'Making' within Material, Cultural, and Emotional Constraints

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atmire.migration.oldid6169
dc.contributor.advisorSharlin, Ehud
dc.contributor.advisorCosta Sousa, Mário
dc.contributor.authorSomanath, Sowmya
dc.contributor.committeememberOehlberg, Lora
dc.contributor.committeememberHughes, Janette
dc.contributor.committeememberParlac, Vera
dc.contributor.committeememberMeruvia Pastor, Oscar
dc.date.accessioned2017-11-07T22:42:15Z
dc.date.available2017-11-07T22:42:15Z
dc.date.issued2017
dc.date.submitted2017en
dc.description.abstractThe Maker Movement aims to democratize technological practices and promises many benefits for people including improved technical literacy, a means for self-expression and agency, and an opportunity to become more than consumers of technology. As part of the Maker Movement, people build hobbyist and utilitarian projects by themselves using programmable electronics (e.g., microcontroller, sensors, actuators) and software tools. While the Maker Movement is gaining momentum globally, some people are left out. Constraints such as material limitations, educational culture restrictions, and emotional or behavioral difficulties can often limit people from taking part in the Maker Movement. We refer to the systematic investigation of how diverse people respond to making-centered activities within constraints as an exploration of making within constraints. In this dissertation, we (1) study how people respond to creating physical objects by themselves within constraints and, (2) investigate how to design technology that can help makers within constraints. We conducted an observational study in an impoverished school in India and identified the students' challenges and their strategies for making within material and educational culture constraints. We conducted a second study with at-promise youth in Canada and identified a set of lessons learned to engage youth within emotional and behavioral constraints in making-centered activities. Leveraging our observations, we proposed Augmented Reality (AR)-mediated prototyping as a way to address material constraints. AR-mediated prototyping can help makers to build, program, interact with and iterate on physical computing projects that combine both real-world and stand-in virtual electronic components. We designed, implemented, and evaluated a technology probe, Polymorphic Cube (PMC), as an instance of our vision. Our results show that PMC helped participants prototype despite missing I/O electronic components, and highlighted how AR-mediated prototyping extends to exploring project ideas, tinkering with implementation, and making with others. Informed by our empirical and design explorations, we suggest a set of characteristics of constraints and implications for designing future technologies for makers within constraints. In the long-term, we hope that this research will inspire interaction designers to develop new tools that can help resolve constraints for making.en_US
dc.identifier.citationSomanath, S. (2017). 'Making' within Material, Cultural, and Emotional Constraints (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26819en_US
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/26819
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11023/4237
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisher.facultyGraduate Studies
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Calgaryen
dc.publisher.placeCalgaryen
dc.rightsUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.
dc.subjectComputer Science
dc.subject.otherMaker Culture
dc.subject.otherConstraints
dc.subject.otherHCI
dc.title'Making' within Material, Cultural, and Emotional Constraints
dc.typedoctoral thesis
thesis.degree.disciplineComputer Science
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Calgary
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)
ucalgary.item.requestcopytrue
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