Using Do-It-Yourself Practitioners as Lead Users: A Case Study on the Hair Care Industry

Abstract

Lead users play an integral part in helping engineers to identify latent needs of customers, and this approach has been used in a variety of ways within the design community. However, despite their close resemblance to lead users, do-it-yourself (DIY) practitioners have not been directly examined by the design community. A seven-step framework is presented where the first four steps resemble a typical design process and the remaining steps are relevant for the approach of identifying DIY practitioners as lead users. A case study from the hair care industry is presented to illustrate this framework. This paper establishes a connection between these two groups of customers and demonstrates how the insights of DIY practitioners, which manifest as latent needs for knowledge, can inspire research for the development of new technologies.

Collective design in 3D printing: A large scale empirical study of designs, designers and evolution

“…Recently, the do-it-yourself (DIY) and maker culture has become a topic of interest within the design research community; as understanding the participants of these movements can provide insights into customer needs and innovations in various industries (Hahn et al, 2016;Kuznetsov and Paulos, 2010;Waller and Fawcett, 2014;McQuitty, 2011, 2015) . (Hahn et al, 2016) further discusses that DIY practitioners can be regarded as lead users and opinion leaders within their communities; since their motivations align well with the conditions laid out in the traditional definitions, they act as innovators and they participate in knowledge sharing within their communities.…”

The Rich or the Poor? Personal Resources, Do-it-yourself, and Innovation in the Household Sector

“…What hacker-and maker-DIYers have in common is that they are both concerned with unique applications of complex technologies (Mauroner, 2017), for example, in 3D printing (Browder et al, 2019). This makes the connection between DIY and innovation more clearly visible (Fox, 2014;Hahn et al, 2016). Yet, 'classical' DIY activities such as home remodeling and furniture design (Collier and Wayment, 2018;Williams, 2004Williams, , 2008Wolf and McQuitty, 2011) also fit our definition of DIY.…”