The New Makers

Freeze-dried backpacking food. A personal finance app. A photo booth. A community dinner for refugees. The perfect coffee mug. An app to teach kids about AI. An exhibit at the V&A Museum. All of these things were made by researchers.

It’s never been easier for researchers to turn their ideas into products. Traditionally, we’ve been one step removed from delivery. We’ve worked through influencing others. AI tools are changing that. Perhaps some are starting to think, “This is our moment.”

But not everyone sees it that way. Others are watching nervously, unsure what it means for them. And a growing number are being told, by their employers, that this is the direction they must now take.

Researcher-makers aren’t new. Quietly and often without the label, researchers have been creating things for years — products, tools, communities, and companies. Their experiences are the closest thing we have to a map of the journey and of the challenges and tradeoffs that come with it. This article learns from those people. And in their stories, something distinctive keeps surfacing: a researcher’s way of making, driven by the traits, values, and practices that define us.

Why now?

When I wrote Hopeful Futures for UX Research a year ago, many evolutionary paths still seemed possible. There was a sense of potential in the air — of all the new “coulds” that AI tools represented. Over the past year, for many people, that “could” has hardened: first into “should” and now, increasingly, into “must.”

For many of us, this new direction isn’t one we fully chose — it reflects the priorities of our employers. New logic drives the organization of product teams, and research is being swept up in those changes. The pressure to become a maker is growing: AI-driven research tooling, prototypes, and even production code.

This article isn’t telling you what to do, and it isn’t trying to sell you on becoming a maker. But it might help you navigate this moment while staying true to your values and identity as a researcher. It asks the question, “What does it mean to be a researcher who makes things?” — and learns from 21 people who have been there. 

The path forward isn’t easy, as these stories attest. Success is to reconcile the researcher’s way of making with the endemic pressures of building products: selling, tradeoffs, the need to ship imperfect outputs, and managing cash flow. It’s to claim a hyphenated researcher-maker identity. Most fundamentally of all, it’s to adopt a more generous, expansive definition of being a maker that recognizes the creativity in our work that was there all along.

Neha’s story

Neha had always thought the power structure was backwards. Working in a corporate innovation lab, she watched ideas get funded or killed by people further from the customer than she was. I said, “Research should be in the C-suite.” And then I said, “Why is a researcher not a CEO?” And then I was like, “Well, I’m a researcher. Why am I not CEO?”

The push came when the job market collapsed. “The “you can always just get a job” reality just completely disintegrated under my feet.” So she founded a personal finance app, Incluya, built on anthropological principles. Not because the timing was perfect, but because it was now or never.

Within a year, Neha had a team of ten, a closed beta, and a product she believed in. She also had a problem. Her researcher instincts — the ones that made the product thoughtful — were slowing everything down. She was seeing every angle, weighing every option. Neha arrived at a solution: decisions should be time-boxed as well as evidence-based. It ensured Incluya’s direction was backed by research while also respecting the need for momentum.

During the beta, Neha’s team heard from a user who’d had a visceral, lifelong triggering relationship to money. After a few weeks with the tool, unprompted, this participant asked to share her story with the Incluya team. She wanted people to know how much it had helped.

Neha reflected, “This woman alone makes it worth continuing. If this tool had this much impact, you kind of can’t stop.”

But this kind of motivation can be a double-edged sword. Knowing the difference that her product could make to users is also an extra burden that Neha now carries, making it harder to step away.

A year ago, Neha put “founder” in air quotes. Now it’s just a fact. She still feels most herself at research conferences — it was like, “Oh, I’m back home” — but founding has strengthened rather than replaced the researcher in her. She doesn’t want to burn out again; she’s trying to prove that a startup can be nourishing rather than depleting. She’s not sure yet whether that’s possible. “Be brutally honest with which aspects of your research sensibilities you’re willing to let go of. But also, don’t abandon them all. It’s not all or nothing.”

