DIY Practices Research Articles

The Sun Is in Your Hand(held): mediating solar imaginaries and technological ambivalence

ABSTRACT This paper adopts a media archaeological perspective to excavate the social, technical, and ecological protocols embedded within videogames with the goal of imagining engaged users and alternative futures centred around photovoltaic technologies. We begin by dissecting the media lineages and infrastructures that are entwined with the development of mobile media. Then, we turn to the regime of planned obsolescence and address how eco-critical modding practices have flourished as a response. Using these theories as a provocation, we summarize the workshops and game jam we facilitated in the summer of 2022 as part of Concordia University’s Solar Media Collective. Through these theoretical and practical explorations, we arrive at the clash between the optimism of solarpunk and the apathy of technological ambivalence. In our concluding discussion, we reflect on the realities of modding and DIY practices, closing with proposals for new (imaginary) research avenues.

Shaping foundations: Trans feminine self-fashioning, DIY and community building in the postwar United States

More than 5 million pairs of falsies, also known as bust pads, were sold in the United States in 1946, exceeding prior sales records. In the postwar United States, falsies were an increasingly popular way of shaping the body into a fashionable curvaceous silhouette and utilized the latest in wartime synthetic material developments. Falsies were an important part of trans and queer life. However, these wearers and makers have been largely omitted from histories of fashion, foundationwear and material culture. This article traces the trans feminine history of falsies and other padded foundationwear in the postwar United States. The author analyses a range of archival materials largely sourced from the Digital Transgender Archive including publications and print ephemera from the 1950s–70s to show how trans feminine, queer and gender-nonconforming people innovated falsie design through DIY practices. While the majority of individuals in the postwar United States were unable to access trans healthcare and anti-trans legislation continued to publicly police bodies, trans feminine networks circulated information on how to purchase, wear and make padded foundations. These collective efforts empowered wearers and built community in a variety of ways.

Course Construction and Practice of Embedded Computing for New Engineering Education

Facing the reform and development of the New Engineering Education, the paper combines the Embedded Computing course construction and practice. The course of Embedded Computing is an elective course for postgraduates majoring in Computer Science in Harbin University of technology. Under the guidance of the education direction for Emerging Engineering Education, it must be strengthened the construction and practice of the course. This paper combines the traditional teaching mode with the online teaching mode, the theoretical content driven by problems with DIY practice, and adopts a diversified evaluation system. Through the curriculum reforms, the students' learning enthusiasm has been actively mobilized, and the teaching quality has been significantly improved. This paper can provide reference for reform of talent training in our teaching courses.

DIY practices in 1990s fashion: Notes from Alexander McQueen's early years (1992–1996)

Alexander McQueen (1969–2010) was certainly one of the greatest fashion designers of the late 20th and early 21st century. Creator of an authorial work McQueen has become the subject of study of numerous researchers. In this article, using a sociological approach, we’ll analyze the designer's early creative phase, specifically his production between the years 1992 and 1996. Reflecting on some of his esthetic results, this article seeks to characterize how DIY appears in his work as a type of epistemological solution conditioned to social, political, and economic issues. Thinking about the gains that come from using DIY as well as the concessions that are made when his work is absorbed into the fashion mainstream, McQueen will be taken as a heuristic example that helps us describe and qualify even more complex phenomena of contemporaneity as the change in the fashion system and the new phases of capitalism.

Editing gender and editing life: DIY, digital artivism and new forms of pedagogy in the contemporary Portuguese society

In this article, we propose a theoretical-empirical cross-section of three basic themes: female migration, DIY practices and decolonial digital artivism. Adopting the case study typology and based on the use of a qualitative methodology, fostered by an indirect autobiographical interview, we proceed to sociologically analyse the migration trajectory of Tila Capelletto, a Brazilian activist responsible for the creation of Wiki Editoras Lx. We intend to discuss digital artivism and the DIY and DIT practices and ethos promoted by Tila and Wiki Editoras, as a formula for promoting processes of diasporic identity (re)construction, resistance, existence and social change, drawing parallels with the Global South and semi-peripheral countries such as Portugal, which are embodied in the editing of Wikipedia to combat the invisibility of women in contemporary societies.

Queer space making across greater Los Angeles: reimagining urban autonomy through collective care

This paper analyzes the lives of whom I call poli-creatives and how they reimagine space making and urban autonomy across greater Los Angeles through a queer and feminist praxis of collective care. Using women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, and transnational feminisms, this paper introduces the concept of mycorrhizal assemblages. As a theoretical and analytical tool, it draws from subterranean webs of mycelial fungal strands to conceptualize how poli-creatives use their work to navigate their everyday socio-political economic conditions by building interconnected spaces and nurturing local queer, feminist, working class, immigrant communities. Drawing on ethnographic observations and life-history interviews with five key poli-creatives, this paper discusses one kind of mycorrhizal assemblage rooted in informal spaces and practices; intimacy, trust, and vulnerability; and anti-surveillance and -policing. I show how these spaces do not depend on visibility and representation in public space, gayborhoods, nor the neoliberal state and formal institutions. Instead, I argue that although they are decentralized and ephemeral, they stay connected by a transnational and queer politics of local community building through DIY practice, holding spaces for embodied trauma, and divesting from institutional and settler-colonial state power. This study responds to the limitations within urban studies and discourses about queer communities by centering how poli-creatives use their transnational experiences, intimate communities, and embodied traumas and knowledges to lay down new soil for collective survival across greater Los Angeles and a future otherwise.

