DIY Projects, Communities and Cultures

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University share the results of a year-long survey studying DIY projects, communities, and cultures. The first ever large-scale survey of six DIY communities (Instructables, Etsy, Dorkbot, Ravelry, Adafruit and Craftster) explores the motivations and practices of 2600+ respondents. In addition to an academic paper, results are appropriately posted on Instructables — one of the studied DIY sites. Findings highlight creativity, learning and open sharing as key values embedded in modern DIY culture."

Comments

Re:Heh 2600

[MetalliQaZ]

Fittingly, 2600 can be viewed as a do-it-yourself community that predates all six of those community by a wide margin. :)

xkcd joke time

[Octopuscabbage]

Oh so now i know what xkcd's circut diagram is for. (xkcd.com/730/) It was used for collecting the data for this!

LA missle launch?

[Frosty Piss]

Perhaps the recent unexplained "missle launch" off of LA is a DYI project?

Re:LA missle launch?

[adamofgreyskull]

Perhaps the recent unexplained "missle launch" off of LA is a DYI project?

Do You Itself?

Instructables is open?

[Hatta]

"To Download the PDF or View All Steps,
Become a Pro Member"

Need I say more?

Re:Instructables is open?

[vlm]

Those of us whom use adblock on FF probably don't even realize they have ads, which is why they they have pro-members etc.
By view all steps, they mean view all steps on one page instead of the classic online magazine click for a new page of ads for each sentence.

Re:Instructables is open?

[adamofgreyskull]

"View All Steps" is misleading. It's just the option to display all the steps on a single page. You can still click through each individual step. This may be because I joined way back when, but I was always able, as just a regular registered user, to "View All Steps" and download PDFs.

Instructables also rewards anyone who has their Instructable Featured with a 3 month Pro membership. If you want to, you can even transfer this to someone else as a gift.

Re:Instructables is open?

[fractoid]

for someone who refuses to fill in a login form you sure are knowledgeable

Fixed. Just because you're capable of something, doesn't mean you SHOULD do it just because someone else demands it of you.

Instructables comments

[vlm]

I found the results odd w/ respect to instructables and comments. I like instructables articles, but I actively avoid reading the comments because they are stuffed with morons.

Generally a couple kids asking for homework help, a bunch of negative trollers whining about safety or how the author is ignorant (worship me for I am fire marshal bill and someone with a room temperature IQ could be hurt, and also you are completely wrong in all your conclusions because I say so! Look at me! Look at me!), or utterly illiterate "mee 2 I agre w u" text talk that is still meaningless when converted to English.

Another thing I've noticed about instructables is I've gotten all kinds of ideas from making what amounts to homemade water park sprayers for the kids out of PVC pipe to a tasty sandwich made out of apples, cheddar, bacon, and sourdough bread. But real hard core stuff, things that takes more than a day and real work and skill, is never discussed. The guys whom make their own legal limit ham radio linear amps. Theres like two articles on electric car/bike conversions, but there should be more. It tends to be a site of talkers rather than doers.

Surprisingly community interaction did better than I'd have expected and no one mentioned the comment trolling team at instructables being a good reason not to upload and share.

Re:Instructables comments

[vlm]

I laughed, but a more "instructables" style comment would be:

I can't believe you posted this to slashdot, don't you know that flaming makes people sad, I am an expert on this topic and it stuns me that slashdot would allow this post to appear without editorial filtering to prevent horrific emotional scarring. Oh, did I mention already that I'm an expert on this topic? Well just to make sure, yes, yes I am. This very important safety notice should be added to the article, Think Of The Children. You can quote me, vlm on that. Yup, quote vlm the expert.

Re:Link Love

[geekoid]

Which part of Do it Yourself don't you understand~

Meh

[stokessd]

First the survey of DIY is very limited. It is a robots and computer hackery biased. There's a ton of very vibrant DIY sites out there, Take for example DIYAudio.com, that place has hundreds or thousands of posts per day. And there are industry giants contributing.

There's a ton of restoration sites like OWWM.com (Old Wood Working Machines, but also does metalworking machines). Along the lines of the CMU computer geekery is places like CNCZone.com. Then there's the more web1.0 sorts of places like the bicycle frambuilders list (http://www.phred.org/mailman/listinfo/framebuilders). DIY is very vibrant on the interwebs and there's a whole lot more of it going on than this survey takes into account.

Also Instructables is pretty weak. Instructables is to DIY as McDonalds is to fine dining.

Sheldon

Make Magazine?

[don_carnage]

There are plenty of excellent DIY sites out there. I have a couple of projects featured on Instructables -- their interface makes is really easy to share your projects step-by-step.

Strange that Make Magazine is missing. Or Hack-A-Day.