1. Research is who we are

“This is the person I am. I don’t have a plan B: I will always be a researcher because those are my qualities, my attributes.” — Shipra, Researcher-Founder-Artist

Our identity as researchers runs deep. It’s more than what we do: it’s our way of being in the world, our values. It defines us; sometimes, it also holds us back.

The main barrier in the journey to becoming a maker isn’t tools or even skills. These can be learned, and we already have most of what we need. The barrier is identity: our model of who we are and which hyphens we allow ourselves. Our identity defines us, but it can also lock us into a swim lane and internalize power structures that hold us back.

Giving yourself permission

Breaking out of those limits we set for ourselves can be hard. When researchers told me their origin stories as makers, they granted themselves permission and claimed it in four ways:

• Play. Side projects like 3D printing equipment for a coffee competition, low-stakes problems like sorting Magic: The Gathering cards, approachable media like ceramics or painting — these lower the permission bar. 
• Proximity. Making tools to optimise one’s research processes, or prototypes for product teams.
• Crisis. Layoffs, burnout, bereavement — these engender a sense that “now’s the time” or “there’s nothing to lose.”
• Prior identity. For those who have followed a zigzag career path into research via design, sales, entrepreneurship, journalism, and so on, multi-hyphenated, adaptable identities are already more comfortable to wear.

In the background are enabling factors: risk tolerance, a stable financial situation, supportive management, and different kinds of privilege.

Evolving your professional identity

Herminia Ibarra’s Provisional Selves (1999) describes a cycle of professional identity transition:

1. See relatable role models.
2. Try out alternative identities.
3. Quick feedback cycles, self-reflection.
4. Adopt a new, hyphenated identity.

Across these stories, I saw Ibarra’s cycle playing out again and again. And yet many researchers struggle to make this transition, because it’s framed simply in terms of skills and tools. These are necessary but not sufficient — we must also permit ourselves that hyphenated identity.

The problem: the buzz about making — especially vibe coding — is deafening, but real-life, relatable role models are few and far between. When we look at LinkedIn, it just makes us feel bad. It’s hard to be playful under scrutiny from our employer. It’s hard to make mistakes and learn when we’re expected to do more than ever, faster than ever. Examples of researchers like us, making things in a way that’s still true to ourselves — warts and all — are rare. That’s what the stories in this article are for.

Jen’s story

For UXPA 2024, Jen hired a photo booth. The concept was brilliant: a portable booth arrives in a parcel, you set it up, use it at your event, and then send it back. But the experience was a letdown: the unboxing was a mess, the stand wobbled, and the iPad shook when you pressed it.

Jen wasn’t looking for a business, but she couldn’t unsee the problem. Within months, she’d bought fifteen iPads, started R&D on equipment, and hired developers to build an app from scratch. She didn’t have a company yet; she just had an idea of what the experience should feel like.

A year on, with a growing network of hosts across the country, Jen found herself standing at the back of her own events, watching people use the booth. As a researcher, it was natural for her to approach a stranger for feedback: “That’s my photo booth. Can I ask you one question — what would make it better?”

The business model itself came from the same instinct. She’d assumed people would want to set up their own booths. And yet some preferred to have a host there who would take care of it for them. So the model changed. She iterated, listened, and adjusted — the same loop we run in our day jobs, but this time applied to something that belonged to her.

Jen carries different business cards depending on where she is. She doesn’t (yet) say “founder and CEO.” She says, “I started a business.”

But the entrepreneurial identity isn’t new. She grew up in her parents’ showroom, literally in a playpen between the bathroom displays. She sold Post-it notes to friends in grade school. Research came later, when she fell in love with rigor and understanding people. The two threads ran side by side for decades, but now they’ve converged.

Jen’s identity shift is recent: in the last few months, the business started generating its own momentum. She set three tiers of company goals, including what she calls the “holy s*** goals.” When she looked at them, she realized they weren’t that crazy anymore. “I knew I was a good researcher,” she says. “But that’s very different from inventing your own thing.”