DIY Design and Radical Worldbuilding at The Grove Skatepark, London

This paper presents an ethnographic case study of DIY design practices at a skatepark in London, UK. The skatepark is presented as an urban commons, offering a framework for DIY infrastructuring that contrasts top-down and inequitable urbanisation processes. Three key themes emerge from the fieldwork that demonstrate the capacities and limitations of DIY design. Firstly, DIY practices are viewed as “learning-by-doing”, wherein skateboarders not only learn how to construct a skatepark but also an array of vocational and soft skills. Here, DIY’s qualities of low barriers to participation, multidisciplinarity, and low risk of failure foreground a rich environment of vernacular knowledge exchange that underpins the research methodology of this paper utilising skatepark construction as object-orientated, research-through-design. Secondly, DIY design is found to support a community of practitioners that transcend the space as just a skatepark, incorporating a community garden, collaborative theatre project and arts-based workshops that transcend male-dominated histories of DIY skateboarding cultures. Here, Participatory Design (PD) notions of ‘infrastructuring’ mirror an emergent and open-ended design process that supports inclusive socio-material worldmaking. Thirdly, DIY design practices influence the ways in which the space is governed, in which there are found to be contradictory notions of “prefigurative politics.” Here, the space is argued to be inclusive and anarchic yet centres agency around notions of “core skateboarding” that reinforce masculine hegemonies. Collectively, this paper argues that DIY design has the potential to serve as a worldmaking agent underpinned by a unique set of values and modes which are well-suited to times of uncertainty, flux and crisis, yet highlights the necessity for critically engaging with the politics and practices of both DIY and skateboarding communities.

Subculture wars: The struggle for the vape industry.

Drawing on a 2-year study, I argue that the UK vape industry is engaged in a classificatory struggle between a subcultural industry and its "other", the mainstream industry. I build on Thornton's analysis of club culture to characterize the subcultural vape industry as a community of taste built round a masculine aesthetic and a commitment to authenticity and DIY practice. Its attachment to complex systems and masculine spaces risked excluding customers without specialist knowledge or interest. The mainstream industry included tobacco companies which promoted vaping as a complementary category to smoking, linking their own vaping products to historic meanings of the cigarette as a lifestyle product. This task was hampered by the toxic legacy of combusted tobacco and its increasing reversion to a generic category rather than a branded product. Finally, the success of the price-focused vaping industry has been largely overlooked, but suggests that for most consumers, electronic cigarettes are still a contrasting category to combusted tobacco and are purchased largely on price. I conclude that the exclusion of a feminized, classed "other" is a defining element of subcultural formation, itself an overwhelmingly male mechanism of group identity construction.

Augmenting Design Education for Sustainability through Field Exploration: An Experience of Learning from DIY Practices in a Rural Community

This article (visual essay) provides a glimpse of a field trip ventured by design students as part of a larger study of developing a localised version of design education for sustainability, focusing on the wants and needs of non-urban populations in vast Russian hinterlands. The central goal is to introduce would-be designers to the concepts of locally appropriate technology and sustainable/circular living by real-life examples and, eventually, teach them to recognise the sustainable potential of place-based technologies and practices of their making, using and maintaining. The primary data came from the trip to Pozhva, a village in Permskiy Krai, Russia, that gained popularity among DIY activists and users of off-road vehicles in Russia in the early 2000s because of its unique, community-centred manufacture of lightweight ATVs on low-pressure tires, nicknamed “jeeps”. This article presents the students’ journey in a comic strip portraying a composite character of technologies and their user-designers as experts in local conditions and (subconsciously) agents of circularity. The article closes with a discussion on the expedition’s discoveries and learning outcomes, correlating them with broader implications for design education.

How the Central Sydney independent musicians use pre-established ‘online DIY’ to sustain their networking during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT This article discusses how the Central Sydney independent musicians’ ‘online DIY’ (do-it-yourself) practices not only provide additional opportunities for practising ‘independence’, but such practices, established pre-COVID-19, allow them to sustain their networking during the pandemic. Empirical findings that inform this article are based on qualitative strategies of inquiry conducted in the inner-city and inner-west areas of Sydney, Australia between 2017–2019–specifically, semi-structured interviews with 15 individuals involved with the scene, supplemented with participant observation at live gigs, and textual analysis of relevant texts, with follow-up online interviews with the same study participants in late 2020. ‘Online DIY’ is the integration of digital music and online communication technologies with the Central Sydney independent musicians’ independent practices. Since their online DIY practices enabled them to somewhat control where they want to perform, and how they want to produce, distribute, and promote their music, while also maintaining networks with both members of the local scene as well as music industries connections via online platforms like Bandcamp, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram before the pandemic, the COVID-19-related live music shutdown did not have an immediate adverse impact on their activities.

