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Users as makers: user experience design for and by the crowd

This project explores some key implications for how overlapping user roles and user experiences are affected by the design of public, crowdsourced projects. The growing prevalence of crowdsourcing is creating new and complex contexts for communication, prompting a need to more fully understand how these arrangements can best be sustained for and by their participants and stakeholders. I draw on an ethnographic study of LibriVox.org---a volunteer audiobook publishing project---to argue that such large communities of makers necessitate a unique understanding of usability: one where, instead of flawless consumer experiences, a more important, long-term goal is to cultivate good, empowering user experiences for makers. Through surveying four central sites of user-generated LibriVox documentation, I learn how this decentralized maker community offers its volunteers multiple and flexible paths toward valuable instances of user-as-maker agency.