Jimmy's got a backpack—and it's the coolest backpack ever. While his dad was on a business trip to Japan three years ago, he saw this backpack in the window of a sporting goods store, and he thought his son would like it. He was totally right. Jimmy loves his backpack. It's yellow and blue with white trim and tons of cool pockets. The shoulder straps fit just right, and there is even an extra strap that Jimmy can clip across his chest so that the pack doesn't wobble around when he is learning new tricks at the skate park with his friends. Inside there's a bunch of compartments for pens and stuff and a secret compartment for his phone with a cool silver grommet where his earbuds pop out. Jimmy's made the backpack even cooler. He's used paint markers to write the names of his favorite bands all over the outside and stenciled the logo of his favorite skateboard company across the back. But the coolest part was that while he was at the X Games in Austin launch last year, Jimmy got Nyjah Huston to sign his name in black Sharpie over the left side pocket. Dude, Nyjah Huston!

Even though it was starting to look a little worse for wear after three years of Jimmy toting it around every day, Jimmy's backpack was still perfect to him.

Until it wasn't.

A few weeks ago—the same day Jimmy landed his first fakie kickflip 180—the zipper broke. It wasn't just any zipper—the main zipper to the big compartment where Jimmy kept his books and stuff for school. Without the zipper, the bag flopped open and everything fell out.

This was a problem—a huge problem.

At first, Jimmy tried to repair the backpack with safety pins. A quick fix, just to keep the main compartment secured. The safety pins looked cool, kind of punk rock, but they were too weak to keep the backpack closed. They got all tweaked and bent out of shape from the weight of Jimmy's books. He couldn't even ollie onto a curb without his bag popping open—and it was such a pain to undo, like, a dozen twisted safety pins just to get his books out.

“Jimmy,” his mom had said, “let me get you a new backpack.”

Jimmy was grateful that his mom offered to buy him a new backpack, but that was totally not an option. There was no way he could go from having the coolest backpack in school to having a bag just like everyone else.

But the zipper problem was really getting out of control. A week passed. Jimmy was about to cave in and finally start looking for a new backpack. But then one day while he was skating home from school, the Sew Low fabric store caught his eye. Jimmy went in and started looking around. There were tons of brightly colored fabrics everywhere and a whole wall filled with different sorts of fasteners. Jimmy was a little overwhelmed, but he was on a mission. After a few minutes of roaming around, he went up to a woman behind a counter and showed her his backpack. “Do you think I can fix it?” he asked.

This was an important question. Jimmy didn't ask the woman in the fabric store, “Can you fix it?” He asked her if he could fix it. Of course, Jimmy already knew he could fix it, but he was mostly just asking how.

Jimmy's a maker. Every time Jimmy sees a new skate video down at the shop, he immediately heads out with a handful of friends to see what cool new street ramps they can build. They study the skate videos carefully and copy the ramps in the videos as best as they can. Sometimes they make perfect replicas that work awesome. Other times things don't work out so well—but they always wind up making some sort of structure that turns out to be just as cool.

Jimmy didn't know the first thing about how to fix a broken zipper, but the lady at the fabric store totally hooked him up. In no time Jimmy was on his way home with a bag full of sewing gear—and a brand-new zipper. He had what he needed to fix his backpack, now all he needed was to figure out how to do it. So he opened his laptop and hopped on YouTube. There were hundreds of videos showing how to replace a broken zipper. A few hours of YouTubing later, and after pricking his fingers like, a million times, he'd finally done it. He'd finally removed and replaced the zipper—and it totally worked!

Jimmy's new zipper wasn't perfect, and he had to tweak it a few times when the seams he'd sewn had started to give, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that Jimmy still had the coolest backpack in school, and now it was even cooler

The story of Jimmy is a story of empowerment. It speaks to one of the main goals of the Agency by Design research initiative, which has been to better understand what maker educators and thought leaders in the field viewed as the primary outcomes of their work. Through interviews and site visits, the Agency by Design research team quickly began to notice some themes. In one way or another, we consistently heard educators say that they were hoping for their students to develop a can-do spirit, or as Bruce Hamren at The Athenian School said, “a feeling like you have the ability to say, ‘I can do that’—and then actually do it.” Just like Jimmy.

Rather than being mere consumers of their worlds, Bruce and others want their students to develop as producers. For example, educators would point to a set of headphones, a backpack, or a chair and say they wanted their students to view these everyday objects not as commodities they could buy but as opportunities for them to invent, create, and innovate.

