Escaping the Sandbox: Making and Its Future

Abstract

"Making" has been gaining traction in HCI and related fields both as a community of practice and as a method for creating objects and systems. While making is an important cultural practice, this paper claims that there is a disconnect between the rhetoric of making and "real world" notions of domain relevance and embedded hardware development. In considering how making operates in practice, we offer the metaphor of a sandbox to describe this contradiction. We exemplify the metaphor with a small-scale prototyping platform of our own, and offer visions on how making might progress in the future.