Skip to page content...
View Submissions
- Please choose an option:
- Title of Abstract:
Men who make; the optimal experience of the amateur designer-maker and DIY enthusiast. (Ref #183)
- Date:
- 24-10-2006 10:21:30
- Status:
-
Accepted
- Rating:
- 8
-
Details:
- This research is a development of the author?s previously published work in the area of do-it-yourself, home craft activity and gender. The current research phase has now been registered as a doctoral programme leading to the award of PhD, and is linked with the Home Interaction Research Cluster at the University College for the Creative Arts. The Home Interaction Research Cluster has been established to explore the possibilities of multi-discipline thinking towards how householders/inhabitants shape their social, psychological, physiological and ideological worlds and what the future of the domestic environment may become.
The research uses methods drawn from the discipline of ethnography to develop a programme of qualitative research that uncovers the motivations for home craft activity, and sets out to ascertain the extent to which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi?s theory of ?Flow? can be used as an explanation for what is effectively unpaid labour within the context of domestic leisure. Developing ideas explored in earlier research, the work particularly focuses on the experience of men who pursue making activities in the context of home, and the relationship of this practice to constructions of domesticity.
The conventional explanations for this practice tend to privilege theories of conspicuous consumption, and the formation and display of public identity. However, Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow points to alternative, internalised motives, revealing surprising parallels between the incentive for home craft activity, and the drives that sustain professional designers and makers. Csikszentmihalyi argues that the pursuit of flow, or optimal experience (between boredom and anxiety), is borne of the desire for negentropy (the struggle to resist psychic entropy). This pursuit of flow drives not only professional artists and craftspeople, but also amateur designer makers and DIY enthusiasts.
The research is located in the field of production of artefacts in home workshops or other makeshift domestic spaces. The respondents are selected on the basis of their enthusiasm and commitment to craft practice, plus their lack of conventional design or craft education, or professional involvement in the creative industries. Analysis of semi-structured depth interviews, combined with video and photographic records of the craft activity, and the domestic workspaces within which it takes place, will be used to ask whether Csikszentmihalyi?s theories can serve as an effective means of understanding men?s amateur home design and craft activity.
Reviewer Comments: