Make Making Sustainable: Exploring Sustainability Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities in Making Activities

TL;DR

The paper investigates sustainability in personal fabrication by interviewing 17 US-based makers to map waste types, management practices, motivations, and barriers in grassroots and academic makerspaces. It combines qualitative analysis with design-oriented discussions to propose concrete directions—such as material-aware waste sorting, modular iterative prototyping, and cross-space knowledge sharing—to enable more sustainable making. The study contributes empirical insights that clarify why sustainable practices are adopted or resisted in maker contexts and outlines pragmatic infrastructure needs (tools, processes, and governance) to support environmentally responsible making at scale. Its findings carry practical implications for HCI researchers and makerspace practitioners seeking to reduce waste without sacrificing creativity, throughput, or learning opportunities. The work thus advances a more actionable, community-centered path toward sustainable making with potential impact on education, fabrication workflows, and local recycling ecosystems.

Abstract

The recent democratization of personal fabrication has significantly advanced the maker movement and reshaped applied research in HCI and beyond. However, this growth has also raised increasing sustainability concerns, as material waste is an inevitable byproduct of making and rapid prototyping. In this work, we examine the sustainability landscape within the modern maker community, focusing on grassroots makerspaces and maker-oriented research labs through in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders involved in making and managing making-related activities. Our findings highlight four key themes: the various types of "waste" generated through the making process, the strategies (or lack thereof) for managing this waste, the motivations driving (un)sustainable practices, and the challenges faced. We synthesize these insights into design considerations and takeaways for technical HCI researchers and the broader community, focusing on future tools, infrastructures, and educational approaches to foster sustainable making.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Potential new tools, systems, and infrastructures to support sustainable making. a) Illustration of a handheld material-detection "torch", b) illustration of the potential reuse and re-purpose of obsolete 3D printed parts, and c) illustration of a conceptual infrastructure system for resource sharing among makerspaces.