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An Adhocist Manifesto1. If necessity is the mother of invention, then combining previous systems

is the father, and adhocism is the creative offspring. This is true in both nature and culture.

2. In culture, combinations that display themselves, and explain their use and origins, are especially adhocist.

3. Thus adhocism is the style of eureka. It is the origin moment of new things, when the forms are typically hybrid, and like all creative instants, the con-junction of previously separated systems. Hence, the style must remain heterogeneous to be understood. Like the best surrealism when seen for the first time, it is experienced as an incongruous marriage; often the copulation of incommensurable things. But as species and things evolve, their ad hoc attachments become supplementary, conventional, and usu-ally simulated. Fully evolved this heterogeneity is integrated and non–ad hoc. Yet an evolved time-city can be an intentional palimpsest of layers, as with New York’s High Line.

4. At a populist level adhocism is radically democratic and pragmatic, as in the first two stages of revolution. It is also evident after catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina, or the earthquake in Haiti, when people make do with whatever is at hand.

5. At an elitist level it is efficient and perfected in the parts. Like the Mars space program, where each Rover is assembled from the best subsystem without prejudice of stylistic unity, there is tolerance, even love, of mongrel beauty.

6. Adhocism badly done is a lazy put-together of diverse things. It steals from the bank of the world’s resources, pays nothing back, and devalues the currency. Plagiarism and theft are redeemable if acknowledged, and if there is added value: the improvement of either the subsystems or the whole. Palladian, as well as Modern, architecture is based on stolen goods duly footnoted. Academics are usually trained in this confessional art.

7. Philosophically, adhocism tends to be open-ended like an additive list and encyclopedia. Thus it is first cousin to eclecticism, defined as “deriving ideas, tastes, style, etc., from various sources.” This is from the Greek eclect, “I chose or select” this part from anywhere. Looking for improve-ment, we choose the best part without trying to stay within a single canon.

8. If misusing a knife as a screwdriver is forgivable adhocism, then the Swiss Army Knife is its customized, evolutionary offspring. Droog Design is the commercial version, the Japanese Tea Ceremony is the ritualized usage, and Frank Gehry’s house for himself typifies the informality. The heteroge-neous and informal characterize the cultural genre.

9. Try a thought experiment with the smallest atom; hydrogen or deuterium. Even these simple bodies are a historical smash-up of different units—the proton, electron, and neutron. Only quarks and leptons seem to be non–ad hoc. Evidently the rest of the world coalesced from difference.

10. If most everything on earth comes from something else and is compound, then we live in a pluriverse. Although the laws may be uniform in our uni-verse today, they evolved during the first microseconds, and may be the bylaws of an ad hoc multiverse.

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REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS

PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY

DESIGN AND CULTURE VOLUME 5, ISSUE 1PP 45–68

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Design in the Age of Prosumption: The Craft of Design after the Object

Stephen Knott

ABSTRACT This article establishes a taxonomy of consumer response to the possibility of becoming a producing consumer (prosumer), through an analysis of the prosumer’s relationship to the tools and materials that facilitate production. I have developed three characterizations of the prosumer dependent on how the tools, materials, and advice provided by companies who incite consumer creativity are used: the prosumer who follows the rules; those who reject such provision and pursue self-sufficiency; and the prosumer who adapts tools and materials in processes of ad hoc bricolage. This emphasis on how prosumers harness their potential productivity will help us challenge boisterous claims of consumer sovereignty in light of increasingly

Stephen Knott recently completed a Ph.D. entitled “Amateur Craft as

a Differential Practice” through an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award program, “Modern Craft:

History, Theory, Practice,” at the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He

trained as a historian at University College London, focusing on

the theory of history, visual culture, and late nineteenth-

century modernity. His teaching at the Royal College of Art and

Kingston University has focused on integrating practicing and academic students within the

art school environment, and his writing covers a wide area within

material culture: from an essay on amateur railway modelers in

Design and Culture (4.1) to work for The Journal of Modern Craft,

where he is Managing Editor. www.knotthistory.co.uk

© BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING PLC 2013PRINTED IN THE UK

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accessible and powerful technologies, which have proliferated since Alvin Toffler’s first enthusiastic assessment of the prosumer in The Third Wave (1980). With reference to case studies from a broad geographical and chronological range, my intention is to develop characterizations that help designers and theorists navigate the complex impact of the consumer-as-designer today, avoiding both denigration of the consumer as naive and unskilled, or their promulgation as the savior of modern production.

