Why has DIY become an attractive practice in a society where most everyday objects can be purchased-and what does this renewed interest in making reveal about how people relate to materials, tools, and everyday life?

Situated within broader histories of craft revival, Becoming a Tinkerer explores the contemporary return to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and tinkering in Poland. In the communist era, repairing, modifying, and creating objects was often a pragmatic response to scarcity. Today, these practices may be pursued for pleasure, sustainability, autonomy, or simply the satisfaction of making something oneself. Rather than treating DIY primarily as a social movement, the book examines tinkering as an embodied practice in which people work with materials, tools, and their own developing skills. Blending anthropology, sociology, and design theory, Jacek Gadecki shows how tinkering blurs the boundaries between work and leisure, professionalism and amateurism, consumption and creation.

Through a unique methodological approach combining video-based fieldwork, mobile app documentation, think-aloud protocols, and participant observation, Gadecki offers a close account of making as an embodied, multisensory practice. The study follows making as it happens: through concentration and flow, frustration and improvisation, embodied thinking and learning, and the recurring desire to create “something of their own.” It shows how tinkering can reconnect people with materiality in a world increasingly shaped by disembodied labor.

Ultimately, this book is about people who, by making things, also remake themselves. It explores the everyday practices through which people reclaim time, agency, and attention, and examines how tools and materials participate in shaping the human experience of being in the world. In doing so, it asks what “making” means when it is no longer primarily a response to material scarcity, but a way of engaging with the world.