The re-emergence of DIY vs Big Organizations

March 26 2011

wired-diy

Johnny Lee, king of the wiimote hacks, former Microsoftie and now at Google recently published a nice text titled The re-emergence of DIY vs Big Organizations . He presents his views on the state of DIY, the reduce cost of tools and advanced technology vs the large research organizations investing in research trying to come up with the next big thing. The article is available on his Procrastineering blog, and more recently it was reposted on Makezine.

I share some thoughts with him on the drive and motivation from the DIY community. The shear number of people spending countless hours to solve their important and not-so-important issues with the world is just mind-blowing. A large group of willing people can accomplish quite much, not only in the technology domain I would say.

My issue with the DIY world is that people can be pretty selfish from time to time, and I’ve experienced this a few times over the years (I might have acted like this myself): I have a problem, I think I’m important and the rest of world should listen to me or even help me resolve my problem. A human leech, sucking attention, other people work’s and resources for its own benefit. Don’t get me wrong, not every DIYer is like this, quite the contrary. But these DIY leeches don’t even say thank you when you just offered and sacrificed some of your blood to satisfy their self-esteem.

There are a few good things to learn from research and professional engineers/builders I think: probably some people have been through this before or tried to do the same thing as you. There are 6.7 billions people out there and most of them are quite clever in their own ways. We have been on the moon, built crazy infrastructures and dealt with a lot of human problems before. The internet is not the known universe, people have been trying, thinking and writing about a lot of stuff way before online search existed. So next time you think you have a big problem, think again and start digging in books, and talk to folks who are good at these things. You’ll be amazed I’m sure. Anyway this is diverging and is totally another story.

Back to Johnny’s text. The state of affairs he describes about large organizations vs innovation is very true I think. It is an issue of scale more than anything else I believe. Aligning the work and vision of a large group of people is really hard, even if people are well paid for it. Success and innovation are never guaranteed, even if you work really hard. On the other hand, large corporations can drive projects that are much bigger than what a group of 10-100 doers can do. Large corporations are resilient in their own ways, they often can afford to inject (and loose) millions in hope to maybe recoup some gains in the far future. Failure on an individual level is much more frightening. Without large mining operations, huge logistics supply chain, and major investments in new processes and materials there would be no 149$ Kinect, snazzy new iSomething or easy travel around the globe. Large and often nasty processes are needed for most of the stuff we have grown accustomed to. I’m not sure we can make do without large providers of technical prowesses.

So we need big orgs, and have to live with the issues associated with them the best we can. We also need DIY people and small group of independent tinkers who can poke the society to highlight problems or expose brilliant new opportunities. I hope both types will continue to push the boundaries in their own way, and cross-fertilize each others’ activities more and more.

What do you think? Are designers some sort of professional DIYers? Do we have to reinvent the wheel constantly (and blog about it) to make sure we understand it properly? Do you consider yourself a DIY person or more just like an user of friendly-technology? Are you making your real own stuff, or you are making stuff that other people tell you you can make?

/Camille

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