KEYWORDS: prosumer, consumer studies, bricolage, do-it-yourself, self-sufficiency, tools, production, labor

Log on to NIKEiD, part of the sports brand’s online store, and you can “custom build it,” selecting from a range of color combinations and materials to design a brand new pair of trainers (Figure 1).1 This online design platform typifies an increasingly common model of consumption in which the consumer is invited to participate. The hybridized term “prosumer” (the producing consumer), first coined in Alvin Toffler’s work on interactive media, The Third Wave (1980), is a term that can be used to define this broad spectrum of practice, from customization to do-it-yourself practice. Producing power is handed from designer to consumer and this transfer facilitates a

Figure 1 Screenshot of NIKEiD design suite. © NIKE Inc., 2012.

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degree of empowerment as it allows “the non-specialist to gain a greater sense of agency through direct involvement in the physical construction of the material world” (Attfield 2000: 48).2

However, even advocates of this new model of productive con-sumption would be aware of the continuing limitations to consumer expression. The NIKEiD design suite, for example, seems to be overplaying genuine individual choice. It limits the consumer to mark-ing their trainers with a word or phrase and stipulates that only the material and color of specific parts of the shoe can be changed. The designer’s authority is not challenged, as creating the blueprint remains in-house, and critically, they are produced under similar conditions as all their other products. Even the ability to customize is limited, as Jonah H. Peretti found out when NIKEiD refused his request to put “Sweatshop” on the tongue of his trainers, written, Peretti recalls, “to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes” (Peretti 2001).

This essay proposes a taxonomy of different prosumer responses to widely accessible tools and materials in order to resist situating the producing consumer as either all-powerful or as inevitably duped. In many respects this balanced approach characterizes the develop-ment of consumer studies as a sub-discipline of material culture and sociology in the last twenty years: for example, Hugh MacKay in Consumption and Everyday Life states how consumers have “ap-propriated, re-accented, re-articulated or trans-coded the material of mass culture to their own ends, through a range of everyday creative and symbolic practice” (MacKay 1997: 6).3 However, this accentua-tion of consumers’ creative subjectivity has widely ignored their reli-ance on the things that incite the reappropriation of material culture in the first place – the power tools, craft kits, scissors, glue, timber, sandpaper, emulsion paint, software platforms, how-to instruction manuals, and a whole host of commercially available objects.

Prosumer agency depends on the level of engagement with these enticements that encourage such production: what tools are handed over to the consumer, what are the political and social contexts of this transferral, and how does the newly empowered prosumer wield this productive power? There are qualitative degrees of prosumer participation: Peretti’s engagement with NIKEiD shows a level of political consciousness absent from users who merely inscribe their name into the trainer’s tongue; buying flat-packed furniture or an Airfix modeling kit introduces an element of making into the domestic context; and workbenches, power tools, and 3-D printers mark a fuller decentralization of production, allowing the prosumer to start projects from scratch.

Nicolas Abercrombie was alert to the “migration of knowledge, skill, expertise, dedication and pursuit of excellence” when con-sumers assume powers from producers (Abercrombie and Keat 1991: 79–80), yet he did not detail how this migration takes place. Prosumers often have to rely on insufficient instruction, ad hoc

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learning, and inadequate kits. Moreover, they are limited by their own skill levels, inexperience, spatial limitations, lack of financial and material resources, and by the crucial fact that their productive powers are often encouraged and guided by companies that have a commercial interest in perpetuating the endless consumerism of mass individualization.

The way in which prosumers mitigate these constraints – whether they follow, reject, or modify suggested rules of making – deter-mines the quality and self-reflexivity of their production and whether prosumption can be more than just another manifestation of the capitalist myth of individual consciousness. This taxonomy of pro-sumer response forms the structure of this essay, with case studies exploring a variety of prosumer practices – from paint-by-number kits and postwar back-to-the-land movements to 3-D printing. In addition, this structure challenges the type of chronological linearity and technological determinism epitomized by Toffler’s periodization of the “waves” of technological change (from the agricultural, to industrial, to digital revolution). Although each category of prosumer response might appear emblematic of a particular period (rejecting any encouragement to engage proactively with consumerism might, at first glance, seem synonymous with the 1960s), they co-exist at any one time, which reflects the inherent plurality of consumer behavior.

Before exploring the origins of the term prosumption in Toffler’s work, it is crucial to account for the way in which the consumer has classically been perceived as duped and passive. This will bring the concept of the prosumer more sharply into focus. We might qualify this consumer response as acceptance; submission to the dictates of designers, retailers, advertisers, and commercial interest.

