When Labor Is Experienced as Freedom: Subject Formation in DIY Practices—Making, Governance, and Publicness in Critical Design Theory

This paper asks why DIY—understood as making, modifying, and repairing—can be experienced as freedom in a platformized consumer society, and why that experience does not necessarily lead to emancipation. It argues that DIY generates a real but limited sense of freedom as people re-enter material processes, engage with tools and failure, and develop practical agency: the experience of “I can.” Yet this agency is ambivalent. The same self-directed activity can be absorbed into neoliberal self-management, platform value extraction, commodity culture, and class distinction. Moving from individual practice to collective repair and shared spaces, the paper examines whether DIY can redistribute technical knowledge, participation, and public visibility, or whether it transfers maintenance burdens from institutions to individuals and communities. Through conceptual analysis and illustrative cases, it treats DIY as a contested field in which making, governance, and publicness intersect. Its emancipatory potential depends not on participation alone, but on equitable access, shared decision-making, and durable collective infrastructures.