Do-It-Yourself (DIY) product design offers an alternative approach to traditional top-down industrial product design practices and promises to support reviving consumer awareness and appreciation of how things are made.

Similar to the consumer product industry, ready-to-wear fashion is facing the hegemonic trend of neomania – an obsession for novelty that causes serious overconsumption issues. Even more in the last three decades, there is an enormous accumulation of fabric and garment waste sent to landfills each year. A change should come from questioning traditional design processes to alter the distant relationship between people and the clothes they purchase.

“Design for DIY” (DfDIY) projects run by fashion design students enabled amateurs to participate and express their creativity. The “research-through-design” experiments were aligned to the generic “DfDIY framework”. The projects were conducted to develop knowledge concerning the FDfDIY poiesis of facilitation and design.

By positioning facilitation as a key element of the DIY experience, this study advances existing knowledge by expanding beyond previous research that has explored DIY in sustainability,1,2 entrepreneurship,5 and open design.3 Unlike past studies that primarily examine DIY as an autonomous or countercultural practice, FDfDIY introduces a structured, guided approach that bridges gaps in skill and feasibility, enhancing accessibility for amateur participants. Additionally, this study integrates both digital and manual methodologies, distinguishing it from prior work on digital DIY4 by demonstrating a hybrid approach to garment customization.

By emphasizing facilitation, this study expands on DIY research in sustainability,1,2 entrepreneurship,5 and open design.3 Unlike studies framing DIY as autonomous or countercultural, FDfDIY offers a structured approach that enhances accessibility. It also integrates digital and manual methods, setting it apart from digital DIY studies4 with a hybrid garment customization model.

This paper describes the experiment setup and the development of FDfDIY strategies using student surveys and amateur questionnaires. The findings from these experiments have practical implications for those interested in this concept and the process of facilitating DIY in the field of fashion design, as well as for entrepreneurs seeking to implement a new FDfDIY business model. ... Read more

Summary
Issues, criticism, problem statement (Section 2, Section 3, Section 4)
In short, this thesis starts with the introduction of an underlying societal problem (Section 3). It starts with the observation and indication of what some would call the ‘bifurcation’ between (1) the industry, institutions and markets who produce and (2) the end users, the so-called consumers who purchase, consume and use (Edwards, 2006). It concerns how producing and consuming have drifted apart and continue to do so. Various developments in history have caused this split, among which industrialization and consequential human behaviour in a market driven society were decisive. Industrialization was criticized from the start and this criticism still seems valid today. The thesis concludes that this industrially induced split has led to severe negative consequences for both humans and nature. The system of mass production and consumption has become traditional and is now common practice. The original problem statement of this thesis is: ‘Given the industrially induced gap and the designer’s responsibility, how can 'design' and 'use' be more closely integrated?’

Opportunities (Section 5)
There are, however, opportunities for improvement of the unsustainable system with which we produce and consume. Given the notion that sustainability is an existential problem (Ehrenfeld, 2008), see Section 4.1 and Section 7.5.3.1, a range of democratizing developments and technological advancements, in combination with certain societal and human principles, have helped to define a solution direction. This section discusses developments in technology and society that, apart from being promising for the entire field of industrial design, clearly help in providing an alternative scenario to today’s strict separation between production and consumption. Various rather new digitally based manufacturing possibilities, available to end-users, allow for small volume (one-off) manufacture of items without high tooling investments. These technologies, together with a general growing interest in making, tend to democratize making, which aligns to people’s innate urge for self-sufficiency and independence.

Do-It-Yourself (Section 6)
The preceding sections have provided reasons to suggest a closer relationship (1) between production and consumption and (2) between people and the product they consume. When considering ethics and ‘Human Being’ (awareness), the Do-It-Yourself scenario (merging making and consuming, hence shortening the distance) appears to be reasonable and sensible, providing great opportunities for people’s personal development and for a better consideration of sustainability. Historical analysis of the DIY phenomenon and the drivers of past DIY activity endorses/supports the relevance and value that DIY could have in today’s context.

