A Sustainable Future in the Making? The Maker Movement, the Maker-Habitus and Sustainability

Abstract

Recent years have seen the emergence of what has been termed a new ‘maker movement’. Alternately cast either as an essentially new mode of engagement with the practices and potentialities of making instigated by the development of new technologies, or a (re)turn to the fundamentals and rewards of traditional crafts, opportunities to practice making in an array of forms are increasingly widespread. Whilst there has been some (limited) acknowledgement of the role a (re)valorisation of making might play in a more environmentally sustainable material culture (e.g. Brook 2012), how such connections might be made and supported has remained unexplored. This chapter draws on both theoretical and empirical sources in order to articulate a conceptual ‘maker-habitus’ – an embodied orientation to the material world characterised by an interest in material (re)production. I argue that fundamental to the ‘maker-habitus’ is a particularly acute affordance sensitivity – that is, an ability to identify the potentialities of materials and material things. Recent empirical work is used to illustrate this notion at work and, in turn, to suggest that increasing societal support for the proliferation of such sensibilities might be key to eliciting a more environmentally sustainable everyday material culture.