2. The researcher’s way of making

Jen’s and Neha’s stories are two examples. Across the conversations I had, I was struck by the variety of different things people were working on, on the ways they described themselves, and on how they’d permitted themselves to get started.

The medium matters

We tend to celebrate certain kinds of making over others: fine art is worth more than knitting, for example. Creating software is valued above education or social work. If community building is making, then researcher-makers have been plentiful all along.

In that light, there have always been media in which researchers do identify as makers: ideas, words, and social structures. It reflects what we value, what interests us, and what we’re drawn to creating. If we want to see researchers as makers, then we should recognize that all making is legitimate, whatever the medium.

A researcher-shaped model of making

Researchers who make apps, businesses, or physical products don’t stop being researchers. Rather, they bring a particular set of sensibilities to the process: ethical, deliberative, iterative, driven by empathy and curiosity. They tend to be driven by a desire to help others rather than to scale and get rich. Their processes, priorities, and outputs reflect that.

Many of our skills are transferable. The ability to identify and define a problem, to form hypotheses, to work iteratively, and to gather and react to feedback. Empathy, curiosity, comfort with ambiguity, analytical rigor, creativity — these are advantages that we bring with us.

Becoming a maker also surfaces skills we don’t normally want to engage with. For instance, sales sometimes have a shabby reputation, but it’s a crucial skill for product success. Good sales is closer to research than most of us think.

“When I learned to do sales, I realized that actually it’s empathy; it’s storytelling. It’s constructing an argument with an understanding of what the other person really needs. Good sales is discovery. Good sales is understanding the other person — is there a thing that you can meaningfully do to help them?” — Brian, Researcher-Maker

Founding like a researcher

But what about research founders — those who start companies, build apps or hardware, and try to compete with traditional product owners?

The word “founder” has a bad reputation. It implies a tech bro, move-fast-and-break-things ethos that most researchers recoil from. But what if you could “find like a researcher”? For many of the people I spoke to, the breakthrough came when they defined “founder” on their own terms. Values-driven, not just growth-driven, like Neha.

Although many of the activities were the same — defining a problem, establishing a company, figuring out a value proposition — the motivations were utterly different. It was about helping people, expressing creativity, and achieving independence from corporate life. It wasn’t about blitzscaling, exit strategies, getting rich, or crushing the competition. They knew this put them outside the startup mainstream; VC funding was rarely mentioned.

Brian’s story

Although he studied computer science and creative writing, Brian’s first job was selling antique carpets. It taught him storytelling, empathy, and reading what a customer actually needed. He moved into entrepreneurship, then discovered research — not as an end in itself, but as a better way to make things. I was like, “This is the thing I really need to get good at — understanding humans and how to identify problems and solve them. That’s the durable skill.”

Now Brian runs AI Kids Club, teaching children to think critically and create with AI. The aha moment, he says, is visceral: “Oh, I have imagination, and oh my God, I made a thing.” He wishes more adult researchers could have that epiphany: he runs workshops and evangelizes for the researcher-builder path through writing and talks.

Brian believes researchers are well-placed to be makers. “I strongly believe that UX researchers are perfectly positioned to found and build things, especially in this moment with AI, but in practice, they rarely do it.”

His expected wave of researcher-builders hasn’t arrived yet. His take: Many researchers simply aren’t drawn to building. “There is a certain population within user research that… they’re not interested in that side of things. The building and the making… Some people just don’t like those toys.”

3. So, is this our moment?

The conditions have rarely looked more favorable. Making is being democratized, and as AI commoditizes operations and delivery, the differentiator for great products is increasingly discovery — understanding which problems matter and for whom. That’s researcher territory.

It’s also a kind of reversal. For years, many researchers have worked without a seat at the table: not listened to, their recommendations left unimplemented. The democratization of making hands us the means to build the changes we used to merely recommend.

