To browse Academia. It covers a wide array of topics including DIY home improvement projects such as furniture building and decoration , personal care solutions such as homemade beauty scrubs and bath bombs , gardening hacks including chicken coops , as well as crafts for leisure and utility.
The content is organized to provide ease of access for individuals seeking to create, innovate, and personalize their living spaces and lifestyle through crafting and practical applications. The democratization of personal fabrication technologies in parallel to the rising desire of individuals for personalizing their products offers great opportunities to experiment with advanced, distributed and shared production processes as well as design new materials.
In this article, we introduce the notion of Do-It-Yourself DIY Materials, which are created through individual or collective self-production practices, often by techniques and processes of the designer's own invention. They can be totally new materials, modified, or further developed versions of existing materials. In order to provide an operational vocabulary to discuss DIY materials, we have collected 27 DIY material cases developed in the last five years.
We group the collected cases under two main categories: 1 DIY new materials: which focus on creative material ingredients e. Grounded on the commonalities of collected cases, we discuss the design opportunities, including new aesthetic impressions offered through DIY material design practices.
DIY is an analytically complex phenomenon. It can simultaneously figure as leisure and work, and as consumption of materials and tools and production of changes to the home. Analysis of the technology and practice of DIY allows us to engage with significant, but relatively unexplored themes that are nonetheless important for theorising consumption. This paper focuses on three such themes.