A vision to facilitate Do-It-Yourself (Section 7)
Subsequently, a vision was established: ‘the support and facilitation of DIY activity by laypersons’. In this, all three of Ehrenfeld’s (2008) sustainability areas (Figure 2) of ethics, human beings and nature are addressed in a positive sense: (1) DIY helps people to know the consequences of their actions, it provides a better human-product connection, (2) DIY addresses human needs and people’s creativity, and provides pride of authorship and joy in the DIY process, and (3) DIY’s conjunction of making and using increases awareness, supports small scale, care and product attachment, and hence serves the natural environment. Given that DIY activity greatly aligns with the elements of sustainability as described by Ehrenfeld (Ehrenfeld, 2008), and the designer’s responsible role, this section proposes to assign the responsibility of creating a better connection between the user and the maker of products to the designer. This is because (1) it is part of today’s design job to offer suitable solutions, by designing products or services and experiences, and (2) morally, it is the designer’s job to serve people with sufficient solutions, to re-connect people to what they really require, and to involve them. Not solely to serve the client company’s wishes.

Gaining insights into Design-for-DIY through a series of Design-for-DIY studies (Section 8)
To explore what the concept of Design-for-DIY could entail in practical terms, based on insights from previous sections, Section 8 presents a series of four explorative Design-for-DIY studies. These studies were conducted to deepen understanding of the Design-for-DIY process and to lay the groundwork for a foundational 'Design-for-DIY framework.' The studies were carried out by students as part of their graduation projects.

The studies included: (1) the DIY design and assembly of a coffee maker, in which participants were asked to choose and assemble their own coffee maker from various second-hand jars, cans, lids, and rings available; (2) the DIY design of a desk lamp, featuring a tangible, ‘deformable’ form that enabled participants to explore shape in a 3D design space and translate their designs into a producible form; (3) a Design-for-DIY study of headphones, which provided an accessible toolkit template allowing laypersons to create a personalized, wearable design using ready-made hardware components; and (4) the 'Reusing Plastics at Scrap' study, which focused on designing tools to assemble parts and materials from 'Scrap' and providing instructional sheets to facilitate DIY activity by laypersons. The studies helped answer the research questions defined for this series, focusing on the division of tasks between designer and layperson, the provision of design freedom for the layperson, and the feasibility of a generic framework.

The Design-for-DIY framework (Section 9)
The previous sections provided the foundation and rationale for a final proposal of a methodological theoretical framework (Figure 3). This framework is explicitly linked to existing educational, DIY-related, and widely recognized design process models as references. This section aims to clarify and describe in greater detail the proposed framework, including its structure, form, and components. The Design-for-DIY framework follows a spiral shape, consisting of multiple concentric design cycles, each containing a range of design steps.
The cycles include:
1. The Project Cycle (or project brief cycle), in which the designer (and layperson) addresses the project’s purpose, target audience, reason for initiation, and product category.
2. The Pre-Design Cycle, which serves as a reference and draft product design for the project, providing an example for the layperson.
3. The Toolkit Cycle, a fundamental element of the framework, as it includes task allocation, specific tools and instructions, and a designated design-space.
4. The Platform Cycle, which consolidates key design-support elements that a layperson may need when undertaking a DIY project. This includes designer support, physical and digital materials for inspiration, examples, peer and community networks, potential material suppliers, and more.
5. The DIY Design Cycle, which invites the layperson to engage in the actual DIY activity. This activity is guided to varying extents by the facilitating designer within the environment as prepared and provided by the designer.

Assessment of the Design-for-DIY framework (Section 10)
This chapter describes a series of design experiments in which 12 participants test the Design-for-DIY framework. The participants, all professional designers, worked in pairs to carry out the Design-for-DIY experiments, using the provided framework as their starting point. The experiments were important in evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed framework: how it helps designers set up a DIY project and, in doing so, facilitates the DIY activity itself. At the same time, the tests generated valuable suggestions for improvements to the proposed framework.

When reflecting on the Design-for-DIY framework design, it seems reasonable to conclude that participants evaluated the Design-for-DIY framework as relatively complete. Specifically, the framework offers design freedom, allows for exploration, and guides the designer in considering essential design criteria and the consecutive design cycles (pre-design, toolkit, and platform). The arrangement of these cycles within the framework is both accurate and flexible, and the instructional video is clear. Most participants felt comfortable starting their designs, and they were generally positive about the suitability of this process for other Design-for-DIY cases. Another conclusion is that participants recognized many of the merits of Design-for-DIY and the use of the framework, such as fostering pride, skill development, low cost, and self-sufficiency. At the same time, they also acknowledged the barriers people might face, including the high effort required, lack of time, and limited skills. While participants generally felt free to manoeuvre, some suggested a more flexible path to follow and expressed interest in having project examples as references. The outcomes of the experiment allow the conclusion that a Design-for-DIY framework was created that can sufficiently help the designer to develop and establish a DIY project. Though, as the findings of the experiments are based on a relatively small sample of participants, this may limit the generalizability of the results.