So by rights, we should be living through a golden age of researcher-makers. We’re not. Inside companies, the move to making is often dictated from above; outside them, researcher-makers remain thin on the ground. What’s holding us back? Sometimes, it’s us.

Overthinking it

Researchers are rightly wary of the founder’s ethos, but its bias to action has an advantage: it doesn’t get bogged down in deliberation. Our job in organizations is usually to be the voice of caution and to surface the risks, and entrepreneurs, by contrast, tend to score higher on risk tolerance. As makers, racing against limited time and budget, our instinct to weigh every angle can become a liability rather than a strength.

New powers, new problems

Moving from advising to making is a fundamental shift in our theory of change. In the past, we’ve had impact through influence: generating and transmitting knowledge and understanding problems so that others can solve them. Being a maker is different. It means owning the solution, not just the insight.

It’s uncomfortable: the ability to create solutions also requires us to be accountable for outcomes. It confronts us with the possibility that our great idea — the one nobody would listen to — wasn’t so great after all.

The ability to create forces us to deal with a new frontier of problems. If you’re shipping code, you must now consider code quality and maintainability — not something that researchers lost much sleep over in the past. Sarah must comply with food hygiene regulations as she makes her products. Jen has to think about tariffs as she buys iPads. The good news: our ability to problem-solve and our instinct to work with others help us here.

Matthieu’s story

Matthieu is building a financial planning product aimed at people who’ve never invested, who are still figuring out their debt, their budgets, and their relationship with money. He had never planned for the future — his apartment was full of records and wine, and that was about it. When he finally educated himself on personal finance, he built a set of tools for himself using Claude. Dashboards, roadmaps, strategies. Then the thought arrived: more people should benefit from this. Not the people that existing fintech serves, but the people around him: musicians, artists, teachers, and people who run restaurants.

Matthieu didn’t start as a researcher. He studied digital design, worked as a project manager at ad agencies, and moved to Boston to work at a health food startup. Eventually, he moved into user research, but before any of that, he’d been building basketball blogs and websites. Making has always been part of who he is.

Years later, a skills assessment confirmed what he already suspected: research was a good fit, but so was entrepreneurship. He considered a record shop and cafe first. He ran the numbers and realized the economics could cost him his apartment. So he went back to consulting and waited for the right idea.

Two months in, Matthieu had an operating model with twenty Claude agents, a Notion board that Claude populates automatically, and an Obsidian second brain. He briefly believed the dream: a laptop on a beach in Bali, AI handling everything, and money coming in while he helped people.

Then he showed his designs to a friend, a design manager. Her verdict: impressive, but it needs a total rebuild. “You don’t get that from Claude,” he says. “Claude would have told me my 4,000 tests passed, and congratulations.”

The dream matured. He needs a peer review on the design system. He needs a visual identity from an actual designer. He needs a code review. He needs another researcher because he can’t run research on his own product — he’s too biased. “Claude is just a tool to expand what you can do. That’s it.”

That’s the researcher talking. The same instinct that makes him rigorous in client work is what stops him from mistaking AI fluency for quality. It’s also what makes the process slower than it would be for someone who cares less about quality or ethics.

4. The honest costs

It’s 2.30 am. Matthieu has spent €200 on tokens today, and his app is still broken. Claude has told him to stop rage-typing and step away from the keyboard.

It’s 7 pm. Astrid has put the kids to bed and is drinking Red Bull before she goes back to work on her startup.

It’s May. Marco hasn’t worked in a “proper job” for 6 months and is wondering if he’s obsolete.

Lotte is afraid to promote her business on LinkedIn in case people judge her. Christian is wary of conflicts of interest. Sarah’s still freelancing to pay the bills.

Nobody thought this journey would be easy, and yet here we are. If you think the researcher-maker path is for you, then you should also know about the hazards along the way.