Initially, our understanding was that this can-do spirit applied to the many commodities young people have the opportunity to purchase in our consumerist culture. However, as we continued to listen to maker educators speak, we noticed that their interest in helping students develop the can-do spirit reached far beyond the making of objects. They wanted to encourage a mindset in their students—a way of seeing and being in the world—that extended their sense of I-can-do-that beyond objects to social, cultural, and political systems. As one example, David Clifford made the case that a young person's experiences making in school could potentially lead to students feeling empowered to challenge major cultural systems, such as our country's dominant paradigm of systemic racism.

As the Agency by Design team members synthesized what we were hearing during our early conversations with educators, we began to interpret the colloquial notion of I-can-do-that as agency. In fact, the name of our project, Agency by Design, derived from our early recognition that student agency is a core driver, and goal, of maker-centered learning (Figure 3.1). As Chapter One attests, educators in the maker sphere seem to care deeply about cultivating a sense of agency in their students—but not just any kind of agency. The educators we spoke with wanted their students to develop a sense of agency with regards to making (or remaking) things in the world. Sometimes those “things” were actually things—like furniture, smartphone cases, or wearable electronics. Other times those things were systems, like the major cultural forces David Clifford mentioned, but also like more localized systems such as the system for lining up for lunch at school or the system for doing chores in one's home. This chapter presents the notion of maker-centered agency as a disposition and offers the focal concept of maker empowerment as its core spirit. Maker empowerment is meant to describe student agency through a maker lens. Shortly, we discuss this specific concept at length—offering a definition, and several examples. But first it may be helpful to say a few words about the more general concept of human agency.

What Is Agency?

People exercise their agency when they consciously choose to act in ways that are intended to bring about certain effects. This may sound straightforward, but its surface clarity masks a wide range of questions that have animated philosophical debates for centuries. Does our capacity to make choices about how we act mean that we have free will? Maybe, but maybe not. Philosophers have pointed out that it is possible to have the feeling that one is acting freely and by choice when in fact the machinery of the universe predetermines everything that happens. Is the faculty of agency the property of an individual mind? Maybe, but some sociologists would argue that our choice-making behaviors are so profoundly shaped by social and cultural systems that the idea of individual choice is an illusion.

Views about the nature of human agency are fundamental to our understanding of issues as diverse as the nature of intention and action, the possibility of free will and autonomy, issues of ethics and moral responsibility, explanations of rationality and akrasia (weakness of will), theories of human motivation, theories of economic behavior, and theories of human rights. Ideas about the meaning and purpose of human agency have been put forth by a wide range of scholars in a wide range of professions, including philosophers, psychologists, ethicists, theologians, neuroscientists, lawyers, sociologists, feminists, and human rights activists, to name just a few. It would take this chapter far afield to try to review the scholarly literature on agency. Instead, what we offer below is a brief subjective synthesis of selected conceptual aspects of human agency that have direct bearing on the concept of maker empowerment—the particular brand of agency we have identified as being the core outcome of maker-centered learning.

Scope: Agency and the Complex Web of Interrelated Actions

Two additional features of the general concept of agency are useful to bring into focus and consider through a maker lens. The first feature is scope, which has to do with the grain-size of actions we want to refer to when we talk about having a sense of agency. Agentic choices can occur across a continuum of human action, from tiny choices we make thousands of times a day, like choosing to walk from point A to point B, to grand choices we make about which life paths to pursue and how to pursue them. The sense of agency reflected in the I-can-do-it spirit that maker educators we spoke with clearly goes beyond the agency of a single act. These educators were not referring to students' capacity to decide to pick up a hammer or order an Arduino online. Rather, they were referring to students' willingness to choose to engage in a prolonged and often complex web of interrelated actions.

Gever Tulley tells just such a story. Recently Ana,⁴ a Brightworks student, had visited an underresourced school in one of San Francisco's neighborhoods. What she learned while she was there was that the school's library was woefully underequipped and that the students did not have access to books they could check out and take home to read at night. An avid reader and the daughter of an English teacher, Ana found this scenario unacceptable. She refused to live in a city where other young people her age did not have access to books—and she was inclined to do something about it.

“She literally was wondering if she could just empty our shelves and take them there,” Tulley noted, “but instead we guided her into a ‘think about this as a project or something you could do that would keep providing books to the school’ mindset.” And that's exactly what Ana did. After raising $1,200 and providing the school with over 700 books, Ana has now set up an initiative connecting local bookstores with the school so that unsold inventory with the covers removed can be channeled to the school's library.

