Sam - it's a self-description that works well for people who find themselves doing several of those things, and don't want to be pigeonholed into doing just one.

Garnet makes the same mistake, I think:
" Language typically expands into a rich lexicon of terms when a field grows, and the generality of ‘making’ is the polar opposite. Ceramicists, welders, sculptors, luthiers, amateur radio builders, furniture makers and inventors have been conflated into the singular category of makers, and the acceptance of this shift seems to indicate that any form of making is novel enough in popular culture that it is not worth discerning what is being built."

If you're making some ceramics and some robots and some lutes, it just doesn't work to call yourself a luthier.  You could think of the term as an acceptance that some people will be making all sorts of things, not going along with the traditional commercial specialisation of making skills.

Yes, it might mean that you get paid less, but then it's not really a description of a job, it's a description of an activity that's often happily not commercial.

One of the things about Make that made me sad was that it tended to presume that everybody aspired (or should aspire) to turn their making into some kind of business, and that was often missing the real point of the making. It assumed that if you liked to cook a nice dinner you'd be even happier running a restaurant.

R.

On 18/06/2019 21:11, Sam Dwyer wrote:
It was always fated to be a high poser and huckster zone, because if you were really good at making stuff, wouldn't you consider yourself an engineer or a designer or an artist first?


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