Principles of maker and DIY fabrication: Enabling design prototypes at low cost.

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) fabrication is the practice where the end user creates a product for personal use rather than commercial production. This paper reviews how DIY practitioners can produce useful artefacts with limited resources. Fabrication principles were extracted from the DIY design repository Instructables.com. A set of candidate principles was iteratively refined and converged to five unique principles. Case studies are presented that illustrate approaches for implementing each. A first empirical study verifies the repeatability of the principle classification through crowd-sourced assessment. A hypothesis is that the principles seen in DIY fabrication can support design prototyping. This is validated through an empirical study that shows a positive correlation between exposure to the principles and enhanced design outcome. Highlights • Do-It-Yourself (DIY) design lowers the entry barrier to innovation. • Five DIY fabrication principles were extracted from the repository Instructables.com. • Occurrence of these principles in the database was validated with several mechanisms. • Ten case studies are presented in detail to elaborate the principles. • Study results show positive correlation with principles and enhanced design outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]