Inspired by her experience at the Brightworks School, where students pursue self-directed projects on a regular basis, Ana had the wherewithal to take the steps she needed to change a flawed system. While she may not have built or made something in the traditional sense, Ana was nonetheless maker-empowered—seeing the world as malleable, alert to an opportunity to create change, and capable and inclined to do so.

Gever tells an elegant story of Ana's experiences, but in reality the amount of work, the number of choices, and the decisions Ana had to make throughout this process indicate that agentic behavior is multilayered, intricate, and complex. Indeed, Ana's experiences at Brightworks had equipped her with a general sense of agency, but moving beyond having a sense of agency toward agentic action required Ana to develop a fundraising campaign, to establish communications with various booksellers, to connect with school librarians, and to place a system into action that would later run on its own. Throughout this process, Ana wrote letters, sent emails, made phone calls, and appealed to a variety of people in person to persuade them to help her out. Although having a sense of agency entails having a tendency toward action, engaging in agentic behavior involves both the pursuit and the execution of a complex, multilayered web of interrelated actions.

Like the example of Ana, the actions that the educators we spoke with had in mind when they talked about maker-centered agency tended to encompass a large sweep of smaller choices, such as learning new skills, seeking out resources, and collaborating with others (Figure 3.2).

Locus: Participating in Agentic Action

A second important feature of the concept of agency as it relates to making, designing, redesigning, and hacking is the locus of agency. The term locus refers to where a sense of agency originates and resides. As with scope, the spectrum of possibility is vast. At one extreme end is a fully internal view, in which a sense of agency originates wholly from the internal workings of an individual mind. At the other end is a fully external view, in which an individual's sense of agency is wholly socially constructed and arises solely through the influence of external environmental factors such as cultural expectations, social networks, and the material influences of the physical world. From the standpoint of common sense, situating agency at either of these extreme ends is implausible. On one hand, radical internalism doesn't make sense because none of us lives in a vacuum; our actions and decisions cannot help but be influenced by the people and places around us, at least to some degree. On the other hand, radical externalism is implausible because it would mean that any sense of interior mental control we have over our own choice-making is simply an illusion and that every agentic action we (mistakenly) believe we author ourselves is in reality determined by outside forces.

The wide middle between these two extremes leaves lots of room for the positioning of agency. Through our site visits, interviews, and work with teachers, we have come to believe that a maker sense of agency tilts clearly toward an external view, generously acknowledging the roles of culture, community, and the physical environment in shaping agentic behavior. Or as Bandura puts it, “Most human pursuits involve other participating agents, so there is no absolute agency… . Effective group performance is guided by collective intentionality.”⁵ The complex web of interrelated actions that Ana engaged in above also consisted of a complex web of interrelated individuals—bringing shape to the social nature of agency and making visible the collective nature of agentic action.

Bandura has referred to this concept as collective agency:

Though Bandura emphasizes the social nature of collective agency, he is keen to note that the individual does not get lost in the process. Rather, individuals assert their agency within collective efforts. This concept is emphasized in Brittany Harker Martin's framework for socially empowered learning. “When students are socially empowered,” she argues, “they feel they can make a difference in their lives and the lives of others.”⁷ From the perspective of maker-centered learning and the broader ethos of the maker movement, it can be said that the individuals within broader communities of makers come together, each asserting their own individual agency, to achieve greater effects. Bandura's concept of collective agency dovetails nicely with the idea of do-it-together mentioned in Chapter Two. Reflecting on his own experiences of becoming a maker, David Lang has made this point very clearly: “Making is about sharing ideas, tools, and processes. The most prolific makers I met weren't the people who did everything themselves. In fact, they were the individuals most skilled at navigating the web of collaboration and adapting it to their will.”⁸

As discussed in Chapters One and Two, maker culture tends to be highly collaborative, community based, and reliant on information sharing. Maker-centered activities are situated in flexible and often sprawling sociocultural networks, which include people, cultural forces, information, and materials that are operant in the immediate vicinity as well as people, resources, cultures, and information that are accessed digitally from a geographical distance. As such, when one asserts one's agency within a maker context, one is often participating with others.⁹

An example of collective agency that emanates from distributed maker participation can be found in the following vignette provided by Aaron Vanderwerff, director of the Creativity Lab at the Lighthouse Community Charter School in Oakland, California:

As this story so clearly illustrates, engaging in the work of making is a highly distributed process. Here, not only did Roberto, Cesar, and Tomas work together as a team, but they also sourced knowledge and expertise from a variety of other individuals. Even beyond their truck conversion project, when the young men realized they needed support passing their Humanities courses, they realized that to achieve their goals, they needed to reach out to their teacher for help. Through a do-it-together process, Roberto, Cesar, and Tomas were able to act on their individual and collective agency (Figure 3.3).

