Long Live the DIY Revival — People Are Turning to Manual Crafts to "Reclaim Ownership" of Their Surroundings, and You Should Do It Yourself

"I was standing in a factory in China watching lots of cheap shoes going down a line, and I remember thinking, 'I don't want to be doing this,'" recalls Beth Swade of a pivotal moment in her 15-year career as a shoe designer.

Partly, the epiphany was about waste and over-production in the fashion industry — subjects, she says, that were rarely discussed in the early days of that journey, but became harder to ignore as time went on. But it was also about the changing nature of creative work.

"I studied fashion and did a lot of sewing, and when I first started working we did a lot of hand drawing," Swade says. "But over the years, it became increasingly digital, and maquettes never went down as well as shiny renders. I could feel everything going in a direction that wasn't natural to me."

What did feel natural was making. Swade took a five-day upholstery course, reduced her hours at work, completed a diploma, and eventually left her corporate design job to set up a sustainable upholstery business in North London.

Nearly five years later, she earns less than she once did, and has had to contend with the less romantic logistics of running a business, yet she is happier and less stressed. "Sometimes when I'm sitting here sewing, I can't believe I'm getting paid for this," Swade says.

Swade is not alone in feeling disillusioned with the seemingly inexorable drift of creative work into the digital realm. In a recent Instagram post, former fashion journalist Katherine Ormerod described her own career pivot: retraining in construction skills.

"The creativity and artistry that goes into brick or carpentry is no different from any other handcraft," she wrote. "Whether it's gender or class, prejudice or facilities, there are endless hurdles to get more girls on site. But when it comes to actual work? It is just such good fun."

The post elicited hundreds of responses, many from women, expressing a yearning for a more hands-on way of working — and for the satisfaction that comes from making something tangible.

Daniel Charny, professor of design at Kingston School of Art, isn't surprised. "There are a lot of creative people who are good at problem-solving sitting in front of screens, saying, 'I love making, and I'm not getting to do it,'" he says. "They miss the agency, the activity, the connection between thought and action, the visible progress as you make."

In 2012, Charny founded what began as a micro-volunteering scheme connecting people with a problem-solving mindset to opportunities to fix things locally. It has since evolved into Fixperts, an education program embedded in over 50 higher education institutions across 25 countries.

For Charny, the project emerged from a concern about our rapid disconnection from making. "Many people haven't seen their parents or even grandparents make or repair," he says.

That has consequences. In universities, Charny says, students can design complex forms digitally without knowing how to make them in real life. Teachers, meanwhile, report declining manual abilities among children, including difficulty using scissors and handwriting. "With dexterity levels dropping this way," Charny asks, "what does it mean if someone wants to study to be a surgeon, or even make their own food?"

There are signs that things are changing.

From the right to repair movement — an ongoing global campaign that demands that products be designed for repair and that manufacturers support independent repairers and consumers with spare parts, tools, and diagnostics to extend their life further — to the popularity of pottery classes and YouTube dressmaking and mending tutorials, many people are seeking a more direct relationship with the material world.

In a culture where digitization often flattens aesthetics and dematerializes experiences, using our hands can become a way to express ourselves and take ownership of our surroundings.

At its heart, making is about agency — about taking an active role in shaping your world and therefore caring for yourself, your environment, your home, and the people around you, rather than seeing it all as an interface that sits at arm's length.

Artist Farwa Moledina was motivated by many of these things when renovating her home in Birmingham. "I love color, pattern, and texture, and would have loved a period property, but what we could afford was a new build, which had bare white walls and boxy rooms," she says.

Over the past seven years, she and her husband have undertaken an ambitious DIY project, learning as they went. For Moledina, who grew up in Dubai, and her husband, who grew up in Tanzania, the work was about making a space that felt genuinely theirs.

"My parents and friends always gather here," she says. "It's not a massive house, but having spaces designed thoughtfully to the best of your ability makes a difference."

Her confidence came partly from her existing relationship with handwork. Moledina's art often incorporates textiles, and she grew up in a family of women who crocheted and knitted. That background gave her a willingness to experiment.

"I know that, if something goes wrong — say, with paint or wallpaper — it's almost always fixable," she says.

Some interventions were simple: tile-effect wallpaper used as a kitchen splashback, basic cabinets transformed with paint and brass handles. Others were more involved, including a built-in wardrobe under a sloped ceiling, made by customizing standard units.

