DIY Movement Continues – WORKING

Do-it-yourselfers, technogeeks, tinkerers, artists, crafters, product and furniture designers, these so-called hackers are united only by their perspective: to not accept something as is.

Winnie Lam was thinking about food when she made her Chocolate Sundae Toppings footstool, fashioned from a few bags of cotton pompoms hot-glued to an Ikea stool. “It came from staring into a bowl of ice cream one day,” said Ms. Lam, 31, who lives in Mountain View, Calif., and is a product manager at Google. “I’m a chocolate lover, but I’d rather look at it than eat it.”

Lam and otheres like her make a subset of an expanding global D.I.Y. movement, itself a huge tent of philosophies and manifestos including but not confined to anticonsumerism, antiglobalism, environmentalism and all-purpose iconoclasm.

“I think there is a movement around looking at all the products that are available — this global stream of stuff — and realizing you can tinker with them and rebuild them,” said Michael F. Zbyszynski, 36, the assistant director of music composition and pedagogy at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California, Berkeley.