Don't Fear the DIY

I sat on a panel up in Portland OR, the topic was DIY and will it threaten the livelihood industrial designer.

Since the beginning of time we have been a DIY society. DIY is about saving money by "doing it yourself", from home repairs to making a sweater for your son. The idea of a homemade dinner brings up nostalgia of a past we might not have ever experienced, but as a shared memory from the collective conscious. We value the craftsman, the hand tailored, the one of a kind item that no one else has, it makes us feel special.

Riding in a Prius does not have the same cache as riding in a hand hewn wagon attached to an electric bicycle. We are set apart by the "oneness" of the experience. With the advent of digital photography, the loss of hand printing from a negative has impacted professional photographers; everyone and their mother can now shoot endless amounts of digital images and out of a hundred, one will be the "one". A common quote from a client is "I just bought a $5,000 camera, I am going to go shoot my own stock images, no need for a photographer on this project", witness a thousand screams heard across the county from pros who have made their living from delivering high quality imagery. What brings to mind about digital cameras is my favorite quote, of which I have bastardized to suit my needs is this: Give a thousand monkeys a thousand typewriters and one of them will come up with the word "The".

Back to the panel, how will this DIY affect industrial designers? Will people be making their own bespoke shoes? Clothing? Bowls? What are people looking for now in design? Will they still buy the mass produced white coffee makers? Buyers are now as segmented as the internet. The internet has given voice to marginalized people and a forum for them to form groups, and a place to buy or market to each other. One group will want a coffee maker that is pink with white trim, another will want one that sings when the coffee is done, and another will want one that has a photo of the family dog etched on the carafe.

For a designer today, DIY is an endless well of inspiration, look into Etsy.com*, the free market site of small product designers, go to the crafts fairs, read the blogs that feature artists' work. Like stars in the sky, inspiration flickers above you, all you have to do is look.

Image: Ophelia Chong /Loving & Knowing

*The Etsy community spans the globe with buyers and sellers coming from more than 150 countries. Etsy sellers number in the hundreds of thousands.