The LACK of Do-It-Yourself

People make and repair their own designs for hundreds of years. This concept of making your own things is known as Do-It-Yourself (DIY). Do-It-Yourself contains aspects of building, repairing and modifying things without the help of a paid professional. A subculture, or better-said counterculture, from the 1970s that makes use of DIY is punk. Punk sets itself off against society and wants to be focussed on the capacity of an individual through self-expression. DIY within the punk subculture can be seen as a rejection of the need to purchase items or use existing systems or processes that would foster dependence on established societal structures. It needs to be stated that punk deliberately chose to use DIY. Nowadays punk slowly fades away out of society. However DIY is still actively used. A company that propagates DIY is IKEA. Nevertheless, IKEA is as Do-It-Yourself as a supermarket where you can take your products from the shelves. Thus, IKEA abuses the concept of DIY as intended by the punk movement. These different examples of DIY show how widely the interest in this topic varies over time and space. In the search for what makes DIY so widely applied, DIY will be used as the central common feature in the analysis and comparison between values and goals of the subculture of punk and the multinational store IKEA. This article argues that IKEA has nothing in common with DIY and therefore it gets mistreated by IKEA. A comparison will be made between DIY as propagated by IKEA and DIY as used by the punk movement, which will clarify the statement made earlier.

The 1960s and 1970s were the decades where a variety of subcultures arrived in Western society, namely in the United States and the United Kingdom. One of these subcultures was the punk subculture. Punk is known for their belief in individual freedom. This subculture