Do it yourself (or
DIY) is a term used to describe the creation, alteration or reparation of something without the aid of experts or professionals. The phrase "do it yourself" came into common usage in the
1950s in reference to
home improvement challenges that people might choose to complete independently.
In recent years, the term DIY has taken on a broader meaning that covers a wide range of skill sets. DIY is associated with the international
Alternative rock and
hardcore punk music scenes,
indymedia networks,
pirate radio stations, and the
zine community. In this context, DIY is related to the
Arts and Crafts movement in that it offers an alternative to modern
consumer culture's emphasis on relying on others to solve needs.
Home improvement
Large hardware stores have capitalized upon the DIY ambitions of North Americans
The DIY scene of today is actually a re-introduction (often to urban and suburban dwellers) of the old pattern of personal involvement in home or apartment upkeep, making clothes, maintenance of cars, computers, websites, or any material aspect of living.
A comment by philosopher
Alan Watts (from the "Houseboat Summit" panel discussion in a 1967 edition of the
San Francisco Oracle) reflected a growing sentiment of that time:
Our educational system, in its entirety, does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions. It trains you to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral character.
In response to this sort of insight, in the 1970s, DIY spread through the North American population of college- and recent-college-graduate age groups. In part, this movement involved simply the renovation of affordable, rundown older homes. But it also related, to some extent, to various projects expressing the social and environmental vision of the '60s and early 1970s. A young American visionary named
Stewart Brand, working with friends and family, and initially using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, published the first edition of
The Whole Earth Catalog (subtitled
Access to Tools) in late 1968.
The first
Catalog and its successors used a broad definition of the term "tools". There were informational tools, such as books (often technical in nature), professional journals, courses, classes, and the like. And there were specialized, designed items, such as carpenter's and mason's tools, garden tools, welding equipment, chainsaws, fiberglass materials, etc. — even early personal computers. (The designer
J. Baldwin acted as editor for the inclusion of these items, writing many of the reviews himself.) The
Catalog's publication both emerged from and spurred the great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, and do-it-yourself attitude of the late 1960s. Often copied, the
Catalog appealed to a wide cross-section of people in North America and had a broad influence.
For decades, magazines such as
Popular Mechanics and
Mechanix Illustrated offered a way to keep current on useful information. DIY home improvement books began to flourish in the 1970s, first created as compendiums of magazine articles. One of the earliest extensive lines of DIY how-to books was created by Sunset Books, based upon articles derived from the pages of
Sunset Magazine in California. Time-Life, Better Homes & Gardens, and other publishers soon followed suit. In the mid-1990s, DIY home-improvement content began to find its way onto the World Wide Web. HouseNet was the earliest bulletin-board style site where users could share information. HomeTips.com, established in early 1995, was among the first Web-based sites to deliver free extensive DIY home-improvement content created by expert authors to Internet users. Since the late 1990s, DIY has exploded on the Web through thousands of sites.
In the 1970s, when home video (
VCRs) came along, the potentials in demonstrating processes audio-visually were immediately grasped by DIY instructors. In 1979,
This Old House starring
Bob Vila premiered on PBS and started the DIY television revolution. The show was immensely popular and helped grow the DIY industry by educating people on how to improve their living conditions (and the value of their house) without the expense of paying someone to do it. In 1994, the
HGTV Network cable television channel was launched in the United States and Canada, followed in 1999 by the
DIY Network cable television channel. Both were launched to appeal to the growing percentage of North Americans interested in DIY topics, from
Home Improvement to
Knitting. Such channels have multiple shows showing how to stretch one's budget to achieve professional-looking results ("Design Cents", "Design on a Dime", etc.) while doing the work yourself.
Beyond magazines and television the scope of home improvement DIY continues to grow online where most mainstream media outlets now have extensive DIY focused informational websites such as
This Old House,
Martha Stewart, and the
DIY Network that are often extensions of their magazine or television brand. The growth of independent online DIY resources is also spiking and the number of homeowners who
blog about their own experiences continues to grow along with Do-It-Yourself websites from smaller organizations.
Subculture
The term 'DIY' or 'Do-It-Yourself' is also used to describe:
- bands or solo artists releasing their music on self-funded record labels
DIY as a subculture arguably began with the punk movement of the 1970s. Instead of traditional means of bands reaching their audiences through large music labels, bands began recording themselves, manufacturing albums and merchandise, booking their own tours, and creating opportunities for smaller bands to get wider recognition and gain cult status through repetitive low-cost DIY touring. The burgeoning
zine movement took up coverage of and promotion of the
underground punk scenes, and significantly altered the way fans interacted with musicians.
Zines quickly branched off from being hand-made music magazines to become more personal. Zines quickly became one of the youth culture's gateways to
DIY culture, which lead to tutorial zines showing others how to make their own shirts, posters, zines, books, food, etc.
Political action
With the rise of the modern multi-national
corporation, North American and European
DIY culture has increasingly become a social and political ideology as well as a hobby or fashion aesthetic. Similar to the
Arts and Crafts movement of the 1900s, the modern DIY movement is viewed as a reactionary response on an individual scale to modern industrial society's reliance on mass-production. In response to various large multi-national companies exploiting labor in developing countries, (such as
Gap,
Nike,
Coca-Cola, and others), the DIY subculture has increasingly been motivated in part by a wish not to support such cruelty and abuse. A common sentiment expressed in DIY culture is to "think globally, act locally," meaning that support of multinational corporations supports exploitative labor and environmental practices, so to create items by oneself or to purchase goods and services made locally in effect boycotts these organizations. In addition, making, recycling, or otherwise following a doctrine of "non consumption" as part of DIY subculture lessens the amount of sales taxes one pays, such taxes being viewed as similarly aiding such morally repugnant institutions as governments which wage war. This view of "consuming less as a political statement" is not agreed upon in the subcultures it is found in, but is a motivating force for many of its adherents.
DIY culture is not limited to hand-making items such as clothing and housewares, but extends to choices of public transportation such as
biking and bike repair,
walking, taking
public transportation, making
electric,
hybrid or
bio-diesel vehicles and modifying existing vehicles, to avoid supporting traditional car companies. Listening to and making
community radio,
pirate radio, and watching and making
community television instead of advertising-filled traditional media is also common.
Groups and publications
See also
