DIY, DIWO, Craft-Nouveau, Open Source, Copyleft, Social entrepreneurship, Participatory culture, Informal learning
FoAM exercises a proactive, 'DIY' (do-it-yourself) approach to life; we take matters into our own hands, rather than waiting for someone to tell us what to do. Instead, we learn by doing. We have pieced together our education and constructed our collaborative setting, which meanders between different intellectual, economic and political models. We gather creative expression and cultural values where they are least expected - in science and engineering, traditional crafts, play and games, or the chores of everyday life - cooking, bathing, or gardening. No human endeavour is ‘above’, nor ‘below’ us; we like intellectual challenges as much as getting our hands dirty. After reaching the limits of our competence, we are not afraid to ask for help from others. In other cases, we offer our own skills and experience. In both cases, exercising our abilities to 'DIWO' (do-it-with-others). Openness and sharing are crucial aptitudes in a DIWO culture. We share different things in different ways at FoAM. All our media and technologies follow ‘open source’, or ‘copyleft’ principles. We encourage a healthy public domain and engage in participatory design with various community groups.
Through workshops and consulting, we transfer our knowledge and skills to fellow ‘do-it-yourselvers’. Through lectures and seminars, we feed people’s minds with invaluable knowledge, ranging from how to design alternate realities, to changing unsustainable behaviours using reality therapy. Our online and onsite doors are always ajar, for researchers (or the merely curious) to bury themselves in our libraries. We work together with an increasing number of people and communities, towards an open and pro-active, transl-local culture. In our vision of the future, anyone could become a crafts-person, living and working in a community of supportive peers. The renewed appreciation of crafts embraces both the age old traditions and emerging technologies, fusing them into a unique blend of past and future. Practising these crafts requires an alternative economy, one not based on mass production, or proprietary technologies. It relies on tightly knit communities, on abundance of information (or bandwidth) and the guerilla-like strategies of appearance and disappearance. This culture has the ability to hack at the rotting bits of the grand narratives of the 20th century until we are left with the world we can be proud of.
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