In Chapter Two we discussed the distributed nature of teaching and learning in maker settings. Teachers often tell stories of how students solidify their newly acquired and often fragile knowledge of a skill or technique by teaching what they have just learned to someone else. In this way, students develop an I-can-do-that sense of agency not merely because of an internal decision to be proactive about redesigning, hacking, or tweaking but also because of an engagement with a community and responding to its needs. It is not surprising then that the educators we spoke with both emphasized student agency as a primary outcome of maker-centered learning in Chapter One and suggested that distributed learning was a central practice in the maker-centered classroom in Chapter Two.

To summarize: first, at its core, agency is shaped by choices, intentions, and actions. One can make a distinction between having a sense of agency and agentic action: Having a sense of agency implies having the intention or tendency toward action, but does not necessarily guarantee that the actions one feels empowered to take will necessarily be enacted. Agentic action moves beyond having a sense of agency and involves the process of activating—or performing—one's intentions.

Second, in the sphere of maker-centered learning, activating one's agency generally refers to an extensive and complex web of interrelated actions, rather than a single discrete act. And third, maker-centered agentive acts are not simply the output of an individual working solo without context. They are best understood as supported by, and often enacted within, a social context.

Agency and Maker Empowerment

With these ideas as a backdrop, we turn now to the concept of maker empowerment. The purpose of establishing this concept is a practical one: We propose that maker empowerment is a key and desirable outcome of maker-centered learning, and we aim to describe maker empowerment in a way that can usefully inform the day-to-day work that maker educators do when they design, implement, and assess maker-centered learning experiences. Here is how we define it:

It is important to note that the phrase maker empowerment is meant to refer to more than a single instance of action or achievement. As we mentioned earlier, a sense of agency with regard to making—what we are now calling a sense of maker empowerment—is an abiding tendency rather than a rule-defined behavior. Accordingly, maker empowerment as an educational outcome is a kind of disposition that students develop, a way of being in the world, that is characterized by understanding oneself as a person of resourcefulness who can muster the wherewithal to change things through making. It is not—or at least not merely—a set of technical skills.

In a way, the concept of maker empowerment is similar to the principle of having a bias toward action that is a core tenet of design thinking.¹¹ Interestingly, the idea of a having bias toward action originally comes from the business world, where it was put forth to characterize a quick decision-making mind-set that could counter the syndrome of paralysis by analysis and cumbersome bureaucratic control.¹² Although paralysis by analysis is certainly something to be avoided, the opposite of maker empowerment—and the syndrome for which the concept is meant to be a corrective—is a bit different.

Being maker unempowered is to have a passive consumerist orientation, in which one unreflectively accepts ready-made goods and social systems as they present themselves, without recognizing that it is a choice to do so and that these human-designed objects and systems are susceptible to modification. Moreover, because the concept of maker carries with it the connotation of constructing, assembling, and the fitting together of parts, the idea of maker unempowerment implies a lack of sensitivity to design, and indeed a thoughtless disregard of the designed, form-and-function character of the made world. Perhaps the simplest way to put it is that being maker unempowered suggests that one is blind to the roles others have played in the making of things and therefore blind to the possibility of enacting one's own agency with regard to making.

The concept of maker empowerment is meant to characterize a broad educational outcome of maker-centered learning—an agentic, dispositional outcome that is worthwhile for many types of students. Acquiring a sense of maker empowerment is appropriate not just for students who are already would-be maker types (e.g., hackers, tinkerers, hobbyists) but also for students who, although they may not go on in life to define themselves as makers, will still take the initiative to engage in maker activities from time to time (Figure 3.4). So, for example, a maker-empowered person might be someone who does not think of himself as a maker but, after the purchase of a new laptop computer, envisions the perfect laptop cover and endeavors to design and make it rather than purchasing it from a store. It would include the girl who eagerly scours the Internet for instructions on how to make a potato shooter rather than purchasing a ready-made potato rocket online, or the young couple who decide to make their senior prom outfits out of duct tape rather than opting for the traditional formal wear. And of course it wholeheartedly includes people like Jimmy, who tackled the challenge of keeping his backpack alive, and Ana, who tackled the challenge of changing a whole system of book distribution between independent booksellers and underresourced schools.