When one cut went wrong, she and her husband repaired rather than replaced it — cutting a slice out of the offcut, then gluing, filling, sanding, and painting the area. These are the deeper lessons of such endeavors: a tolerance of mistakes and the patience to try again.

For designer Ana Bridgewater, making her own home was a way of rebuilding after personal upheaval. She started out in graphic design, branding, and coding, and later turned toward ceramics and art, creating lighting, jewelry, and sculptural objects in porcelain, wood, and other materials.

When, following two dramatic events that reshaped her life, Bridgewater bought a house of her own, she embraced its renovation as "a laboratory": a place where both she and her practice could evolve.

The previous owner had stripped out many of its original features — "there was plastic everywhere," the designer says — but Bridgewater saw it as a blank canvas. Rather than handing the project wholesale to a builder, she used her understanding of materials to break the work down, finding specialists for specific tasks and experimenting herself.

"I knew, for example, that once concrete is cured it can be treated in a similar way to porcelain, so I needed someone to pour the raw material and sand it," Bridgewater says.

The house is now a home and studio, as well as a testing ground for her work — she has designed and installed her own lighting features in the space. For her, making is also a form of therapy.

"Working with clay, for example, is instinctive and direct — you put your fingers on it, and straight away you are physically envisioning your interior life and how you feel. It makes you focus and be in the moment, rather than overthinking — or it's never going to work."

There is a risk of romanticizing manual work from a safe distance. Connor Pearce, who is currently completing his architectural training at London- and Liverpool-based practice Turner.Works, understands both sides of the argument.

His father was a carpenter, and from a young age Pearce worked with him during weekends and holidays. He studied carpentry and project management before turning toward architecture after seeing the toll that construction work took on his father's body. "It was evident to me that you can't do this for the rest of your life without a physical downside," Pearce says.

He continued to work on construction sites during university holidays, though, and now values hands-on work as a counterpoint to desk-based architectural practice. "Often I sit at my chair all day and think, 'humans haven't evolved to be like this,'" Pearce says. "When using your hands, you definitely feel like you're using a different part of your brain."

He has found that making skills are an advantage in architecture, and believes they will give him the ability to adapt to a changing world — in which the skills that AI can't replace will be valuable. "My USP is that I can actually build things," Pearce says.

His background in carpentry gives him a greater understanding of joints, connections, materials, and waste, and the ability to research ideas in practice. He eventually wants to develop properties himself, from design to build. Pearce has also been making furniture as an antidote to the slow pace of architecture. "It's validating to see things from conception to reality in a quick timescale," he says.

At the same time, the training architect is wary of the current glamourization of craft. "For many people I grew up with, hands-on jobs felt like the only thing you could earn money from if you didn't have enough education for anything else," Pearce says.

Manual work can be satisfying, but it can also damage bodies and expose workers to risks that are often ignored by those who see it as a lifestyle choice — something he has experienced firsthand through shadowing his father.

The point isn't that either type of work is more worthy than the other, but that the way we value them — and therefore the people who do them — has been shaped by deeply rooted social norms and prejudices.

"Making is often seen as not an intellectual activity," says Charny. "But material intelligence, a combination of problem-solving and self-expression, is one of humanity's most precious resources, and it is critical to our future."

While the growth of artificial intelligence represents a shift in how we work, could it also prompt a re-evaluation of the skills that matter and, therefore, the extent to which we respect them?

There are hints that this is happening. Pearce believes manual skills are becoming more valued in architecture, while Swade has noticed that people are increasingly averse to throwing away objects and willing to pay more for repair.

For architecture historian Neal Shasore, this is vital for restoring humanity back into a built environment that has become increasingly synthetic and distant from craft.

"We need a cultural shift that says, 'this is what life is about' — we are connected through space and time to other people, to other places, and that's innate to what it is to be human," he says. "People want to feel that there's meaning in the places that they occupy, particularly their homes."

He is working to establish a new educational institution that connects architecture back to craft — a link that has been hard to sustain because of the comparative cost of employing people over mechanizing processes.

The irony is that what people value most are older buildings that have traces of human intention. "Ultimately we have to shift our conception of value, from the short term — primarily in terms of money and a quick appreciation on capital — to meaningful long-term value," Shasore says.

This is, of course, a bigger cultural shift than any one craftsperson can make. But it's one we all have some power over — even if you don't leave your desk job to take up a craft, you can support others who do make: whether by buying a handmade dining table or commissioning a plasterer for your home.

"We're all part of a supply chain and can create opportunity for makers, even though modest choices," Shasore says. "It may take a bit longer to find, but you'll reap the reward forever."

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