Make: Three Modes of Making

2 IMITATION, MODIFICATION & INNOVATION

For the past several years as a maker educator, I have been using the concepts of imitation, modification, and innovation as the structure for how I think about the curriculum I teach, how I assess students, and most importantly, what I want them to get from their experiences in the makerspace. Expertise and mastery over the skills involved in these three modes of making are universally applicable in any pursuit that involves creative thinking and problem-solving.

It’s important to think of these three modes as equally essential and connected. There is often a tendency to imagine that imitation is only valuable to pursue modification, which leads us to innovation, and therefore imitation is in some way ...