretations of experiences with makers and making, but also how I came to those accounts and interpretations and experiences. Readers who are interested in the dynamics and processes of qualitative research projects (like a longitudinal, ethnographically informed case study) will find in this chapter a detailed account of my philosophies, relationships, and techniques in conducting and writing about research on making.

The second portion of the book offers two chapters with stories from SoDo Makerspace. Readers interested in learning more about what I observed and experienced in my years studying a makerspace will find in these chapters stories about acts of making, rhetorical approaches to design and documentation, and dynamic relations among humans and machines in a makerspace over several years. These stories are my participation in (rather than my observation or representation of) the marking of boundaries. Enacting the method/ology described in Chapter 2, each story begins with a particular moment that came to matter to me and to the people I was interacting with. The stories trace how those particular moments came to matter, not only through the prior interactions that informed my understanding of and participation in that moment, but also through the ways in which that moment changed how I understood past and future interactions. I also connect these stories with the theoretical and methodological concepts discussed in Chapters 1 and 2.

Chapter 3 is a story of spatial manipulations (a phrase inspired by a 3D-printed “spatial manipulation toy”): interacting with people and objects, making objects, making space in a makerspace, and understanding embodied ways of meaning and making. The chapter focuses on the ways in which my own efforts to make space for myself in (or integrate myself into) a makerspace are entangled with how I understand what I observed there, particularly the efforts of Tony, a freelance writer, to make space for himself in the makerspace. And while Chapter 3 focuses on making things, Chapter 4 traces the complex function of disequilibrium (which includes breaking things) in making processes in SoDo Makerspace: from human errors and machine malfunctions to the amateur ethos of the space (and the maker movement) and systems of production. Some makers allow for and even cultivate a relatively high tolerance for disequilibrium as an invention practice. This story traces disequilibrium as both a marking of boundaries and a site for intervening in boundary marking. The threads of this story examine and account for disequilibrium-as-boundary-marking in machine operation and maintenance, in documentation practices, in prototyping and design, in the ethos of the space, and in production systems.

The third and final portion of this book looks beyond the physical space of SoDo Makerspace to trace relationships and practices of making. The relationships and ventures of makers are dynamic, and they exceed the physical and temporal space of a single makerspace, as Chapter 5 and the conclusion describe. In turn, my relationships and experiences in and beyond the makerspace shaped my approach to teaching writing and rhetoric, described in Chapter 6. Readers interested in the ways in which practices of making apply to professional and pedagogical work beyond makerspaces will find in these chapters discussions that illustrate these relationships and possibilities.

Chapter 5 focuses on professional practice in the maker movement and intersecting technology industries, and Chapter 6 focuses on iterations of a digital rhetorics course that was influenced by my research on making and relationships with makers. Both these chapters involve collaborative knowledge-making with my research participants and account not only for what we found in our collaborative analysis but also Pow we found what we found. In other words, just as Chapters 3 and 4 account for the making of my research(er) apparatus in SoDo Makerspace, these chapters account for the boundary-marking practices involved in collaborative knowledge-making in and beyond SoDo Makerspace, with implications for professional practice and for teaching. Thus, the methodology in this project can be useful not only for theorizing but also for (professionally) doing and teaching writing as complex, relational, material-discursive acts of making. Chapter 6 turns to implications for teaching by tracing the ways the concepts introduced in previous chapters shaped my approach to teaching writing and rhetoric. The stories in this chapter connect concepts like rhetoric as/and making, disequilibrium, spatial manipulations, stories, design, and community across my research and teaching practices to show the ways in which they informed each other. Finally, in the conclusion, I reflect on the affordances and constraints of this study and articulate future directions for the study, practice, and teaching of making.

Introduction * 9

SoDo Makerspace opens

Fieldwork for this book begins

Fieldwork continues

Makerologist opens

SoDo Makerspace closes

Fieldwork ends Figure 1. Chronology visualization: 2014— 2019

Chronology Visualization: 2014-2019

While the stories in this book model a nonlinear, relational approach to knowledge making and storytelling, the visualization in Figure 1 presents a chronological narrative that emerges from and can be read alongside the nonlinear relations in the chapters, which move forward and backward in time to emphasize relationality. This chronological visualization provides a temporal orientation to the stories in this book.

