A few months ago, I ended up in urgent care, and left with a wrist brace and pack of cortisone pills. Everyone assumed it was carpal tunnel, but no. In truth, it's a long story. Actually it's not that long, it's just a bit embarrassing. In fact when I told people at work what happened, a number of them said, "You know, you should really come up with a different explanation."

Here's what actually happened: inspired by my 4 close friends who were all expecting babies within a few months of each other, I went on a yarn shopping spree and proceed to knit 4 baby sweaters in the course of about 10 days. And one particularly long bender happened on a 12 hour flight back from Europe. My usual jet lag tactic is to just stay up the whole way back, and so that's just what I did, knitting the whole way. I woke up the next morning with a searing pain running down my wrist; acute tendonitis, the doctor said, and she clucked her tongue at me, admonishing, "Don't you know how dangerous knitting can be?"

What drove such compulsive and apparently self destructive behavior? After all, I could have bought more beautiful, better made baby sweaters that would have cost me far less than the ones I made myself.

The answer is not that simple. I've thought a lot about it since I've had to curb my knitting obsession; in fact, it's made me down right philosophical on the subject of creativity, and the drive to make things. So I asked people; my followers on Twitter, my design colleagues at Facebook, and of course, myself: "Why do I make things? What drives me to create?" Here's what I heard from the Twittersphere:

To hold in my hand, what I dream in my mind.
Being creative, I am unable to NOT make things. I am driven to live a purposeful life. Make the world more beautiful, express myself.
Creating emotions. Improving life of humankind. Being able to sleep better cause I know I contributed something good to the world.

And from my Facebook design colleagues...

Being a consumer gets boring quick. There's no excitement, jeopardy or struggle with the promise of succeeding. I could be vegetating by watching television or get up off my ass and make something that matters to people.
As the years go by, lots of details make that question increasingly challenging to answer. But the basic motivation has never really changed - making stuff is fun.
For myself, I just feel like I need to make stuff all the time, and I've been that way since I was a kid. Since I mostly manage now and don't make a lot of stuff day to day, that means I find myself up at night and on weekends, trying to fill this need because if I don't my soul starts to feel like its dying a little.

That last one was from me.

Now there are a lot of nuances to these responses. But the more I poured through them, and there were many more than I can share here, the more I noticed three themes.

The first and most obvious is that we create for ourselves.

Because it's fun.
Because it feels good.
Because it calms us and keeps us present.
Because we all need to express ourselves.
Because we can.
Because we must.

When she was three, my daughter Isabel used to love making these crazy playdough concoctions. Anything that was in her path would get sucked into the vortex of her sculptures. And when she was done, she’d smash it up and do it all over again. She wasn't focused on the end product; it was all about the fun of making. And she never asked herself whether she was good enough to do it, or whether people might like it. It was her right and duty to make stuff. She loved the process of making something with her own hands, and spending that time getting lost in her interior world where ideas are born. And she found joy in sharing that process with others.

We're all born this way, and as kids, have a seemingly endless capacity to make stuff. Any parent of a preschooler knows this from the reams of paint blobs and crayon scratchings that come home with a big proud smile.

So we make things for ourselves and the joy that it brings us, and sometimes regardless of what others think. But there are other themes that emerge from the comments of the makers.

We also are motivated to create for others.

For some of us, there is altruism associated with making things. We show our love for others by making things for them. We show concern by trying to understand and solve other people's problems. On a personal level, when I knit, or sew or bake for others, I am making things to show I care. Professionally, as a human-centered designer, my goal is to make things that somehow improve people's lives. They are both ways of showing my humanity. I've always believed that design is creativity in service of others. And while we may get personal gratification from the act of making, we also find deep satisfaction in addressing the needs of others.

So we make for ourselves and we make for others.

We all start as makers, but something happens as we grow older. In the process of "growing up", we tell ourselves, or the world tells us, that we are not artists, and that we are not creative. That we should let others do the creating, because they are better at it. Because the assumption is you should only make things if you are great at it, in a way that other people value.

For those who hold on to their creativity, some have even figured out a way to get paid for making stuff. That's a pretty good gig. But many people do not. Many people work at jobs that don't encourage and sometimes even actively discourage creativity. So what are they supposed to do with all that maker energy that they were born with? How can we get people to re-engage with their creative selves? Access to experiencing the arts is a good first step, but it won’t necessarily get people back to making. In order to re-engage people in making, you have to create experiences that are open ended and invite participation from everyone.

We know this from our childhood; that the best toys, the ones that we learned the most from, grew the most with, and that had the longest shelf life, were the ones that were open ended. LEGO. Wood blocks. Simple rag dolls. And of course Play dough. There's no story or script. You make up the story, and you decide when it's done. There's no right or wrong way to play. And like my daughter's creations, you joyfully tear it all down and do it again.

There are billions of people in the world, and they all need and deserve creative outlets. In the engineering world, we talk about scaling things. It's how you take a small idea and grow it to have massive impact. So how do we scale the notion of helping people be and feel creative? This leads me to the last theme that emerged from the responses of makers; it was the idea of turning consumption on it's head.

We help others create.

Throughout my career, I've worked on a number of projects that look to help others create and express themselves. Back in the Jurassic period of the late 90s, I helped build Tripod, one of the original homepage building sites. Later, I worked on YouTube, the world's largest open video platform. And now I'm at Facebook, with over 1 billion users, surely the greatest modern example of the power of connecting people through storytelling and technology. But there are so many others, products that I wished I’d worked, but admire from afar: Pinertest, Instagram, Tumbler and Etsy.

And I've realized over the years that it's evolved into kind of a personal mission to help people be and feel more creative. I truly believe that people are happier when they are empowered to express themselves creatively, even if it's just for themselves.

Occasionally, broadening the population of people who are invited to participate in the making of things can reveal true artists and creators in our midst. YouTube is such a powerful example of this, launch the careers of countless musicians, filmmakers, comedians, and revolutionizing how people teach and learn. And on Facebook, we see makers like Humans of New York and Science is Awesome and countless others engaging and inspiring millions.

But even more than the stars who've emerged from the masses, it's become a vehicle of self-expression for all of us, a way to capture and share the everyday moments of life that bind us together as a human family. Instagram is a great example of this as well, taking everyday, sometimes mundane mobile photos, and with the use of clever filters, elevating them to things worth sharing with the world. It makes us feel like an artist again.

This kind of design, the kind that empowers others to create, is different than traditional design. You have to check your ego at the door. You have to design an agnostic container that doesn't dictate to the makers what they should or shouldn't make, because your design only serves as an amplifier to the content that *they* create. It's not about you, or your portfolio, or the team you work with, or the company you work for. It's about the people who use it, and build on it, and fill it with the stories that connect with other people.

And it can be messy. These open systems can create a lot of stuff than I'll generously describe as low quality. But we all know that nothing great is created without a ton of messes and failures. And if you only see these tools as a means to create a polished, finished product, you are definitely missing the point.

Because like the playdough things my daughter made, it requires you to sometimes look past the end product, and instead value the process. The process that tells all people, regardless of their age, gender, background, religious views, or economic status, that their stories matter and deserve to be heard. Because just like professional makers, the rest of humanity has that need to make.

Because it's fun.
Because it feels good.
Because it calms us and keeps us present.
Because we all need to express ourselves.
Because we can.
Because we must.

At the end of the day, I'm kind of proud that I hurt myself knitting. Because I'm a maker, and dammit, I'm gonna make.