More alone than ever

The freedom to follow your idea can also be the freedom to be isolated, to lose your sense of perspective. Now that you can staff a business entirely with AI agents, the risk of loneliness is higher than ever. Many missed the “productive friction” of working with others, even as AI enabled them to achieve more alone. Working at home, not having a day job — these are compounding factors. Most researchers are “people people,” and we shouldn’t take the risks of isolation and burnout lightly.

Skills we won’t allow ourselves

Not everything comes easily. Skills that feel foreign to many researchers are necessary to thrive as a founder: tough cash flow management, pitching, knowing when not to compromise on quality, and knowing when something is done enough to ship. These aren’t just gaps; our researcher identity can actively resist them.

Material reality

Being a founder, going it alone, following a dream: there’s a dangerous romance to these concepts. For many, this simply isn’t a journey they’re taking by choice: layoffs, burnout, and personal crisis mean that founding can seem the least-worst option. These risks are not evenly distributed: if you have dependents, are older, are located outside thriving job markets, are less well-off, or are precariously housed, the idea of making, of “following your dreams,” can ring hollow.

The people I spoke to had often found ways around this problem: they had a partner with a stable income or had stashed away enough money to give them a year’s runway for bootstrapping their idea. But for others, it’s not so simple. When we step into the world of serious solution building, time (and therefore cash flow) is our enemy.

“I learned that you don’t have a business if you don’t have money. You need to always have a balance between the user and the business and make sure to make money. We had all our private money in it… I would not do it that way again.” — Astrid, Researcher-Founder

Sarah’s story

Sarah describes her career as “two flowers on one stem.” Alongside freelancing as a researcher, she and her husband are building Bowl & Kettle, a freeze-dried backpacking food company. She doesn’t romanticize it: the freelancing is functional, and the business is real but not yet self-sustaining.

Sarah’s career coach gave her a transformative exercise: ten days of tracking what brings her energy and what drains it, from loading the dishwasher to delivering presentations. That self-awareness became her compass. Now, she treats her career like an iterative journey: “Be committed to the goal, but not committed to the tactics.”

Sarah moves carefully, gathering the support she needs. Joining a Slack community for outdoor-industry founders has been transformative for calibration, education, and connection. Having a partner with a full-time job reduced financial pressure and enabled better decisions. They bootstrapped at first, then took three small investment rounds as the business grew. “Not feeling forced to take investment before we showed enough traction to have more leverage — that’s been hugely impactful.”

Mirjam’s story

Mirjam has never felt she fits neatly in the researcher box. Her background spans innovation sciences and child safety; she describes herself as someone who fills gaps, takes ownership, and builds what’s missing.

At weekends, she builds deliberately crappy prototypes — a picnic app for her husband and a Magic: The Gathering deck optimizer for her partner. He hated it: his joy was in building decks himself, by hand. It taught her something about what AI should and shouldn’t try to replace.

What started as fun has become professionally useful. In her corporate job, Mirjam now builds prototypes to gut-check product ideas for her team. But she’s also protective of the boundary: she refuses to automate away the parts of research she loves, like connecting with people face to face.

Despite feeling empowered to prototype, Mirjam always seeks collaborators with different expertise. “Building something alone is just very lonely. It’s just better if you can bounce off other people.”

5. So what should we do?

If you’re weighing this path, the people who’ve walked it have some advice:

• Permit yourself. Experiment in low-stakes media, side projects, and play. Look for role models. Claim your hyphenated identity. Don’t hold yourself back. 
• Assess your skills. The ones you have, the ones you could acquire, and the ones you can’t or don’t want to develop, but still need access to.
• Reflect on your values. What’s core? What’s nice-to-have at this stage? What’s holding you back?
• Be realistic about how far AI development can take you. It’s great for spinning up prototypes and ideas and automating some processes. Unless you already have the software development skills, it won’t give you a production-quality, regulator-compliant app.
• Find other humans to work with. Partnering with others or joining a community of people going through similar experiences can help avoid burnout and give you access to skills and contacts you need. Share your methods with others, too.
• Be disciplined with money. The higher the stakes, the more you owe it to yourself to have a good financial model and buffers in place. Learn to speak the language of startup fundraising, even if you don’t share its values.

