Abstract
In times of multiple crisis, embracing alternative and sustainable solutions for materials, products, and manufacturing systems becomes increasingly crucial and urgent. Constant improvements and innovations in technology and science together with surging consumer demand for the new, encourage an ever-growing production of electronic goods which consequently leads to a wide and multi-levelled scope of problems. In the field of electronic goods, while incremental growth follows unsustainable production patterns, on the contrary, the democratization of technology gives rise to contrasting paradigms and ways of production that could shift the power back to the consumer. Starting from the principles of transparency and openness, the DIYR (Do-It-Yourself Revolution) project aims at a more sustainable product world, environmentally conscious production, and consequently raises the value and care for things, while at the same time formulate a new contemporary visual language deriving from the liberation of products from the prevalent constraints inherent in traditional industrial paradigm. This project aims to create novel products and product ecosystems with a localized production focus, wherein users are motivated to transition into proDusers (producer-users). This transformation is facilitated through instruction, the acquisition of additional knowledge, and the cultivation of skills via immersion in the worlds of making, crafting, and design.DIYR seeks to reach beyond the scopes of nowadays consumption and production and contributes to a constant raise of awareness about electronic products that are not anymore “black boxes” but open, accessible, and transparent systems. It strives to collaborate with Fab Labs in providing them ‚recipes’ to amplify engagement with existing users as well as breaking through to new user groups. DIYR acts as an innovation interface, fusing Design, Making, DIY and sustainability together with distributed manufacturing and diffused micro-factories.
DIYR is a practice-based action research project questioning current conventions of industrial production and carries user involvement into a further level in which the user becomes an active participant. DIYR may be seen as an impetus for a more sustainable mode of production - one that empowers proDusers, offers alternative production methods, and challenges present perception and use-pattern of electronic devices and products at large. On the symbolic level, the project echoes Enzo Mari’s words and invites us “to reflect critically on the objects that fill our daily existence” (Mari 2002, 33). DIYR instigates a valuable knowledge-transfer and delivers important educative values for a more conscious, responsible, and proactive attitude towards our material world and the environment.
DIYR is an innovative wide spanning and ongoing research projectwhich sets to take design-led research out of academia to society and the market. DIYR designs growing ecosystems of innovative, playful, and highly purposeful social electronics for anyone to build, hack, personalise, share, fix, and keep.
DIYR actively empowers countering of planned obsolescence and reducing e-waste. Enabling one to get active, gain knowledge and skills to repurpose components and make things one need, like, and would keep; while in the process, developing a mindful approach to resources, products, alternative production, and active environmental responsibility.