Empowerment and Social Justice

The foregoing examples mainly bring out the maker side of the phrase maker empowerment. Regarding the term empowerment, we feel it is important to note the long history of empowerment initiatives emanating from the field of youth development. Broadly, the goal of youth empowerment is to help young people develop the ability to make decisions for themselves in a manner that positively affects their own lives and the lives of others. In this sense, the concept of youth empowerment is dispositional in the way that maker empowerment is, but it also has a social justice aspect to it. Although our work would never suggest that maker empowerment is a disposition that develops in isolation, many youth empowerment initiatives specifically respond to social inequities or the imbalance of power within a social system—much in the way that David Clifford referred to earlier in this chapter. And indeed, many youth development programs take on social justice issues by focusing on the empowerment of young people from traditionally disenfranchised communities. In fact, the Abundance Foundation, the primary philanthropic supporter of the Agency by Design research initiative, has devoted an entire strand of its resources toward funding just such empowerment initiatives.¹³ As the foundation's website states:

As can be seen in this excerpt, empowerment initiatives—whether for youth, women, or others—are situated within greater cultural contexts. Even when such empowerment initiatives are focused on individual youth development, those individuals are always situated within greater social systems.

Youth empowerment initiatives are diverse and can include organizations devoted to civic engagement, youth rights councils, student activism networks, and community organizing initiatives. Many contemporary arts education organizations likewise include a specific focus on youth empowerment combined with a social justice agenda. A general interest in youth empowerment programming has recently manifested itself in the form of what has come to be known as creative youth development. A 2014 study frames creative youth development as an instrumental effect of learning in various disciplines:

Though maker empowerment may be seen as a separate brand of agency that is enacted differently in the maker-centered classroom than it is within the context of a youth empowerment or creative youth development program, we believe there are many commonalities between these various settings as well. We also believe that maker-centered learning may itself have much to learn from the work of youth empowerment and creative youth development organizations—especially with regard to considering how imbalanced power structures shape our social experiences, and how one's actions—the things one makes in the world—have the potential to affect the lives of others.

Empowerment in Education

From the standpoint of education, the goal of cultivating a sense of empowerment is nothing new; it is the deep rationale behind much of what we teach. We teach art, or history, or mathematics not solely to the group of students who will go on to make their livings in these areas but to all students because we believe it is empowering for all young people to learn how to engage with the world through the lenses of these disciplines. Although maker-centered learning is not a stand-alone discipline, the concept of maker empowerment aims for this same breadth. Not all students who are exposed to maker education will go on to become scientists, technology specialists, engineers, or carpenters. But perhaps, through high-quality maker-centered learning experiences, they might all acquire a sense of maker empowerment.

If you consider the definition of maker empowerment we previously articulated as a design—and most of the complex concepts humans invent are designs—you can see that it weaves together three distinct ideas. For the sake of convenience, here is the definition again: Maker empowerment is a sensitivity to the designed dimension of objects and systems, along with the inclination and capacity to shape one's world through building, tinkering, re/designing, or hacking. The first phrase, a sensitivity to the designed dimension of objects and systems, points to the importance of simply noticing that many of the objects, ideas, and systems we encounter in the world—from desktops to democracy to driver education classes—are human-made designs. They are composed of specific parts that fit together to serve one or more purposes, and they can be understood and analyzed from the standpoint of design. The second part of the sentence mentions both the inclination and the capacity to make (or remake) things. The terms inclination and capacity are separated intentionally. Inclination has to do with motivation to do something. Capacity has to do with the skill or wherewithal to actually do it.

This three-part definition, with its emphasis on the triad of sensitivity, inclination, and capacity, extends a concept of dispositional behavior developed at Project Zero that proposes that ability alone is not enough to ensure action.¹⁶ To draw again on our bicycle example, think about what it means to be called a cyclist. It is necessary to have not only the capacity to ride a bicycle but also the motivation to ride a bike on a regular basis and to be alert to occasions to do so. Dispositional behavior, which by definition means the tendency to do something on a regular basis, occurs when these three concepts coalesce—the capacity to do something, the motivation to do it, and the sensitivity to appropriate occasions to do it.