AcceptingAnalyses of modern consumer society have long portrayed the indi-vidual consumer as manipulated, with individual free will subjugated to the dictates of facile desires created by supra-individual, homog-enizing social structures, a critique central to the Marxist analysis of the Frankfurt School thinkers, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkhemier, and Siegfried Kracauer.4 Sharing their pessimism, Jean Baudrillard in The Consumer Society (1998) unleashed a devastating critique on the way consumer society reduces reality to simulacra, and objectivizes all experience in the process of facilitating its passage into commodity exchange.

Baudrillard claimed that personalization within this consumer paradigm, the ability to chose the color of your trainers or the design of your new kitchen, only reflects a reconstitution of individual will “in abstract, by force of signs in the range of expanded difference” (Baudrillard 1998: 88). The Marxist term, “false consciousness” describes this presumed subjectivity within the wider parameters of a homogenizing culture, and finds its most explicit expression in

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advertising. Judith Williamson explains how the formal composi-tion of advertisements encourages the viewers to substitute them-selves into the enticing dream image – filling in the semiotic “gap” (Williamson 1983: 14). In her world of image superfluity the potential for consumer agency seems to diminish ever further.

This pessimistic view of consumerism situates individual will as merely a permitted freedom within the context of overwhelming homogeneity, objectification, and the superfluity of signs. According to this concept of passive consumerism, the individual accepts the commodities as already finished: commodities ready for judgment, exchange, arrangement, and use. The task of producing these objects is given to the series of professions arranged according to the specialism that arises from the division of labor: the designer, manufacturer, marketing manager, and retailer. Far from exercising their labor, the consumer can only participate by being absorbed into the symbolic code, the smiling face next to the modern streamlined toaster, or the brooding driver of a sports car.

The ProsumerThe claim that consumers are inherently passive has attracted critique from a sociological and anthropological perspective, methodologies that have proven adept at highlighting the consumer’s productive involvement in the world of goods. Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe brought attention to the significance of markets for secondhand goods (Gregson and Crewe 2003), Danny Miller explored the plu-rality of consumer responses to objects in his analysis of a North London street (Miller 2001), and others, like Yiannis Gabriel, have sought to break down the consumer as a unified, coherent category (Gabriel 1995). Use of the term “prosumer” responds to these more sympathetic characterizations of the consumer as more proactive and critically engaged. To fully understand the concept, however, demands an analysis of its first use in Toffler’s work, which provides a benchmark from which to judge its usefulness and limitations.

Toffler’s book is an optimistic account of the new technologi-cal innovations of the late 1970s that he felt would usher in the third wave of Western history after agriculture and industrialism had receded from the shore of world history. His predictions about the development of interactive media technologies read like a prophecy. The Japanese Hi-Oris and Qube systems that Toffler describes are the ancestors of current wireless devices which allow the “viewers to become senders” (Toffler 1980: 178–9) as well as store information for future use. The new media allowed the user to become program scheduler, engaging him or her in processes of labor that were previously inaccessible.

Toffler’s expectation that these developments would lead to the revival of the notion of meaningful work, and the decentered, anti-imperialist, pre-industrial union of consumer and producer in the creation of the “electronic cottage” (Toffler 1980: 27), seems

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overly optimistic. Toffler’s argument chiefly depends on a techno-logical determinism whereby new technologies, by themselves, alter longstanding relationships of production. This expectation – that consumers will become producers and shape their own media universe in a continual process of invention and re-invention – is constrained by the persistence of conventional forms of editorial control, the consumer’s limited skill, and the often-insufficient quality of the tools handed over (Toffler 1980: 182). Today, “on demand” television is the norm and seems to confirm the veracity of Toffler’s commentary, but the consumer’s part in shaping this media universe is limited to playing the part of scheduler, using technologies such as BBC’s iPlayer, Sky+, and Freeview to record programs and watch them when they want. Despite the technological potential to partake more fully in processes of interactive media, consumers are beset by limitations to their powers from all sides, and relinquishment of control over content to users will certainly not occur if it contradicts corporate interest or editorial intention.

