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.