Resist or perish!

This article examines the practice of resistance among young DIY musicians in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in the context of the post-reform era. DIY young musicians negotiate how to provide for their everyday economic needs while also upholding their music genre’s spirit of resistance against market commodification. Lately, commodification not only comes from the music industry but also from the state through neoliberal-oriented creative economy policies. Music falls into the category of a creative sector and is seen as a product to boost economic growth. Based on our empirical data, young musicians resist this through DIY practices in their music scene. We show the struggle of young musicians to sustain their musical values of authenticity (otentisitas) and autonomy (kemandirian). Instead of viewing resistance as homogenous, we observed three modes of resistance: the rookie, the in-between, and the afficionado, based on their level of commitment to being a DIY careerist. Our research offers a real-world example of theories around popular music and youth studies based on the experiences of young Indonesian musicians.

The Seventies Sociality: Activist Publishers and the Digital Commonplacing of New Knowledge

The historiography of gay liberation publishing offers much to the Digital Humanities, especially if read through Peter Stallybrass’ argument that “reading is a technology of inventorying information to make it reusable.” He suggests commonplacing to make clear that every individual’s thoughts are informed by others’ voices. This paper asks how we might best go about this commonplacing work using linked data, building on the DIY practices of gay liberationists.

DIY in Devon (Exeter and Plymouth)

Abstract Regional cities are usually not widely known for their music scenes and live music spaces. In the historical context of DIY music scenes and youth cultures, communities are bounded by larger metropolitan areas and cities. However, this scene report will analyse a series of thoughts and interviews in discussing some of the important aspects of production in smaller DIY music scenes. This case study focuses on the medium-sized cities of Exeter and Plymouth in Devon, in the southwest of England. In examining some of the cultural identities, challenges and expressions of self-organization from labels, magazines and musicians, it reveals how alternative micro-scenes are forged through DIY practices within smaller communities.

Technologically Mediated Artisanal Production

From 3D printing to maker culture, there’s a rise of technical practices that resist large industrial and corporate modes of production, similar to what is occurring in artisanal food and agriculture. While DIY practices are not new, the widespread availability and cheap cost of such tools has the potential to disrupt certain aspects of manufacturing. How do we better understand what is unfolding?

A ‘Call to Tools’: DIY between State Building and Consumption Practices in the GDR

This article discusses state attempts to politicize do-it-yourself activities in order to strengthen the regime of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in East Germany. To be sure, for many East Germans DIY practices were a hobby and a pastime. Given the notorious shortage of consumer goods and the slow progress in improving standards of living in the GDR, however, it was also a strategy to overcome the shortcomings of the socialist society. The SED attempted to make a virtue out of this necessity by reinterpreting DIY practices as a personal contribution to the building up of the GDR and socialist society. Performed in the right way, practices of DIY were supposed to contribute to both the material and the ideological consolidation of the GDR. In order to direct DIY activities towards undertakings defined as most important by state and party officials, the regime developed particular organizational structures. The annual competition ‘Join in!’, on which this article focuses, addressed the housing situation and therefore one of the most pressing problems of the GDR. Calling upon the East German population to devote their leisure time to the creation of housing spaces, the renovation of state-owned apartment blocks, and the erection and preservation of parks and playgrounds, however, caused new problems. While the East German state tried to generate pride in communal facilities and in public goods rather than in private possessions, this ideal competed with practices of DIY where citizens used their handiwork to improve their private standard of life.

Metal militia behind the Iron Curtain: Scene formation in 1980s East Germany

Abstract The article offers results from a three-year Ph.D. research about the East German metal scene in the 1980s. Due to the political circumstances of a divided Germany, two separate German metal scenes arose. In focus will be aspects of politics and cultural transfer and flow as well as practices of the metal scene in socialist East Germany. The socialist state understood metal as a threatening western youth culture, though it quickly became one of the most popular youth cultures during the 1980s. The article explains how the scene developed partly unofficial and illegal ways of scene formation with domestic gigging bands, supra-regional trade-off networks and correspondence system, prospering black markets, and DIY practices. Therefore, the article further points out to the ambiguity of the 1980s East German socialism with the argument that simple concepts of confrontation and conflict between the state and youth culture are too simplistic.

A Case Study of Women's Participation in DIY in France: Towards an Increasingly Androgynous and Individualistic French Society?

Over the past decade, the traditionally masculine pursuit of DIY has attracted an increasing number of female practitioners in France, thus seemingly challenging the long-established gendered division of tasks observed in the domestic sphere. This case study of women's DIY practices in France analyses women's rationale for participation by contrasting agency with economic necessity. Drawing on vertical and horizontal segregation theories, women's participation in DIY is examined as a potential indicator of progress towards greater gender equality in the domestic sphere. Finally, the article argues that women's participation in DIY illustrates the increasing normalisation of an androgynous division of labour already observed in the public sphere. This results from the development of individualistic values that are increasingly challenging the prevalence of gender as a term of reference in the construction of social and individual identity.