Conclusions and discussion (Section 11)
The final chapter discusses the conclusions and implications regarding the previously mentioned Design-for-DIY vision, the scenario, the Design-for-DIY framework and its validation, and what these could mean for the field of design, the human-product relationship, the broader implementation of the Design-for-DIY concept, and design education. The following topics are addressed in turn: a reflection on the overall research objectives, the answers to the research questions, the value of the research for design practice and theory, its impact and limitations, the implications of the findings for design education, the propositions developed and approved for the dissertation, and suggestions for future research.

The outcomes of this research seem to align with the ambition of the study: deducing and proposing a scenario that would help counter today’s unsustainable user-product relationship. This is achieved through the provision of a scenario and method for facilitating DIY activity via a Design-for-DIY approach.
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Previous scholars have advocated the significant value of sketching in design process-es. This paper first explores how design sketching functions as an agent for design, building on insights derived from both theory and practice. Interviews with professional designers in the field reaffirm the functions and importance of sketching. Not only for designers themselves, but also for their clients and consumers. Given the value of sketching and the variety of stakeholders involved, this paper then aims to structure the affordances of design sketching in a practical framework. Considering that af-fordances must be discoverable and perceivable in order to be effective, this paper subsequently proposes ideas for transforming the framework into a tool that will help designers to discover design sketching and unlock its benefits. ... Read more

For design and art enthusiasts who seek to enhance their skills through instructional videos, following drawing instructions while practicing can be challenging. STIVi presents perspective drawing demonstrations and commentary of prerecorded instructional videos as interactive drawing tutorials that students can navigate and explore at their own pace. Our approach involves a semi-automatic pipeline to assist instructors in creating STIVi content by extracting pen strokes from video frames and aligning them with the accompanying audio commentary. Thanks to this structured data, students can navigate through transcript and in-video drawing, refer to provided highlights in both modalities to guide their navigation, and explore variations of the drawing demonstration to understand fundamental principles.

We evaluated STIVi’s interactive tutorials against a regular video player. We observed that our interface supports non-linear learning styles by providing students alternative paths for following and understanding drawing instructions. ... Read more

There is a growing interest in the discipline of design sketching and drawing. Whereas its origin lies in the sketching and presenting of tangible (industrially designed) products, the discipline has, since approximately 2010, extended in various ways, along various dimensions. Various authors have addressed and discussed the most prominent change within the discipline since: the addition of so-called ‘story telling visuals’: sketches of processes, overviews, systems and e.g. journeys (Corremans and Mulder-Nijkamp 2019, Hoftijzer, Sypesteyn et al. 2020), also named ‘visual thinking’. In fact, sketching as a means of communication has grown across discipline borders, and, consequently, the activity of sketching for communication enjoys a growing group of actors and audience these days. The authors, being sketching practitioners and teachers, have been developing sketching course content aligned to this, both for the extending discipline (Bachelor and Master courses) of sketching within Industrial Design and for new audiences. One particular course, a so-called ‘Master Class’, which is an intensive two-day taking course to an external audience, focused on ‘how to sketch visual stories’, was subject to an experiment. Firstly, the course was designed according to specific requirements (audience, goals, pedagogy) and to previous insights of course development and evaluation, of workshops offered, and according to previously described vision and methodology that concerns the alignment between sketches of tangible things and sketches of abstract concepts (Hoftijzer, Sypesteyn et al. 2020). Secondly, in order to assess the logic and quality of the short course’s structure and contents, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire. Together, this experimental set-up, the questionnaire results, and the sketched output of the Master Class have led to new insights, to new knowledge that will help improve the pedagogic approach of many of the current courses taught and to the follow up Master Class in particular. ... Read more

