Making do—faire avec—is the operational core of de Certeau's entire framework. It names the creativity that emerges when a practitioner works with materials she did not choose, under constraints she did not set, toward purposes that must be realized through navigation of systems designed by others. The cook makes do with the refrigerator's contents. The walker makes do with the city's grid. The worker makes do with the factory's machinery. The builder makes do with the AI model's outputs. Making-do is not resignation but active practice—the exercise of judgment about what can be appropriated, which combinations will hold, what is good enough for the purpose. It is the freedom available to those who lack the territory, the resources, or the institutional power to design their circumstances. And it is, de Certeau insisted, the ordinary human condition—the condition under which most creativity actually occurs, most meaning is actually produced, most lives are actually lived.
The phrase appears throughout de Certeau's writings as a thematic refrain. It captures his fundamental orientation: genuine creativity emerges not from ideal conditions but from the specific constraints of actual situations. The philosopher who waits for perfect circumstances before beginning her work will never begin. The practitioner who makes-do with imperfect materials, insufficient time, and inadequate tools produces something—imperfect, tactical, specific—that exists in the world rather than in the imagination. De Certeau valued existence over perfection, practice over theory, the tactical operation that produces something real over the strategic vision that remains unrealized.
Making-do requires specific skills: the capacity to recognize potential in unpromising materials, the judgment to know what is good enough, the improvisational intelligence to combine heterogeneous elements, the acceptance that the result will reflect the constraints rather than transcending them. These are not lesser skills than the engineer's capacity to design from first principles. They are different skills, adequate to different conditions. The bricoleur working with scraps is not a failed engineer. She is a practitioner whose art consists precisely in making constraints productive rather than trying to eliminate them.
In the AI context, making-do describes the builder's daily practice. The model's output is never exactly what the builder needs—it is statistically optimized for average cases, inflected by the training data's patterns, shaped by alignment constraints that serve the platform's interests more than the builder's. Yet the builder makes something from this imperfect material. She selects, evaluates, combines, adjusts. The result bears the traces of the constraints—the model's rhetoric is still visible in the finished work—but it also bears the traces of the builder's practice, her specific judgments about what serves and what does not. Making-do is not settling for less. It is the tactical art of producing enough from whatever materials are available—an art that the AI moment has made universally necessary and newly visible.
The concept synthesizes multiple strands of de Certeau's thought: his theological interest in how laypeople practice faith outside official doctrine, his historiographical attention to how ordinary people navigate institutional power, his anthropological study of everyday material practices. It crystallized through his engagement with Lévi-Strauss's bricoleur and his reading of how French workers, students, and residents navigated the planned city, the rationalized workplace, the bureaucratic welfare state.
Making-do is creative practice under constraint. Not making from nothing but making from what is given—the ordinary condition of human creativity.
The practitioner judges what is good enough. Not optimal but adequate to the specific purpose, given the specific constraints, for the specific audience.
Constraints shape the result without determining it. The refrigerator's contents limit the meal but do not dictate it. The model's patterns shape the output but do not control the builder's use of it.
Making-do is the universal human art. The condition of those who lack ideal resources, perfect tools, unlimited time—which is to say, nearly everyone, nearly always.