An Interview with Mark Frauenfelder, Author, “Made by Hand”

Mark Frauenfelder is the author of Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, a paean to the pleasures of doing it yourself and a manifesto for living a more meaningful and happy life in a consumer-driven society. Frauenfelder is also the founder of the most popular blog in the world, www.boingboing.net, and the editor in chief of Make magazine. He recently spoke with Suvudu about the secret link between chickens and T. Rex, learning to be self-reliant, and how the worlds of makers and science fiction fans aren’t so different after all.

The subtitle of your book is “searching for meaning in a throwaway world.” Could you elaborate? What does that mean?

What I mean is that when you buy things that are meant to be thrown away, like modern television sets and most appliances and things like that, you really don’t appreciate them or have any kind of sense of ownership of them. If you make your own things or modify them or repair them then your investing your own time and effort into them, and as a result they have some of you in them. You value those kinds of things more highly than the kinds of things you buy that you plan on throwing away. If something is repairable it can last with you and also be modified for your changing needs, and so there’s more meaning in those kinds of things. I was just reading Dan Ariely’s new book, Predictably Irrational, where he conducted experiments and found that people who make their own stuff have more sense of meaning in their lives, which I thought was kind of interesting. His experiments show that the kinds of experiences that I was going through are actually measurable.

There are practical benefits to making things, but it seems that you’ve discovered other benefits, perhaps psychological or spiritual. Can you talk a little bit about how your own life has changed as a result of becoming a do-it-yourselfer?

I feel that my sense of being able to get things done, my self-efficacy, has increased. I’m less reluctant to take on projects that involve new skills or knowledge that I don’t have, because having gone through a bunch of things where I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and being able to eventually be successful in completing those projects and solving those problems, I know that probably with enough time and effort I can tackle those things that I normally would have shied away from, like fixing the thermostat that went on the blink a couple of weeks ago, instead of calling an HVAC expert to install a new one. I went online, read about it, and bought a thermostat. It took me a couple of hours to do it, but I got it done.

I understand that you weren’t always such a handy person, though. Is this true?

Yes, that’s true. Starting out with home improvement projects when I was in my twenties, I had some pretty unfortunate results. Like cracked tiles for a kitchen floor that I laid down, or wallpaper that was askew or bad paint jobs, and that made me not want to do those kinds of things as much, so I kind of gave up on do-it-yourself, but then I started editing Make magazine and hanging out with makers, I found out that the difference between them and me was that they accepted their mistakes and didn’t let them stand in the way of moving forward and having fun and finding fulfillment. So I decided to consciously adopt that self and say ‘alright, I’m going to make mistakes, and that’s okay. I’m just going to keep on going. That little of nugget made all the difference, because I did make plenty of mistakes. I’m very mistake prone. But you know, most people who do make stuff are. They make plenty of mistakes, and as they challenge themselves with more difficult projects once they master something they make new mistakes, but if you look at it as just part of the learning process then it’s not so bad.

You call this “the courage to screw up in your book.” Can anyone become a do-it-yourselfer? Is this something that even the most fumble-fingered person can do?

Yes, I think so. I’ve really started to think that nobody is born handy, or a do-it-yourselfer or a maker. It’s something that you can start at any time. Do something that’s not to difficult, and as you master it, you can raise the bar next time and progress. It’s never too late to start doing it.

Do you think that as a consequence of our highly technological society we’ve lost some skills that we very well should have preserved, and do you think that there’s a financial interest in instilling a kind of learned helplessness among the consumer public?

Yeah, I think so. That was one thing that I looked at a little bit in the book. It was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who created advertising campaigns designed to make people feel ashamed of homemade food or homemade clothes, or having used cars and to concentrate on buying the newest, greatest latest things. He appealed to their subconscious cravings rather than their practical sensibilities of what’s important to have in life.

Here at Suvudu, our primary focus is on science fiction, and it would seem like there would be some crossover between SF fans and the maker crowd. I’m thinking particularly of things like Steampunk and cosplayers. Have you seen this?

Oh, definitely. Going to Maker Faire and seeing the people there, they do remind me of the same folks that I see at comic conventions and science fiction conventions. These are people who are interested in change and possibility and the power of science and creativity to change their environment, so I very much see a connection between fandom and DIY.

Speaking of changes in the environment, I know that you touch upon some ecological and environmental issues in your book, particularly how out of touch we are with the resources that we use and the impact we have on the environment. Are there changes coming? Will we get to some point in the future where we won’t have as much technology to depend on because our resources are running low, and these kinds of skills that you have will become much more valuable? is this something that we should be preparing for?

You know, I really hope it doesn’t come to that. I met with some people who started an organization called the Post-Carbon Institute, and their goal is to try to find ways that people can live well in a world where there is no more liquid fuel available, or it’s unaffordable. From their experiments – and they’ve done a lot of hands-on work doing interesting gardening techniques and things like that – they’ve found that it’s really difficult to live in a comfortable way without petroleum. One gallon of gasoline is equivalent to about five weeks of human labor, so we’ve been getting this incredibly expensive work done for us in the last century, and if that goes away, DIY skills will certainly be helpful, but they won’t come close to making up for what petroleum does for us. I don’t look to DIY as an answer to the future, or look forward to a future where an energy crisis or peak oil really happens. It could help in only a small way, I would say.

In The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler writes that we should look at this period of having all of this liquid fuel as a one time event in our history, and it’s going to go away at some point. Say if it did – and I know that you and I were talking about one of his other books a while back, World Made By Hand – what are some of the skills that you’ve learned that would be most useful?

I think that some of the gardening techniques, composting, definitely, and raising chickens. You get a lot of return from a small amount of investment raising chickens. They don’t need much upkeep, you can feed them low quality calories, and they produce high quality calories in the form of eggs and meat, so I think that, and learning about food and food preservation techniques, making sauerkraut, yogurt and kombucha, things where you’re letting natural fermentation processes preserve your food so that if you don’t have refrigeration you can still have food and store it, those kinds of things would definitely be important.

I was especially delighted with your description of chickens as “baby dinosaurs.” Why did you call them that?

The reason is that scientists have compared the DNA of modern day chickens to earlier animals, and they’ve found that the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the chicken share a lot of DNA. The current thinking is that the Tyrannosaurus Rex evolved into the modern day chicken. It’s such a great thing to think about when you see these little chickens run about. There are some genes in chickens that aren’t expressed, but scientists have been able to express them, that will give chickens razor sharp teeth just like a dinosaur. Hopefully that’s not going to be a mad scientist’s project, but chickens are just great.

Let’s assume now that my readers are inspired to go out there and start making things. Where should they go online? Are there any favorite websites that you might want to send them to?


I have a couple of places. One is a blog I really like called homegrownevolution.com that some people that I met through writing the book maintain. They do a really great job writing on urban homesteading and how to live in the city or country and produce a lot of what you need on a small parcel of land. Another one is a website called ramshacklesolid.com. It’s a family that’s doing a lot of similar things and looking at ways to educate their kids and really do a lot of things on their own. Also, it’s not really online, but I’m really happy that my book was released on Kindle this week because a lot of people were asking for a digital version to read on their iPad or Kindle.

Mark Frauenfelder is the author of Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throw-away World.