Today's global context of mass-produced items has resulted in an increasing 'distance', or alienation, between people and the origins of the items they buy and use: an unhealthy human-product relationship. This observation permits the search for an alternative interpretation of well-being: a transformation that would support resilience and self sufficiency, and a better human product relationship or 'a new partnership', as advocated by various scholars. In this paper, this new partnership is considered through supporting 'Do-It-Yourself' (DIY) product design: a scenario in which professional designers facilitate laypersons to design for themselves. Anticipating (1) the designer's responsibility, and (2) the layperson's innate desire to create, this paper introduces a 'Design for DIY' framework method to help bridge the knowledge gap between the product designer and the layperson. The initial starting points of this study, complemented by a range of 'Design for DIY' studies, and an exploration of existing design frameworks and design models, resulted in the design of a 'Design-for-DIY' framework. This paper concludes with recommendations for the testing and further development of the Design-for-DIY framework. ... Read more

Digital technologies have enabled design sketching to expand into new applications and domains. Inevitably, these new forms of visualisation require re-evaluating how we use drawing to see, visualise, understand, and fabricate products and services in design education and the profession. This paper presents a selection of discoveries after the authors performed research, made presentations and mediated workshops when face-to-face collaborations and travel were impossible because of the Covid-19 epidemic restrictions. Findings add to work intending to build a modern taxonomy for design sketching and visual knowledge while accounting for immersive virtual collaboration and distributed workflows from sketching to 3D CAD and 3D printing. These are among the first indications of a drive towards synthesising historically demarked design process stages into a singularity of actions that merge and move simultaneously among ideation, design, and production. Participants in two international conference workshops shared ideas and discussed their local circumstances relating to the potential use and acceptance of new technologies already researched and adopted in other disciplines such as computer science and entertainment. A critical consensus was that the challenge of new technologies for our design education and profession is not as much about technology and its tools as the process and steps that enable change. Significantly, conversation pointed towards a strategy that enhances and augments habits in design education and the profession as the means to modify and transform culture and practice. ... Read more

A new analysis of design sketches for the design of the Quinny Hubb strawler, by Vanderveer Designers,
was executed to validate and/or complement the existing typology of design sketch factors and outcome
characteristics, as described by Hoftijzer et al (2018). ... Read more

Product designers extensively use sketches to create and communicate 3D shapes and thus form an ideal audience for sketch-based modeling, nonphotorealistic rendering and sketch filtering. However, sketching requires significant expertise and time, making design sketches a scarce resource for the research community. We introduce OpenSketch, a dataset of product design sketches aimed at offering a rich source of information for a variety of computer-aided design tasks. OpenSketch contains more than 400 sketches representing 12 man-made objects drawn by 7 to 15 product designers of varying expertise. We provided participants with front, side and top views of these objects, and instructed them to draw from two novel perspective viewpoints. This drawing task forces designers to construct the shape from their mental vision rather than directly copy what they see. They achieve this task by employing a variety of sketching techniques and methods not observed in prior datasets. Together with industrial design teachers, we distilled a taxonomy of line types and used it to label each stroke of the 214 sketches drawn from one of the two viewpoints. While some of these lines have long been known in computer graphics, others remain to be reproduced algorithmically or exploited for shape inference. In addition, we also asked participants to produce clean presentation drawings from each of their sketches, resulting in aligned pairs of drawings of different styles. Finally, we registered each sketch to its reference 3D model by annotating sparse correspondences. We provide an analysis of our annotated sketches, which reveals systematic drawing strategies over time and shapes, as well as a positive correlation between presence of construction lines and accuracy. Our sketches, in combination with provided annotations, form challenging benchmarks for existing algorithms as well as a great source of inspiration for future developments.We illustrate the versatility of our data by using it to test a 3D reconstruction deep network trained on synthetic drawings, as well as to train a filtering network to convert concept sketches into presentation drawings. We distribute our dataset under the Creative Commons CC0 license: Https://ns.inria.fr/d3/OpenSketch. ... Read more

Within the field of industrial design, sketches play a significant role for communication. Sketching represents a language for designers to explore options and support creativity, and to express visions and solutions to teams, clients and other stakeholders. Considering the many different goals and formats professional sketches (and visualisations in general) have in practice, this paper suggests to also explicitly distinguish and teach the various factors that should be taken into account for each specific type of sketch: uncover why sketches look the way the look. Several authors have in the past described classifications of design sketches and drawings, mostly assigned to specific design stages. However these scholars do not specifically describe the communication factors, nor do they provide clues or guidelines for implementation. The case study on which the research was based was executed in close collaboration between University and Dutch design agency Vanderveer Designers, it concerned the Thule Yepp Nexxt child bike seat project they ran, which was awarded with the ‘best of the best’ Red Dot Award and the IF Gold award. The case study has helped to conclude that sketches vary along an extensive range of dimensional axes. Further, the visual database of sketches helped to uncover the various characteristics sketches could have. Correlating (1) specific sketches with (2) the factors defining them and (3) the outcome characteristics together will help students and designers, agencies and clients to better understand and interpret each other. ... Read more

