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."

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.

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

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.

Make Magazine?

[don_carnage]

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

Strange that Make Magazine [makezine.com] is missing. Or Hack-A-Day [hackaday.com].