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" &amp;quot;Stuff&amp;quot; is only as crappy as how you&amp;#039;re using it. At Lifehacker, making crappy stuff awesome is about identifying hardware, operating systems, furniture, or whatever potentially awesome thing we can find, divining the right application of said thing, and supplying the necessary know-how (that&amp;#039;s the special sauce in awesome). In equation form, that&amp;#039;s something like (Crap + Idea) ^ Know-How = Awesome. (My math&amp;#039;s not great, but I&amp;#039;m pretty sure it&amp;#039;s something like that.)  --Adam Pash, editor of Lifehacker.com  Back in 2001, my wife and I ditched the digital age for a year of 1900-era subsistence farming. During the warm weather, we took splash baths outside in a big livestock watering tank, which left us exposed to any (non-1900) tractor or car that happened by. I had gotten rid of our car, and the nearest building supply store was unreachable by horse and buggy. So I pulled a stack of old (you could say crappy) fenceposts and boards out of a burn pile and hammered together a really fine outdoor &amp;quot;shower&amp;quot; (we couldn&amp;#039;t use electricity to pump water through an actual shower head). I sank four posts in the ground and built a platform, and then lined three sides with boards, cutting a window to face the mountains. On the third side, I latched a chest-high clothesline over which we draped our towels. When we bothered to heat the water on the wood stove, outdoor splash baths actually became enjoyable. --Logan Ward, author of See You in a 100 Years  I think different resources and constraints lead to very different innovations and inventions. And that is part of the power of confluent technologies, of engineers and inventors from around the world collaborating to solve the most difficult problems--the piles of junk that we use is different in different places. Of course, every time I move to a different workshop in a different country, I take some of my pile of junk with me. To share. I think most inventors, regardless of where they are, have their precious pile of junk that they use for old-school rapid prototyping. A pile of junk is much more important to invention than a 3D printer. You know Edison&amp;#039;s saying &amp;quot;to invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.&amp;quot; I believe that.  --Shawn Frayne, founder of Humdinger Wind Energy  How to make crappy stuff awesome--a mini instructable: 1. Collect free hot-tub covers from Craigslist. 2. Toss them in the water to create makeshift boats, surfboards, or barges!  --Eric Wilhelm, co-founder and president of Instructables.com  How making crappy stuff awesome saved my relationship: As a hardcore DIYer, turning trash to treasure is my unguilty pleasure. I feel strongly that anything worth buying is worth trying to keep, cherish and repair as long as humanly possible. But I never realized that this philosophy could apply to human beings as well. In fact, when my relationship started getting rocky, I was so fed up I wanted to call it quits without even trying. Luckily, my better half was able to teach me a thing or two about applying my &amp;quot;to have and to hold&amp;quot; mentality to the only thing I hadn&amp;#039;t applied it to yet--our relationship! To think I&amp;#039;d spent countless hours crafting rings out of old credit cards, bags out of discarded tank tops and sewing machine covers out of Apple store bags, but when the going got tough, I almost threw away the person I loved! Now, we are happier than ever (granted it&amp;#039;s only been one week since this epiphany) because I know what we have is worth tending to and reworking when things get rusty. Just like an old chair that you reupholstered with your own two hands or a classic car that you made new again, human bonds become stronger when you work on them instead of feeling that you can always find something new. This may be a stretch, but perhaps as more people in the U.S. turn toward slow living, heirloom products and making crappy stuff awesome again, our embarrassingly high divorce rate will go down too. If not, I guess one man&amp;#039;s divorcee is another man&amp;#039;s possible wife. --Yuka Yoneda, editor of Inhabitat Making crappy stuff awesome means that you no longer have to put up with artificial limitations on gadgets placed there by manufacturers to make more money off of you. For example, if you don&amp;#039;t like the fact that your phone maker won&amp;#039;t release a new version of an OS for a smartphone (artificially forcing you to upgrade just for something they could easily patch in), go ahead and Google up some custom builds and install it yourself. Your printer ink cartridge &amp;quot;expired&amp;quot; even though you still have ink inside and it can still be used to print? Just remove and reinsert the battery on the printer&amp;#039;s memory chip. Why should you be strong-armed into the cycle of manufactured obsolescence?  Carrier locking is also crappy, in our opinion. Imagine buying a meal at McDonalds or KFC and being forced to eat it there--and pay money for the use of their facilities. No good, right? Break the lock. There are plenty of unlocking utilities online for many phones--some of which are free, some of which are not--but you can do it yourself. Why subject yourself to two years of AT&amp;amp;amp;T with your iPhone when service is nonexistent at your home? For a little bit more money and a little handiwork, you can be on your way over to T-Mobile. Awesome.  --Jason Chen, editor of Gizmodo.com  There&amp;#039;s an aesthetic to crappy stuff. It often has a worn look, like it&amp;#039;s taken a lot of abuse. It&amp;#039;s crappy now because it was made poorly, or made well and has been so heavily used that it can no longer function as intended.  When repurposing or refinishing it, you gain this character the Japanese call wabi sabi--a kind of Zen approach to design in which you&amp;#039;re taking the flaws of the material and accentuating them. Making crappy stuff awesome adds character, but also speaks to your resourcefulness, and the necessity of building things for the long term.  Manufacturers overbuild some components and underbuild others. When products fail, the bad parts render the other good parts useless. Breaking these things open and salvaging the bits and pieces you need--a very useful way to approach construction--is a key skill set to master.  --Ryan Wilson, landscape architect, Chicago  Making crappy stuff awesome is really all about how you look at the world. When you look at a vacant lot full of rusting metal do you see disarray or opportunity? I guess it&amp;#039;s as simple as being either a glass-half-full or half-empty person. To make crappy stuff awesome you have inherently to be an optimist--and optimism in the face of failure, defeat and decay can be a powerful potion. This was first brought into sharp focus for me in college while checking out a friend&amp;#039;s art work. I was staring at this particularly hypnotizing piece that was essentially a six-by-six graph of square photographs, each its own brilliant hue. I couldn&amp;#039;t put my finger on what I was looking at exactly so I asked him. He explained that they were close-up shots of the sun beating down on car hoods throughout Los Angeles. Amazing! While one person sees a never-ending nightmare of boiling hot steel another sees a pulsating, colorful oasis. My friend definitely knew how to make crappy stuff awesome.  --Andrew Wagner, editor-in-chiefReadyMade magazine  At the Daily Green, we&amp;#039;re continually surprised and delighted by all the creative reuse that people in our community and in the world at large conduct during the everyday act of &amp;quot;making crappy stuff awesome.&amp;quot; When it comes to bettering the planet&amp;#039;s health, there are few acts more effective than repurposing something commonly seen as trash into something useful again, thus avoiding wasting all of the natural resources that go into each new product.  Making crappy stuff awesome is one of the easiest and greenest acts that an individual can do to help the planet. The act is empowering--taking you out of the consumer and manufacturing chain--and this only adds to the value of the final product. Because when you make Halloween costumes out of found objects (umbrellas, used plastic bottles, bits of old fabric), or build your home office out of old shipping containers, you can proudly say &amp;quot;I made that&amp;quot;--without buying a thing.  --Brian Howard, web editor at TheDailyGreen.com  One of my favorite pieces of fun furniture is a child&amp;#039;s plywood rocking seat that I found in the trash one morning while I was driving to work at Fine Woodworking. I rounded a corner and saw a colorful animated graphic of Disney&amp;#039;s Dumbo brightly stenciled on the plywood sides and realized that it was probably from the 1950s to 60s, and it was in GREAT shape. After looking around to make sure no one saw me (being childless, I didn&amp;#039;t want anyone thinking that I was taking this home to lure wayward children into my domicile), I threw the kiddy rocker in the car. Later, it dawned on me that this cool little seat made a perfect magazine rack--and I still use it for that purpose to this day.  Attending university in the early 1970s, I observed several forms of recycling as it related to furniture: Many, many of my friends furnished their first homes or apartments with these items: Cargo-ship-hatch coffee tables; big wooden cable-spool dining tables and small-spool end tables; fruit boxes used as dresser drawers to store clothing; plastic milk crates used to hold records (LPs) or to store other stuff; cement blocks and old fence boards or barnwood bookcases and stereo shelves. These items were often laying around construction sites and storage yards, behind stores or in other unfenced, unguarded locations. I suppose it was natural to assume that since these items were unsecured, they must be free for the taking. But I do remember sitting around a spool table playing cards with friends one night, when I noticed that it was stenciled in big letters: &amp;quot;Property of Pacific Bell.&amp;quot;  --Sandor Nagyszalanczy, woodworker and author of 13 books published by Taunton Press.  What I really like is the challenge. When you&amp;#039;re repurposing something--let&amp;#039;s say a bike wheel and forks--you&amp;#039;re in an intellectual battle with every bike wheel and fork designer and engineer ever. You have to take something that&amp;#039;s been endlessly developed and tested to do one specific job really well, and make it do something completely different.  But beyond the functional facets of recreating, I really enjoy getting to pick apart the aesthetics of an object and finding sympathetic elements that it can be combined with to create not just a functional piece, but something beautiful.  --Timothy Dowse, instructor of &amp;quot;How to Make Crappy Stuff Awesome,&amp;quot; 3rd Ward. 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