The phenomenon of DIY has been relatively neglected in social studies to date, despite its emergence as a significant practice and movement over several decades, and its potential for driving improvements for individuals, schools, companies, organisations, and society as a whole. Digital tools have allowed a new emphasis of collaboration and open sharing within (Di)DIY, but before this Project this was rarely studied in a systematic way.
The Knowledge Framework highlights the human-centric nature of DiDIY and systematically analyses and interprets it by taking into account the main dimensions of involvement in DiDIY, the components of such involvement, the necessary conditions of what DiDIY is and the multiple interpretations of what DiDIY may be, analysed using the four core perspectives of the Project: DiDIY in organisation and work, in education and research, in creative society, and in laws, rights and responsibilities.
The Project integrated contributions from a range of academic disciplines and showed that:
- (in organisation and work) digital technologies are transforming the concept of DIY by exploiting knowledge sharing within communities into new configurations of Digital Do-It-Together in which functional roles blur – this research could identify ways to achieve better individual and organizational performances by studying the features leveraging on, or conflicting toward, DiDIY within several different organizational domains;
- (in education and research) DiDIY is largely a bottom up phenomenon, related to the flow of skills and knowledge between stakeholders, the steps of learning processes and the outcomes, and the technology involved in learning processes – this research could indicate ways of improving the uptake of teaching/research tools as well as raise citizens’ expectations about the potential of DiDIY by mapping what is going on in different countries in different environment;
- (in creative society) DiDIY influences, alters, or empowers the dynamics of makers’ relationship to digital technologies, and it enables DiDIY communities to meet the challenge of local, social, and environmental problems in a new way – this research could help guide communities towards the creative resources they need for tackling problems, with a consequent impact upon policy making regarding support for DiDIY initiatives;
- (in laws, rights and responsibilities) current legal systems are challenged by and provide challenges to the emerging culture of DiDIY, as in the case of the “right to repair” which is needed in order to make production less environmentally damaging – this research could influence the formulation of future policy and legal measures by developing a clear overview of the main challenges and policy recommendations that fit with the new paradigm.
The research has shown that DiDIY-related phenomena can be effectively modelled and simulated, capturing the activity of making so to explore “what if” scenarios on the impact of DiDIY, in order to better understand the effect of: different licensing laws/systems on its growth; sharing and communication structures concerning how makers interact and organise themselves; how the development of makerspaces/fablabs could facilitate the development of DiDIY. This understanding improved the Knowledge Framework, the Simulation Framework, and the policy recommendations.
