Do-it-yourself or do-it-with? The regenerative life skills of off-grid home builders

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic research on Canadian people living off-grid we describe and interpret how people without formal training in architecture or construction manage to build their own homes. Our findings show that they do so thanks to what we call regenerative life skills. Juxtaposing our argument in the context of DIY (do-it-yourself) research and discourse we argue that rather than in a solo endeavor off-grid builders engage in relational practices, becoming entangled with others, with historical traditions, with place-specific resources, and with the affordances of the materials they utilize. DIW (do-it-with) relies on the engagement of what we call regenerative life skills − drawing from relational theory and regenerative design.

Rural Islandness as a Lens for (Rural) HCI

“…'Constrained' use of ICTs is shaped by the weather and communal relationships via intermittent access to shared electricity [5]. Separateness in rural islandness shares some characteristics with resistance to infrastructure dependencies, demonstrated by people who actively choose to live 'off grid' [36,55] or grieved for by people whose livelihood has been made unavailable by mass-mediated forms of networked connectivity [35]. To consider the importance of separateness and geographic isolation as providing insulation could add to Rural HCI researcher's sensitivities when designing from the rural, through attuning to these values.…”

Le Projet urbain régénératif : un concept en émergence dans la pratique de l’urbanisme

“…Attia, 2016 ; Busby & Driedger, 2011 ;Camrass, 2020 ;Kamrowska-Zaluska & Obracht-Prondzyńska, 2018 ;Lau et al, 2018 ;Naboni et al, 2019 ;Pedersen Zari, 2012 ;Pedersen Zari & Hecht, 2020 ;Robinson & Cole, 2015 ;Svec, Berkebile & Todd, 2012 ;Thomson & Newman, 2018 ;Thomson & Newman, 2020 ;Trombetta, 2018 ;Zhang et al, 2015. 2 Bénéfices mutuels à l'homme et à la nature 40 Bonyad, Hamzenejad & Khanmohammadi, 2020 ;Busby & Driedger, 2011 ;Camrass, 2020 ;Cole, 2012b ;Delpy & Zari, 2020 ;Kamrowska-Zaluska & Obracht-Prondzyńska, 2018 ;Lau et al, 2018 ;Naboni et al, 2019 ;Pedersen Zari, 2012 ;Pedersen Zari & Hecht, 2020 ;Petrovski, Pauwels, & González, 2021 ;Robinson & Cole, 2015 ;Trombetta, 2018 ;Vannini & Taggart, 2014 ;Zhang et al, 2015. Le projet urbain régénératif : un concept en émergence dans la pratique de l'... Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale urbaine et paysagère , Actualités de la recherche 3 Conception basée sur le lieu 31 Benne & Mang, 2015 ;Bonyad et al, 2020 ;Camrass, 2020 ;Cole, 2012b ;Hoxie, Berkebile & Todd, 2012 ;Kamrowska-Zaluska & Obracht-Prondzyńska, 2018 ;Robinson & Cole, 2015 ;…”

Doings with the land and sea: Decolonising geographies, Indigeneity, and enacting place-agency

“…The temporalities of doings are just as important as their spatialities. Doings are practices and processes that continuously renew, are ongoing, moving, evolving new relations and generating new forms of the world (Vannini and Taggart, 2014). Doings are subtly different to makings, which tend to explore the creation of new materialities and objects as outcomes of skills and craft (Carr and Gibson, 2016).…”

“…Doings frame embodied actions as complex, relational (between people, but also with the more-than-human world; Wright, 2015), and transformative of both self and space. Doings have been used to investigate the importance of a variety of acts to understanding space and place, including: creative acts of dance, writing, painting and mixed-media artwork (Marston and De Leeuw, 2013; Hawkins, 2011; Nash, 2000); the doings of political identity formation through national musical performances (Wood, 2012); the way that doings of domestic life overlap with the doings of gender, class and race (Widerberg, 2010); through land-based pedagogies (Johnson, 2012); how knowledge and emotions are embodied (to make meaning from embodied senses) (Askins, 2017); through photography as a participatory and sensuous act (Kind, 2013); and the non-human affordances that enable people to self-build homes (Vannini and Taggart, 2014). We seek to extend this framework of doings in several ways.…”