Cris’s story

Cris spent nearly ten years in a corporate job. When she left, burned out, she grieved. “You lose your community — everyone I know. Half of my identity was just gone.” She didn’t have people’s mobile numbers. She couldn’t access the internal channels. The wall went up overnight. She became tribeless, she says.

Pottery had been a hobby — like meditation, something to keep her going. It wasn’t a career plan. But once she’d left her job, she started to see it differently. She’s built a studio in her back garden now.

Her husband asked her, “Shouldn’t you have a business plan?” “That’s the PM way of doing things,” she said. “I’m the researcher. I’m exploring.” She’s prototyping, iterating, seeing what works. She doesn’t have a five-year plan; she has ideas of where she might go, and she’s prepared to be proven wrong at any point. That, she says, is what being a researcher means to her. Not methodology, so much as a way of being in the world.

She’d also considered building an app — a wishlist tool for parents. She mapped it out and put together a research project. Then she hit a wall. It felt like reaching back into the world she’d just escaped. She put it on hold.

A few days after we spoke, Cris emailed. She’d been thinking about why researchers don’t build things and caught herself defaulting to the corporate framing: PMs drive, designers make, and researchers check. “Funny how I went straight to that, considering I didn’t really feel comfortable with that separation. Some things are really hard to shake off.”

But something else was shifting. She’d rejected a master’s in ceramics because it would push her towards becoming a “ceramic artist” — and that’s not what she wants. She wants to make a cup that people enjoy drinking their coffee from: practical design, not art.

The ceramics, she wrote, might be the step she needed. “Maybe this is the confidence to build something myself.” She’s not sure yet whether the pottery will lead back to the app idea, or to a studio shop, or somewhere else entirely. But she’s creating things with her hands, and the permission to make is starting to arrive.

6. The evolutionary power of hyphens

For a growing number of us, the question is no longer whether to make things but how — and whether we can do it without losing what made us researchers in the first place. In a time where “should” and “must” have replaced “could,” the pressure towards becoming a maker is real.

But there’s also a chance this article has shown you a version of your future self — one who hasn’t abandoned the researcher’s way and instead has learned to carry it alongside the demands of building: the selling, the shipping, and the managing of money. It won’t have changed your employer’s expectations, your circumstances, your risk tolerance, or your financial situation, but it may have shifted something in how you see yourself: the identity you will allow yourself and the hyphen that unlocks a new direction.

This isn’t asking you to do something totally new. Like many researchers, you may have had different roles before user research and have been creative in other media. You may already have navigated identity transitions; you may carry multiple identities right now. Adding another hyphen — researcher-maker, researcher-founder, researcher-developer, researcher-potter — doesn’t diminish the researcher part. Rather, it creates a new application of those skills and a new expression of you as a person. And if it creates new challenges, then that can be a form of growth, too.

Cris sits in her pottery studio. Jen expands her business. Sarah develops her value proposition. Brian codes an app. They’re still researchers, but also researcher-something else. The hyphen has liberated them. Their way of making is distinctively a researcher’s way of making. They’re on a path to creating — and becoming — something new.

Thanks to…

The researcher-maker-founder-multitalented people who were generous with their time, stories, and observations towards this piece, including Aaron Lynch, Amulya Tata, Brian Greene, Christian Lawrence, Corbin Cunningham, Cris Bilsland, David Tang, Jen Romano, Grace Nicklin, Kim Feenstra Kuiper, Kristen Lee, Jan Ahrend, Julio Angulo, Katherine Norwood, Katie Tzanidou, Lorraine Burrell, Matthieu Guilloux, Megumi Morigami, Neha Vadrevu, Rob Youmans, Sarah Bowlin, Shipra Bhutada, Will Myddleton, Zack Stewart, and all my colleagues at Together by Design.

Featured image courtesy: James Lang.