The main problem with Toffler’s incarnation of the prosumer is that he situates this figure as the new style of consumer, the next step up from the passive consumer in the teleological story of Western capitalism. Toffler’s claims made on behalf of the prosumer have to be treated with skepticism, not least because earlier writers had already sought to define a new producing, consuming individual. For example, French sociologist Georges Friedmann predicted the merging of consumption and production in the conclusion of Où va le travail humain? in 1953 (Friedmann 1953: 350). Dating evidence of prosumption before Toffler extends as far back as the nineteenth century and before. For example, histories of the home have shown how women made use of consumer goods to craft, alter, repair, and amend goods in the upkeep and decoration of the home.5

In addition, for prosumption to justify its claim to be a new model of consumption it has to distance itself from being just another false illusion of individuality within the expanded choices offered by capi-talism. Although prosumers might be given productive power, their actions are invariably shaped by the tools available. For example, Toffler celebrates self-help medical kits and self-service petrol sta-tions as examples of prosuming (Toffler 1980: 282–3, 287). Clearly this drive for consumers to use their own time in the completion of objects and services formerly done by a paid worker is less about consumer control over a production procedure and more about corporate cost-cutting and profit maximization.

Toffler over-animates the power of the consumer in this new environment. In essence, his notion of prosumption describes con-sumers who sacrifice their own productive power to become the “henchman of technological excess,” a continuation of the idea of consumers not as “masters of the machine” but “machine-like” (Kracauer 1995: 70) – a phenomenon Kracauer had observed sev-eral decades before.

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craft practices – overlook the nuanced relationship between the prosumer and the tools, materials, and advice that facilitate produc-tion. Taking the lead from Matthew Watson and Elizabeth Shove, attention must be diverted from assessing the quality of finished prosumer craft to the various processes of “doing,” which encourage us to consider materials and consumer goods (such as DIY tools, kits, and advice manuals) as “active agents” in prosumer practices (Watson and Shove 2008: 71). A focus on the relationships between consumers and the things that incite their production gives a greater indication of how preordained, radical, or unpredictable processes of prosumption are, and helps us move away from the notion that the consumer remains sovereign when engaging in manual practice.

AdaptingThe speedy passage of tools and materials into domestic contexts, facilitated by capitalist commerce, has given the consumer un-precedented power. As Charles Jencks states in the seminal work Adhocism:

There are ways in which the individual can use today’s prod-ucts without losing either the right to shape his personal envi-ronment or convey openly the technical complexity of modern products. (Jencks and Silver 1972: 60)

For Jencks, the consumer’s power lies in the ability to tailor an indi-vidual response to local environments while depending and openly acknowledging the technical complexity of the products being used. Adhocism is neither passive acceptance of the dictates of capitalist production nor outward rejection, and instead is based on adap-tation, modification, and indeed the unveiling of modern material culture. This is an incarnation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the bricoleur as described in The Savage Mind, using “whatever is to hand,” updated for the conditions of late capitalism with its expanded range of easily accessible tools and materials (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 17). This archetype of the prosumer as bricoleur acknowledges how the prosumer is simultaneously reliant on the technical complexity of a finite and heterogeneous set of tools and materials that he or she does not fully understand, whilst employing these resources in the organization and modification of one’s environment.

For Jencks, do-it-yourself activity provides the “greatest potential” for creativity on a large scale, so long as practitioners resist their propensity to copy various styles (Jencks and Silver 1972: 70). One example of this do-it-yourself adhocism that resists copying is the modification of IKEA kits by IKEA hackers, as advised by the website www.ikeahackers.net.

IKEA’s production model relies heavily on prosumption: the buyer is invited to follow the instructions outlined in their kits and is equipped with all the required screws, fittings, brackets, and pre-measured

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pieces of timber with holes in the right place. This allows IKEA to sell at a lower price, contributing to consumer satisfaction and the company’s profits.

Due to the guided nature of producing an IKEA product, it is understandable that their furniture is rarely considered a vessel of consumer creativity. However, the kit becomes a more obvious vehicle of self-expression when conscious modifications to the rules of the kit are made. If the kit is viewed as a basic foundation rather than a rulebook, the prosumer’s role can change from following to self-conscious adaption, echoing the actions of the proactive bricoleur.

In the case of IKEA furniture, the IKEA hacker forum provides suggestions for those who want to “hack, personalize, repurpose IKEA products into the very thing we want” (IKEA Hackers 2011). The most popular IKEA hack in 2010 involved repurposing the doors on a PAX cupboard to divide a studio apartment into a lounge and a small bedroom.10 This project, described on the website, shows how IKEA products have been used in a manner that subverts the original designer’s intention. The ubiquitous instruction booklets, so synonymous with the company’s identity, have not been followed, and the hacker (called “thedesignguy”) has used a combination of the kit and his own carpentry skills to construct a wooden frame specific to his particular needs and wants (Figure 5).

