Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The goal of this research program is to design, develop, and evaluate tools that help diverse people to build physical interfaces such as toys, robots, and utilitarian systems by themselves. The Maker Movement, a recent social trend, aims to democratize technological practices and empower people to become more than consumers of technology. The act of building physical projects by oneself is said to have profound benefits for people including improved technical literacy, opportunity to develop agency and to become entrepreneurs. The availability of new technologies such as 3D printers, low-cost constructionist toolkits (such as Arduino and MaKey MaKey), and software tools such as programming environments and simulation software's has made it easy for people to create new interactive physical objects. While the Maker Movement is gaining momentum worldwide, a critical analysis has highlighted that certain constraints prevent the democratic vision from taking hold. For example, constraints such as limited or restricted access to material resources, cultural restrictions, emotional difficulties, or person impairments prevent people from taking part in the Maker Movement. Within this space, there exists an opportunity to engage human-computer interaction (HCI) research to broaden the reach of the Maker Movement and its benefits to wider audiences. *The long-term goal of our research program is to develop tools and techniques to address diverse makers within constraints. In the short-term, we are specifically interested in designing, developing, and evaluating tools to help makers within emotional constraints. This research program primarily builds on the fieldwork done as part of my PhD dissertation, Making within Material, Cultural, and Emotional constraints. The contributions of this research program are two-fold. First, we will design, develop, and evaluate a collection of prototype tools and techniques that can help people to continue building physical computing projects despite constraints. Second, by leveraging our design process and the evaluation results of our prototype systems, we will formulate design frameworks that can aid HCI designers and researchers in creating future systems to support maker practices within constraints.*This program will advance the field of HCI by addressing problems that inhibit people from taking part in technology-based making-centered activities, an area that is sparsely populated with research solutions. More broadly, this research addresses the diverse nature of the population of Canada, which spans various cultures and ethnicity, language, gender, and abilities and economic status. Our tools and techniques for youth within emotional or behavioral constraints can help them engage in constructive activities, and in the long-term help, such youth can develop positive identities and successfully transition to adulthood.