Chapter One

The theories, methodologies, practices, and relationships in this project are as much a part of the study phenomenon as the acts of making I examine. This chapter accounts for how I make knowledge in relation to theoretical traditions and in relation to the communities this project engages. I begin by situating rhetoric in relation to making, because readers who come to this book from perspectives outside of the areas of rhetoric, composition studies, and technical and professional communication may be wondering what rhetoric has to do with a study of making. After all, in everyday language, “rhetoric” is usually synonymous with “razzle-dazzle style or verbal bullshittery,” as Candice Rai (2016) aptly puts it (16). While there is plenty of razzle-dazzle and bullshit in the domain of rhetorics, I assemble an understanding of rhetorics in relation to making in order to provide a shared conceptual vocabulary for describing and participating in meaning-making work in and across makerspaces, classrooms, and professional and community contexts. I then assemble an understanding of relationality that works across epistemological traditions in conversation with experiences and perspectives from a makerspace. I conclude by presenting a framework of relational rhetorics that models a commitment to locating and pluralizing conceptual lenses for making—including making knowledge about making.

Rhetoric and/as Making

In situating rhetoric in relation to making, this book highlights two characteristics of rhetoric and making that are particularly salient to this study:

IO that they are both more than symbolic and more than human. By more than symbolic, I mean that both rhetoric and making involve doing, being, knowing, and relating using more than just words and other symbols. Whether we are in a makerspace or a writing classroom, we persuade, negotiate, solve problems, create, and act using a combination of words, symbols, objects, movements, spaces, and relationships. By more than human, I mean that both rhetoric and making involve doing, being, knowing, and relating beyond the intent and scope of human bodies. Again, whether we are in a makerspace or a writing classroom, the work of persuasion, negotiation, problem-solving, creation, and action includes forces, histories, and relationships that come from and circulate through more than just the bodies we recognize as human.

Much of what I have observed and engaged in during this study can be described as negotiating, persuading, solving problems, creating, and getting things done through acts of making with not only words and symbols, but also objects, movements, spaces, and relationships. These observations and experiences resonate with articulations of rhetoric like those offered by Angela Haas (2012), who defines rhetoric as “the negotiation of cultural information—and its historical, social, economic, and political influences—to affect social action (persuade)" (287), and Donnie Johnson Sackey (2018), who similarly describes rhetoric as *a means (tactics/tools) whereby people come together to solve localized problems in movement that frequently oscillates between local and global foci" (156). Jody Shipka (2011) draws attention to “other representational systems and ways of making meaning" than printed, spoken, and digital words (131), and David Sheridan (2010) argues specifically for attending to rhetoric in 3D objects (like those made in makerspaces), because objects, like words and symbols, can persuade and create meanings and actions (250). And while rhetorical scholars have long engaged with more-than-symbolic rhetorics across epistemological traditions, some have also taken up interdisciplinary work in new materialism to consider, as Ehren Pflugfelder (2015) does, *what rhetoric is like as we move beyond the humanist symbolic arts" (443). All these articulations expand a traditional focus in Western rhetorics on spoken and written words by suggesting that both the processes and the products of rhetoric can and do exceed symbolic forms. Therefore, while it might be surprising—as it was to participants in this study—that a researcher of writing and rhetoric would be interested in what happens in a makerspace, where the focus is on 3D objects, I am interested (like many researchers and teachers before me) in rhetoric and/as making with more than words, through the relations of objects, words, spaces, bodies, technologies, and meanings.

In this way, attending to more-than-symbolic rhetorics also draws our attention to the boundaries of what counts as rhetoric, because, as Sharon Crowley (1999) argues, *Distinctions and boundaries are never disinterested: when someone is named as a witch, a factory worker, a rustic, or an illiterate, someone else profits from that distinction. When images are distinguished from texts, someone profits. . . . no body is disinterested” (363). Excluding more-than-symbolic rhetorics in the boundaries we draw has consequences: for example, scholars like Ellen Cushman (2013) and Malea Powell (2012) have argued that restricting definitions of *rhetoric" or “literacy” to the realm of the alphabetic erases Indigenous peoples whose rhetorical and literate practices have (long before the rise of the contemporary maker movement) involved multimodal, embodied ways of meaning.

And just as excluding more-than-words in our definitions of rhetoric has consequences for whom we recognize and do not recognize as rhetorical, excluding traditions of making outside of the contemporary maker movement has consequences for whom we recognize and do not recognize as makers. Silvia Lindtner, Shaowen Bardzell, and Jeffrey Bardzell (2016) observe that technosolutionism, "the view that technology can unilaterally solve difficult social problems," is *visible in promotions of making that portray it as furthering sustainability, social justice for women, economic development for the Global South, and empowerment for all" (1390). Echoing Jessamyn Hatcher and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu's (2017) point that the maker movement is tied to the rise of neoliberalism, Lindtner, Bardzell, and Bardzell observe that technosolutionism has consequences for practices of making that may not engage technologies in the ways privileged by technosolutionist definitions of making, because such practices might be then considered less empowering and less valuable. And as is the case in rhetoric, what counts as making is inextricably related to w/o counts.

