From Prosumption to DIY Culture

Frankfurt.
The next keynote at Prosumer Revisited is by trend researcher and journalist Holm Friebe. He begins by referencing de Certeau, and describes prosuming in the first place as the creative repurposing of existing products; from this, though, we've also moved on to the creation of new artefacts by users. There is a semantic shift in the description of prosumption, then - a shift further towards various forms of DIY production.

What's happening now is that this form of DIY production is becoming a brand in its own right - and this 'DIY brand' may be the most important brand of the 21st century. This is visible for example in 'crafting', the latest iteration of the arts and crafts movement - in effect an extension of online DIY and produsage (and importantly also of its its collaborative, community-based aspects) into the offline world. In the long tail of interests, some of this is becoming an industry in its own right as well, of course - the arts and crafts marketplace Etsy is a clear example for this, and it's even begun to operate its own (offline) training courses.

Another example for such trends is hacking, of course - not hacking as computer hacking in a narrow sense, but the user modification of products such as the iPhone, for example. This is a kind of deliberate misuse of products that vastly improves the usability and use range of such products, and there is an increasing range of tools and toolkits which support such developments - including, for example, the programmable hardware toolkit Arduino. The next step from here is the mass production and distribution of these hacks through on-demand manufacturing platforms. Such approaches question the industrial logic of production, and make possible a move towards the decentralised production of user-created objects.

A further example is open source, of course - the development and customisation of software packages by self-organising communities, as well as user-led projects for documentation and marketing. Such spontaneous emergence of self-organisation has been described by some as a more effective form of organisation than conventional hierarchical management structures. The transition between enthusiast culture and commercial application continues to be difficult, however.

What's the impact of such tendencies on brands, then? What remains of businesses when everything has been outsourced, crowdsourced, transferred to the responsibility of users? Some even see a 'brand bubble' where the subjective evaluation of brand value among customers has been declining even if brands continue to be valued highly by business - these divergent trends cannot continue for long without running into trouble. Holm links this to Eric Raymond's distinction between cathedral and bazaar - the successful brands of the future are much more likely to be oriented towards the flexibility and changeability of the bazaar, rather than the controlled design of the cathedral. There's no fundamental opposition against brands here - but an opposition to the major brands, and a move towards each of us having our own brand.

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