Another example of this adaptive, do-it-yourself prosumption is demonstrated by the practice of “souping up” cars. The designer’s original intention is altered by augmenting the engine’s power and making changes to the interior, usually for the purposes of creating a dazzling, supercharged effect.11 This form of adaptive bricolage is mentioned in Michael Crawford’s impassioned plea for men to get their hands dirty by fixing things (Crawford 2009). Yet, Crawford too quickly describes the practice as anti-modern, a rejection of the “ghastly” practices associated with office employment. In his desire to promote male self-empowerment, he forgets how car modification demands the modern networks of capitalist production that provide sophisticated tools, materials, advice, and technology so cheaply.

The modified Smart cars of Alan Newman and Stuart Johnson (www.t1ny.com) reflect the adaptive practice of augmenting a mass-produced car (Figure 6). They alter Smart cars by installing new engines and gadgets and replacing dashboards and upholstery. The fact that the duo are keen “to keep the surface looking close to a factory standard” highlights their dependence on the mass-produced model (Deller 2008: 70–71). Smart car designers are co-authors in this production but the tweaks of Newman and Johnson demonstrate the palpable prosumer augmentations that transform the object.

These examples of adapting capitalist objects – the IKEA kit, the Smart car – reflect the productive engagement between consumers

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Figure 6 Modified t1ny Smart car. Photograph courtesy of t1ny.com.

Figure 5 IKEA hack using PAX sliding doors. By “thedesignguy” at

http://www.ikeahackers.net/2010/10/turn-your-studio-apartment-into-1.html. Photograph courtesy of ikeahacker.net.

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and the capitalist world they inhabit. The market for secondhand objects and their appropriation also elucidates this mediation,12 as shown by Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe in their book Second-hand Cultures, where they claim that individual agency resides in the “interstices” of “second-hand spaces, where multiple means of value creation are possible” (Gregson and Crewe 2003: 172). Consumer creativity is defined by these processes of adaption: the IKEA hack-ers and amateur car mechanics subvert the designer’s intention, demonstrating their craft prowess by making use of the resources to hand. This kind of reappropriation does not fulfill Campbell’s criteria of the craft consumer – in control of all stages of production – because it relies on mass-produced, ready-made objects, but is no less an example of prosumption. In fact, the unashamed use and exhibition of mass-produced tools, materials, and advice in these projects honestly reflects the reliance on ready-mades that characterizes modern production in general.

Digital interfacesSimilar questions concerning the relationships between tool and individual need to be asked when assessing prosumer response to technological advances. The ubiquity of digital design platforms – like Rhino, Photoshop, InDesign, Wordpress, Blogspot – need not result in antithetical, inflated veneration of “craft consumption,” but should encourage an assessment of the different ways to approach these ever-growing invitations to consumer access and the symbi-otic relationship between tool and user (McCullough in Adamson 2010: 310–16).

The recent introduction of 3-D printers that facilitate additive manufacture from CAD software in a domestic context is an example of technological advancement that has the potential to decentralize production, a tool that would fit well within the confines of Toffler’s “electronic cottage.” A special issue of the Economist in 2012 anticipated that the 3-D printer would usher in a “third industrial revolution,” echoing Toffler’s arguments and reflecting the optimistic attitude toward these new objects of technological wizardry and their potential to decentralize production to the home (Leadbeater 2007; Shirky 2009; Atkinson 2011; Charney 2011; Markillie 2012: 1–14).

There is not the space within this article to give a full account of the impact of 3-D printing; I merely want to demonstrate how the taxonomy of prosumer response described throughout this essay can be applied to these technological developments that endow consumers with productive power.

Individual modification of products and platforms is at the heart of 3-D printing production: designers like Bre Pettis, who developed the 3-D printer MakerBot (Figure 7), upload blueprints or CAD files on the internet to be downloaded and altered by the user for their own specific use (Pettis 2011). One can proclaim a “gentleman’s revolution” with decentralized manufacture at its core (Scott 2010),

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over the outlined image or use a different color13 and since the 1980s American artists such as Trey Speegle, Don Baum, and more recently Jeff McMillan have used these same materials in their artworks in a subversive reappropriation that is far removed from accepting the original designer’s intention. Similarly, Peretti’s attempt to get “Sweatshop” written on his NIKEiD trainers demonstrates a highly self-conscious use of the shoe-designing software, a subver-sion of the tool order set out by the sportswear firm.