The activity of drawing has characterized the human being since pre-historic times. The ‘language’ of drawing was utilized long before writing was there. It is an expression of human’s unique creativity and an example of human’s near-exclusive usage of tools. In this paper, the broad definition and relevance of drawing will be addressed first. Subsequently, the position of the professional and educational field of design drawing takes will be discussed, and its specific functions within the context of product design. The overall goal of this paper is to summarize the various uses of drawing as a ‘design language’, discuss the educational value and present a preliminary learning model, which describes the sequential and additional steps that need to be taken into account when teaching students how to draw. The variety of functions of the drawing medium are integrated in the so-called design drawing curriculum of the Industrial Design Engineering program at the Delft University of Technology, which will be elaborated on. Subsequently, as an exemplifying and representative approach for suggesting an object’s volume - one of the most important goals of design drawing – a specific method and technique will be described and shown. ... Read more

The technological changes that concern the tools for making have an effect on the type of profession designers will have in the near future. The traditional ‘industrial’ relationships between suppliers, manufacturers, designers and users alter rapidly, causing business models to change as a consequence [Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers Is Essential to Winning in Business, Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2004; MCPC: World Conference on Mass Customization, Personalization, and Co-Creation 2011, San Francisco Airport Marriott Waterfront, 2011], as many economic principles seem to be no longer valid [NV Weekblad De Groene Amsterdammer, De Groene Amsterdammer, Amsterdam, 2015]. While many education programs prepare students for a future in a traditional user–supplier relationship context, anticipating the recent changes should probably be considered [Open Design Now, BIS Publishers, Amsterdam, 2011].

The extended process of ‘design for DIY’, that is facilitating non-designers to design and make an object or tool for themselves, by creating a suitable platform and design environment, includes a range of extra design steps, compared to traditional product design. (1) The pre-design stage, including setting the objectives, anticipating the audience, and the initial product design that is to be adapted; (2) establishing the design environment (including platform, inspiration, etc.); (3) designing the interaction between facilitator and amateur with the help of the design kit; (4) The final ‘translation phase’, in which the amateur design result is to be prepared for fabrication. The order in which these steps can be taken varies.

As part of a running research project, a small series of ‘design for DIY’ experiments has been executed, that helped testing specific approaches of how to facilitate amateurs. These test runs resulted in some very interesting insights regarding the exchange of information between facilitator and amateur, and regarding preferences and skills amateurs revealed to have. Conclusions from these experiments help to define the area of expertise that should preferably be integrated into (university) design curricula and will help to further establish a framework for ‘Design for DIY’ (DfDIY). These experiments help indicate the changing of the design profession caused by technological and societal changes and, most importantly, how to anticipate. ... Read more

Since the field of industrial design to a great extend concerns the creative development of threedimensional objects, project communication is often a visual matter. The activity of design drawing enables to visually suggest ideas and solutions that don’t exist yet. Drawing sharpens observation, increases perception and support visual imagination, is how art historian Buser describes it [1]. This paper will explore and discuss a specific drawing tool that seems to be suitable to utilize in various
stages of the design process, and to a wide range of functional practices and educational exercises of design drawing. This drawing technique – applying scraped pastel powder to drawings – facilitates the visual depiction of an object’s volume, and of the spaciousness of a certain scene. Besides, because of the pastel powder’s smooth effect, it is also very suitable to very lightly and gradually describe a surface with a certain curvature or shininess (reflecting the sky). Further, because of the remarkable similarities between the analogue pastel technique and the digital airbrush (e.g. in Photoshop), the pastel tool serves as a very helpful tool and technique to prepare students for the digital medium. For educational purposes, this paper will discuss the use and suitability of powdered pastel as a drawing tool, by evaluating its implementation in a range of specific drawing education exercises. These drawing exercises correspond to and represent the visualization of various design stages and subjects. ... Read more

Hoftijzer, J. W. (2012b). , . . (paper in conference proceedings) ... Read more