Expertise | Skill

What are the effects of making on understandings of expertise? 

Making promotes the idea that everybody can participate without being an expert and thereby become one. Expertise by making is validated within the situatedness and context of maker communities. Design practice, however, relies on expertise legitimized by education or by professional institutions. 

Foregoing research on making has already critically examined how less technically skilled novices access makerspaces and fab labs, how participation is encouraged, and how knowledge is shared. However, there has been little research on the specific topic of design expertise involved in order to fabricate objects and the skills that can be translated in these processes.

I analyze some of the following aspects and issues: Which type of expertise counts as such? How can other than technical and design skills operate in practice in a meaningful way? What moral, organizational and physical structures and procedures are required to acknowledge expertise by making?