Do it yourself, often referred to by the acronym DIY, is a term used by various communities that focus on people creating or repairing things for themselves without the aid of paid professionals. The notion is related in philosophy to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many modern DIY subcultures take the traditional Arts and Crafts movement's rebellion against the perceived lack of soul of industrial aesthetics a step further. DIY subculture explicitly critiques modern consumer culture, which emphasizes that the solution to our needs is to purchase things, and instead encourage people to take technologies into their own hands to solve needs.

The phrase "do it yourself" came into common usage in the 1950s in reference to various jobs that people could do in and around their houses without the help of professionals. A very active community of people continues to use the term DIY to refer to fabricating or repairing things for home needs, on one's own rather than purchasing them or paying for professional repair. In other words, home improvement done by the householder without the aid of paid professionals.

In recent years, the term DIY has taken on a broader meaning that covers a wide range of skill sets. Today, for example, DIY is associated with the international alternative and hardcore music scenes. Members of these subcultures strive to blur the lines between creator and consumer by constructing a social network that ties users and makers close together. There are various communities of media-makers that consider themselves DIY, for example the indymedia network, pirate radio stations, and the zine community.

Home improvement

The home improvement DIY scene we know today is actually a re-introduction (often to city and suburb dwellers) of the old pattern of personal involvement in home or apartment upkeep, or the making of clothing, or maintaining of cars, computers, websites, or any material aspect of living. A comment by philosopher Alan Watts (from the "Houseboat Summit" panel discussion in a 1967 edition of the San Francisco Oracle) reflected a growing sentiment of the times:

Our educational system, in its entirety, does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions. It trains you to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral character.

In response to this sort of insight, in the 1970s, DIY spread through the North American population of college- and recent-college-graduate age groups. In part, this movement involved simply the renovation of affordable, rundown older homes. But it also related to some extent to various projects expressing the social and environmental vision of the '60s and early 1970s. A young American visionary named Stewart Brand, working with friends and family, and initially using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, published the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog (subtitled Access to Tools) in late 1968.