'This brings us to a second shared characteristic of rhetorics and practices of making: they are more than human in ways that can both enhance and erase bodies. Candice Rai (2016) describes rhetoric as “a force that not only orders our lives but also animates our bodies. Gets under our skin. Puts things into motion through and beyond human will. Emerging from and wedded to the co-constitutive interactions of language, people, things, matter, and all other presences and forces in the world" (16). Such an expansive view of rhetoric has, in turn, expanded how I experience and describe acts of rhetoric and making in a makerspace, because as Brian

McNely, Clay Spinuzzi, and Christa Teston (2015) observe, attending to more-than-human materialities troubles “how researchers . . . bound off and study objects and practices" (6).

Similarly, Jody Shipka (2016), drawing on the work of Laura Micciche, argues that more-than-human approaches to rhetoric help us redefine “multimodal collaborations ‘as partnerships that include and exceed intentional ones established between people'—partnerships that involve the merging of ‘various forms of matter’ (Micciche 498)" (254). The merging of matter is particularly noticeable in a makerspace, and it echoes through a long history of making across cultures, as Tim Ingold (2013) observes: “In the act of making the artisan couples his [sic] own movements and gestures—indeed his very life—with the becoming of his materials, joining with and following the forces and flows that bring his work to fruition" (31). In the time I spent in makerspaces, I have seen objects and tools quite literally get under people’s skin in ways that changed the outcomes of projects, and I have seen machines and materials exert as much influence on a process of making as the will and intent of humans.

And this all took place in an environment with lively and frequent conversations about human-machine integrations, often through science fiction analogies—as was the case in many of my conversations with a person I met at SoDo Makerspace who features prominently in this book: Tony Loiseleur, a writer and sociologist by training who is currently studying data science. Tony and I are both fans of the Star Trek franchise, and in one particular video-recorded conversation about the Borg (a cyborg collective and infamous antagonist in the franchise), Tony noted that the tools and technologies we make extend human capabilities and redefine what humans can be and do (Figure 2). “Sign me up!” Tony joked about the possibility of becoming a cyborg, but he added that he would want to be a cyborg “with feelings" (unlike the Borg).

I have learned from Tony to take a more than humanist but still human-centered approach to understanding and participating in making and rhetoric. By “more than humanist,” I mean that I do not take the traditional Western humanist boundaries of who counts as “human” for granted, particularly since some bodies are recognized as more human or less human than others. And by “still human-centered,” I mean that even as we dwell in the dynamic boundaries of “human” in relation with other bodies, machines, and environments, human bodies and relationships are both the point of reference and the focus of my work. After all, as Anne Frances Wysocki (2012) argues, “Our bodies—our primary media . . . are not fixed;

Figure 2. Tony works on a 3D printer and discusses human-technology relations they are mutable. We come to be always already embedded—embodied—in mediation" (4). Therefore, a more than humanist but still human-centered approach foregrounds not only the making of technologies and objects, but also the making and remaking of bodies and relations—and all the possibilities and pitfalls entailed. Technologies are encoded with humans’ values and biases, and technologies reinscribe and shape values and biases when we use them. And while technologies and acts of making can productively expand the boundaries of “human,” I cannot ignore the dehumanizing effects of definitions of making that privilege certain bodies and traditions at the exclusion of others.

This boundary marking in definitions of rhetoric and making resonates with M. Remi Yergeau’s (2017) observations about rhetoric in their work on autism:

It is not uncommon . . . for rhetoricians to claim that rhetoric is what makes one human. This is a belief that persists in spite of rhetorical studies’ various turns toward things, ecologies, affect, and complex vitalisms: if one is arhetorical, then one is not fully human. Rhetoric function as a precondition for humanness or personhood is typically and deeply connected to how we conceive sociality, our modes of relating and relatedness with our (neurotypically human) surrounds. (6)

Extending Yergeau’s observations about the persistent function of rhetoric as a precondition for humanness, I notice similar ways in which identifying and being identified as a *maker" has material and social consequences for which bodies belong—or matter—in the spaces and conversations of the maker movement. If, in the words of disability rhetorics scholar Margaret Price (2011), rhetoric is ^who we are allowed to be" (27), making, likewise, is who are allowed to be. Yergeau's emphasis on neurotypicality also highlights the ways in which both definitions of rhetoric and definitions of making can normalize certain bodies as "able" to the exclusion of others, which in turn shapes the meanings and things that get made, for whom, and by whom. The “normal” human body envisioned in the design of spaces, machines, and interactions in a makerspace marks the boundaries of who can make, which in turn shapes what gets made.