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As the making phenomenon becomes more prevalent, diverse, and vast, it becomes increasingly challenging to identify general temporal or spatial trends in types of making endeavors. Identifying trends in what participants are making is important to makerspace leaders who seek to understand the impact of the making phenomenon on the world or who are interested in broadening participation within their own maker contexts. This paper shows how topic modeling by means of LDA can be used to analyze maker artifacts, and illustrates how these types of insights can be used to make inferences about the making phenomenon, as well as to inform efforts to broaden participation. 

While makerspaces are often discussed in terms of a utopian vision of democratization and empowerment, many have shown how these narratives are problematic. There remains optimism for the future of makerspaces, but there is a gap in knowledge of how to articulate their promise and how to pursue it. We present a reflexive and critical reflection of our efforts as leaders of a university makerspace to articulate a vision, as well as our experience running a maker fashion show that aimed to address some specific critiques. We analyze interviews of participants from the fashion show using feminist utopianism as a lens to help us understand an alternate utopian narrative for making. Our contributions include insights about how a particular making context embodies feminist utopianism, insights about the applicability of feminist utopianism to makerspace research and visioning efforts, and a discussion about how our results can guide makerspace leaders and HCI researchers. 

Our research is grounded in several years of experience in establishing and running an academic makerspace that is open for our entire campus community. As part of developing the goals and purpose of our space, we have identified the need and opportunity for HCI mindsets and practices to be more prevalent in the making phenomenon. In this paper we discuss: how this need resonates with the challenges and questions in HCI education; our own value-based approach to understanding and supporting HCI in the making phenomenon; and implications for HCI education of both the value-based approach and the relationship between HCI and the making phenomenon. 

While understanding macromolecular structural elements and their roles in dictating cellular function is critical to grasp basic concepts in biology, it can be challenging for students to master this content—these elements naturally exist at the nanoscale and are not observable with the naked eye. Oftentimes this understanding is catalyzed by impactful illustrations and animations found online and in textbooks. In recent years, 3D printing technology has become readily accessible as an additional way to generate models and visualize entities of interest. In this report, we describe and discuss the efficacy of an approach using 3D-printed models in combination with online open-source molecular modeling analyses of the macromolecular structure of p53 to engage students with molecular concepts in cancer cell biology and human health. This pedagogy strategy has been successfully integrated into an upper-level undergraduate course at a primarily undergraduate institution and a graduate biology course at a public research university. We describe the potential benefits while providing tools for others to integrate this strategy into their teaching. 

One way to help address larger scale social and environmental challenges is to help individuals consider the social impacts of making alongside the technological aspects. We investigate the experiences of volunteers who 3D print prosthetic devices for children, focusing specifically on the way they discuss their relationship with the device recipients. We show that while the volunteers understand the social aspect of the experience, their focus is on the functionality. We suggest some techniques, methods, and principles from HCI that can enrich the experience for the volunteers and recipients by broadening the focus to include consideration of the complexities of the human and social experience.