Dale Dougherty on modern craft & DIY
I’m fascinated by the New Craft / DIY, so I loved hearing Dale Dougherty speak at an open session at Xerox Parc recently.
Dale is a longtime O’Reilly Media leader and is currently editor of Make Magazine and one of the founders of Maker Faire, so he’s been watching this new wave of Craft DIY for as long as anybody.
He covered a lot of ground so I’ll just give a few highlights:
Brief history of craft: Craft = stuff you made around the house. The history of weaving as a craft is esp interesting, as automated looms were the original Industrial Revolution.
Brief history of DIY: DIY was originally a technically oriented activity going back to at least the early 1900s, when magazines gave instructions for building crystal radios. DIY mags and popularity ebbed and flowed throughout the 20th century, with a heyday in 1950s-60s post-sputnik.
Concept behind Make Magazine: Martha Stewart for Geeks. Emphasis on doing stuff and making stuff, not buying stuff. Emphasis on making fun gadgets that had some technical piece.
Modern Craft & DIY cultural values: Creativity. Learning and play. Interdisciplinary. Participation in a community. Recycle, repurpose and reuse. Transparency (meaning, you know how something is made, you can see how it works, you can tinker with it).
Identity and craft / DIY: it’s very personal. The things that people create have meaning for them and are a reflection of their identity. They can also give you a feeling of connecting to the past, to all those people who did the craft before you. Craft DIY is a form of gift economy in that people share their knowledge and love of their craft and often give away the stuff they make.
Dale tipped his hat to the Finnish blogger Ulla-Maaria Mutaten who wrote a “Craft Manifesto” that talked about Craft DIY culture.
Concept behind Maker Faire: in-person event so people from different craft & DIY disciplines could meet, see and discuss each other’s creations. Takeoff on the old agricultural fair, where people from across the county and different farms would come together to socialize and show off their goods.
Dale mentioned the annual Punkin Chunkin Competition and the OskKosh Experimental Aircraft Airshow as examples of DIY that have been around for awhile in pockets here and there.
So it was a very stimulating presentation. I have oodles of thoughts around all of this for future posts.