The unschooled life.

• Author: Balaker, Ted
• Position: Soundbite - Interview

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In 1988 Mark Frauenfelder co-founded bOING bOING, a small technology-culture magazine that eventually evolved into one of the Web's most popular blogs. In addition to blogging at bOING bOING, Frauenfelder is editor in chief of MAKE magazine and author of the new book Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World (Portfolio). Ted Balaker interviewed Frauenfelder in July.

Q: Tell us a bit about the book.

A: Made by Hand is a book about my explorations in the do-it-yourself world. I was always interested in DIY media, bOING bOING started as a print zine in the late '80s, so I was interested in that and things like silkscreen T-shirts and the Web and blogs and all that. But I was never really handy.

Once I started editing MAKE magazine, I came into contact with all these people who were really great DIYers, and what I learned from them was that they were all really OK about making mistakes. In fact, they considered making mistakes part of their creative process. They realized that they were going to breaktools and spend money they didn't need to going on wild goose chases. But in the end it was worth it for them because they had all this cool stuff that they lived with, and it was part of their lives.

I decided that I wanted to try that out as a way to live and see if l could make my life better. So I started doing things like building a chicken coop and raising my own chickens and becoming a beekeeper, making things like cigar box guitars. I'm a big espresso fiend, so I retrofitted my espresso maker to control the temperature. I started carving my own wooden spoons and kitchen utensils. Things like that. And it turned out that it was really a lot of fun.

Q: These days we kind of live in a zero tolerance society where we're trying to minimize risk all the time. How does that interact with the DIY culture? In a lot of ways we don't want to make mistakes.

A: You should try not to make...