DiDIY Project Approach

The Digital DIY (DiDIY) Project intends to

• define descriptive concepts and models to characterize the current and prefigure the future developments of the examined transformations, and to identify their implications with regard to the values and competitiveness of European education, research, business and industry, and the related opportunities and threats;

• translate these concepts and models into guidelines able to support and orient future thinking in DiDIY, as well as regulatory and policy-making activities related to development and use of ABC-related technologies.

This goal will be achieved by a human-centric and multi-perspective approach to the scientific study of the DiDIY phenomenon, that:

• focuses on the human protagonists of DiDIY at the different levels of their involvement (individuall, organizational and inter-organizational), and also takes into their human experience(s), not just quantitative data

• produce and coordinate descriptions of the DiDIY phenomenon from both researchers and human protagonists, from different disciplinary points of view.

In practice, the investigation will be based on:

• bibliographical research and analyses
• qualitative research methods, e.g case study research, action research and ethnography, where data sources will be exploratory interviews, participant observation, focus groups, and workshops, and data analysis tools such as NVIVO(TM) will be used
• quantitative research methods, e.g. field experiments and studies where questionnaire-based surveys will be used to collect information on demographics, behavioral and organizational patterns related to DiDIY.

The data collected with both methods

will be also used to generate simulations (computer based models) in order to define and test our hypotheses on potential future developments of DiDIY, as well as the strategies and the guidelines that we intend to propose for EU regulatory and policy-making activities.