Towards patterns of responsible consumption and production: an exploration of do-it-yourself practitioners through motivations, conceptions, and fabrication processes
Laurence Carney, Claudia Déméné · J of Design Research · 2022
Defined as a way for practitioners to conceive and fabricate products by and for themselves, do-it-yourself (DIY) has recently garnered interest as a practice that may encourage patterns of responsible consumption and production (RCP). However, conceptualising the DIY practice as one that reduces resources, energy and waste is still debated among the scientific community as it may require the use of new materials and technologies with higher energy consumption. In this context, this study has the following objectives: 1) to explore practitioners' environmental, social and ethical motivations to DIY; and 2) to document their DIY process. To this purpose, 37 semi-structured interviews were conducted with practitioners from Quebec, Canada. Based on the findings, three personas were developed to categorise practitioners and examine their profile types. Finally, this paper proposes a definition of responsible DIY to guide practitioners towards patterns of RCP in their practise of DIY.