This view of the mechanism of dispositional behavior—often termed the triadic theory of dispositions—may sound good in theory. Importantly, it is also supported by empirical research.¹⁷ Through a series of rather elaborate experiments, researchers have shown that the contribution of these three elements—ability, inclination, and sensitivity—can indeed be individually distinguished in young people's intellectual behavior, and that a shortfall in any of the three elements can block cognitive performance. As an example, consider the tendency to think outside the box. People who have this disposition tend to have a distinctive and dependable mind-set that flavors their engagement with the world. They are skilled at challenging existing paradigms and developing break-set ideas (ability); they are interested in innovative ideas and solutions and are motivated to seek them out (inclination); and they are alert to occasions when outside-the-box thinking is called for (sensitivity). If any one or more of these factors are lacking, agentic behavior will not ensue. For instance, ability without motivation will not work—think of how many things we can do but do not do simply because we do not want to do them. Motivation without capacity does not work either—consider all the things we want to do but cannot because we do not have the necessary skills.

What about sensitivity? Here is where it gets interesting. It turns out that the biggest bottleneck to dispositional behavior—in other words, the shortfall that most frequently prevents ability, inclination, and sensitivity from coalescing into regular patterns of action—is a shortfall of sensitivity. In other words, at least in terms of critical and creative thinking, young people do not follow through with these habits of mind not because they cannot (ability) and not because they do not want to (inclination) but mainly because they do not notice opportunities to do so (sensitivity). This finding does not mean that young people's inner detection mechanisms are hopelessly flawed. Sensitivity has everything to do with the saliency of cues in the environment. If an environment does not have strong cues toward certain patterns of behavior—or actually contains countercues—it can be pretty hard for those patterns of behavior to be internalized by young people acting within that environment.

The Project Zero research on dispositional behavior just described was originally conducted to investigate thinking dispositions—habits of mind like open-mindedness, reason-seeking, and perspective taking—and it took place in fairly traditional school settings, so perhaps the findings about a lack of sensitivity are not surprising: Schools typically cue students to think in certain ways at certain times rather than encourage them to be alert to occasions to determine what to think about on their own. For example, at 10:00 a.m. students might be asked to start thinking about math and then at 10:45 a.m. to redirect their attention to thinking about art. We cannot know for sure if the findings about sensitivity transfer to the notion of developing a disposition toward maker empowerment, but it is easy to see that there are lots of cues in our everyday environments that prompt us not to notice design and not to make things on our own: The endless stream of cheap, ready-made objects; a culture of disposable goods; entrenched social systems that seem impervious to change; and little time for—or valuing of—prolonged tinkering or iterative cycles of experimentation with materials.

Maker culture is different, of course. What goes on inside makerspaces and in maker-centered classrooms is usually just the opposite, and that is part of the point. Maker-centered learning experiences often explicitly aim to cultivate students' sensitivity to the made dimensions of the world, for instance by encouraging them to become alert to design, and by urging them to notice not only that much of our world is designed by humans, but that our human-made designs—the objects and systems all around us—are susceptible to change (Figure 3.5).

Earlier in this chapter we introduced Jimmy, the young man who hacked his backpack, and Ana, the young woman who developed a new distribution system for providing a school in San Francisco with a fresh supply of books. The accomplishments of both of these young people can be seen through the lens of maker empowerment. Both of them had the inclination to change or fix something in their worlds: Jimmy was motivated by the desire to continue to use his way cool backpack, just as Ana was motivated by her desire to put books in the hands of children who would not have had access to them otherwise. Both Jimmy and Ana ended up having the skills they needed to get their respective jobs done, although it was noteworthy that they both developed the requisite skills along the way: Jimmy learned how to sew a zipper; Ana learned how to fundraise and connect disparate members of her community.

Very importantly, both of these young people were sensitive to an opportunity to engage with the designed dimensions of their worlds. Jimmy personalized his backpack, modifying its design even before it was in need of repair. Ana saw the absence of books in certain settings not just as a regrettable situation and an unjust social imbalance but also as a flaw in the design of a larger system that she decided to address herself. As mentioned earlier, a lack of sensitivity to opportunity is a significant obstacle to the development of dispositional behavior, and one that is often overlooked. With this in mind, if maker empowerment is a desirable dispositional outcome for maker-centered learning, then it is crucial to pay special attention to helping young people develop a sensitivity to opportunity. We turn to this theme in the next chapter, where we ask: How can we help young people become sensitive to opportunities that activate their sense of maker empowerment? That is, how can we help young people become more sensitive to the designed dimensions of their worlds?