DIY.org
When a website shows you how to build it, why buy it?
Julian Dibbell
Tuesday, March 7th 2006
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photo: Developed by Graffiti Research Lab/www.instructables.com
With your own two hands
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The site's design team, Squid Labs, calls it "step-by-step collaboration," and I suspect even Hakim Bey might call it a start. The explosion of online do-it-yourself walk-throughs is perhaps the most concrete case to date of the Internet's potential for reshaping our material world, and Instructables' crisp, thoughtful design highlights the Web-specific strengths that make it so. Project books have always been capable of spreading DIY wisdom around, of course, but the ubiquity of digital cameras (a pic is worth a thousand instructions) and interactive social software have lowered the threshold for publishing your own projects just about to the ground. No big deal, maybe, but look at it from the bottom-line perspective of the transnational corporate empire: By making it easier to DIY, sites like Instructables are lowering the transaction costs of opting out of commercial culture and weakening the value proposition in yet another trip to Target. And really, who likes turnips anyway? Here, have a Throwie.
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