Perhaps these examples help us understand what skills are demanded of the designer (and the craftiest of consumers) in the age of prosumption. With an increasing amount of skills within reach of proactive consumers the designers continue to assert their skills and authorship by determining the pattern: they design software platforms, pen manuals that introduce consumers to a par-ticular practice, or provide the parts and models for the consumer to interact with, as seen with Droog’s recent collaboration with EventArchitectuur and Studio Ludens for the project downloadable design.14

Consumers are given the chance to be designers but as countless examples show, they do not remain content with filling out someone else’s pattern. In 1917 William Lethaby wrote the foreword of Mary Waring’s An Embroidery Pattern Book, stating that designing a pat-tern oneself “is on a higher plane of interest” than relying on ready-mades. He described self-design as “playing the game” (Lethaby in Waring 1917: v). Consumers have long “played the game” of design when provided with tools and materials, and have responded to established rules of making with new combinations that derive from their playing. The role of the designer is, in this context, to either be a better player, or to set the rules that others want to play.

Notes1. Nike’s online design suite enables customization through color

combinations, fabric selection, and individual lettering. http://store.nike.com/gb/en_gb/product/zoom-mogan-mid-2-id-shoe/?piid=22040#?pbid=1032583 (accessed January 17, 2012).

2. See also Atkinson 2006 and other articles in the Journal of Design History special issue “Democracy and Design,” Journal of Design History, 19(1), Spring 2006; Sabatino 2008.

3. See also Willis 1990 and Hebdige 1979.4. Siegfried Kracauer, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno mainly

focus on leisure occupations of the 1920s and 1930s as idle occupation of time, yet occasionally direct their attention to hobbies and thus the activities of the prosumer. See particu-larly Adorno 1991: 165. Also Kracauer 1995 and Arendt 1998: chapter 17, “A Consumer’s Society.”

5. For example Schaffer 2011; Tiersten 1991; Morowitz and Emery 2003; and Ferry 2003.

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6. For a critique of technological determinism and the utopia of decentralized production, see “Consuming Com munication Technologies at Home,” in MacKay 1997: 261–94.

7. For a history of the paint-by-number kit, see Bird 2001 and Robbins 1997.

8. Contributors to the “Post-a-Reminiscence” blogsite – set up by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History as part of its exhibition, Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s (April 2001–January 2002) – who lived outside the metropolitan centers note how the paint-by-number kits constituted their sole means of artistic education: Shirley Bumbalough (June 14, 2001), Carol W. Elliott (April 7, 2001), Loren Blakeslee (April 23, 2001), Reatha Wilkins (February 19, 2002), and Betsy Holzgraf (August 24, 2001). Available online: http://americanhistory.si.edu/paint/reminiscence.html (accessed January 23, 2012).

9. An anonymous contributor to the “Post-a-Reminiscence” blogsite recalled how she glued dried oil paint on her paint-by-number canvas in an effort to finish the image after her parents refused to buy any thinning agent after she had run out: Anonymous (April 30, 2001). See also Fran Peitri (April 21, 2002) (accessed January 17, 2012).

10. http://www.ikeahackers.net/2010/10/turn-your-studio-apartment-into-1.html/ (accessed April 25, 2011).

11. See MTV’s television show Pimp My Ride, at: http://www.mtv.co.uk/shows/pimp-my-ride (accessed July 3, 2012). Also episode one of Grayson Perry’s In the Best Possible Taste on Channel 4, at: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/in-the-best-possible-taste-grayson-perry/4od#3361745 (accessed July 3, 2012).

12. One example of this is the creative hybridization of a Jules Vernes-esque Victorian aesthetic of outdated technologies with contemporary handicraft. See Carpenter 2011.

13. Contributors to the “Post-a-Reminiscence” blogsite for the Smithsonian Museum’s exhibition, Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s. Kathryn L. Bergstrom (April 10, 2001); Linda Beason (June 4, 2001) (accessed January 17, 2012).

14. http://www.droog.com/blog/category/design-for-download-2 (accessed January 17, 2012).

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London: Routledge.Adamson, G. 2010. The Craft Reader. London: Berg.Adorno, T. 1991. “Free time.” In J.M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture

Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge.Arendt, H. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University

of Chicago Press.

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Atkinson, P. (ed.). 2006. “Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design.” Journal of Design History, 19(1): 1–10.

Atkinson, P. 2011. “Orchestral Manoeuvres in Design.” In B. Van Abel, L. Evers, R. Klaassen, and P. Troxler (eds), Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.

Attfield, J. 2000. Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. London: Berg.

Baudrillard, J. 1998. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage.

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