What if there was some kind of apocalypse?” a friend fretted over dinner. “What if we had to survive in Stone Age conditions? Do we have any skills any more? What could any of us practically contribute to rebuilding civilisation?” A circuit of the table revealed that, indeed, almost all of us surround ourselves with products that we would not be able to make, repair or even properly explain.

But there is a new movement afoot designed to remedy this technical impotence. Just as the self-build trend is gathering pace, so too is a new wave in do-it-yourself (DIY) projects for the home – embracing everything from plumbing, woodcarving and pottery to robotics, electronics and recycling.

At the spiritual heart of all this is California-based magazine Make, which, since launching in print and online in 2005, has evolved into a virtual community with an archive of instruction videos, an online store and a network of Maker Faires, one of which was recently held in the UK. Its success is based on rising interest in hobbies with tangible results and the connective power of the internet, which lets enthusiasts share skills.

“We have a strong fun component to what we’re doing that gets people involved,” says founder Dale Dougherty. “But we’re really encouraging people to think how DIY can remake the world.” He cites the current edition, which carries features on efficient lighting and solar energy as well as making-based business strategies.

Paola Antonelli, curator of the design department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, New York, has watched the DIY culture move from the underground into the mainstream over the past few years and thinks another reason for it is consumer anger over built-in obsolescence. “People are getting concerned with the life-cycle that companies build into their products,” she says. “Here in Manhattan, when something breaks you throw it out because no one can fix things.”

Make, by contrast, excites its readers with the prospect of not only repairing household goods but also improving or transforming them. A recently posted film illustrated how to make a time-sensitive cat feeder out of an old VCR. “What I find wonderful is that Make is a movement concerned not only with having fun but with imbuing objects with more meaning and responsibility,” says Antonelli, who recently sat on the Brit Design Awards jury that named the magazine as the interactive design of the year.

There are several strands to new-wave DIY. The first is traditional crafts, represented by people such as former conservation officer Anne Holden, who runs weekend courses from Assington Mill, an organic farm in Suffolk, eastern England. Her programme originally focused on rural skills such as straw baling and traditional building but a few years ago a lawyer from a nearby village asked if she could teach the basics of woodwork and today her course subjects range from bee- and hen-keeping to plumbing and garden machinery maintenance.

“It’s definitely a growth area,” she says. “People want to feel more competent about being able to do things. Human beings have had to make and mend for millions of years and all of a sudden we’ve stopped. We get lots of professional people who come and want to do things with their hands.”

Also tapping in to that demand is British television presenter Kirstie Allsop’s new programme chronicling her DIY makeover of a cottage and offering tips to viewers who want to do the same. Episodes of Allsop’s Homemade Home, on Channel 4, have included segments on stripping wallpaper, making lampshades and designing garden mosaics.

NYCResistor’s Bre Pettis

Alongisde this “new craft” movement is a second, more tech-savvy, branch of DIY made up of cool, collectivised city dwellers, seen in Berlin and Vienna, Seattle and New York. NYCResistor is, for example, a workshop space that since spring 2008 has been shared by 25 members dedicated to making cool stuff, from cocktail-serving robots (the Barbot) to automated artworks. “The members of NYCResistor can make anything they imagine,” enthuses co-founder Bre Pettis, star of more than 200 online tutorials. “In our culture, people expect things to come in boxes and solve their problems. But now we’re at a magical time in history. Technology has become so modular that you can make anything you want.”

Funding comes from teaching public classes in new-wave DIY skills, such as rapid prototyping and working with LEDs, and the space is occupied almost 24/7, since some members are also running full-time jobs as well.

Shayna Gentiluomo, a regular visitor to NYCResistor’s Thursday night open craft sessions – which are populated by knitters and needlepointers alongside the robotics and electronics enthusiasts – says the experience has allowed her to rediscover skills wasted in her job. “I studied painting but nearly went into electrical engineering,” she says. “This is great because it’s a way to draw the two together.”

The do-it-yourself sensibility has also spread to the high-end design world, where creatives are beginning to question their own collector-targetting clubbiness. “At the 2008 Milan fair there were a lot of companies and designers showing limited edition pieces for as much as €90,000,” laments Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek. So at this year’s event he not only displayed new work but also distributed plans for a DIY version of his signature chair made from slats of reclaimed wood. He also offered the model for production to companies in Africa, South America and Asia.

He wasn’t the only one. Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera signed up 28 other designers, including Maarten Baas and Max Lamb, to post rights-free DIY designs and instructions on its website during the fair. Lamb offered his own slatted DIY Chair, the materials for which cost £9.77, while Baas suggested using Ikea flatpacks as if they were Lego, creating a coffee table from the company’s Stefan chair and Ringo stool, topped off with a sheet of glass. (German design studio Ding 3000 also recently achieved cult renown for their Pimp My Billy project cannabilising the popular Ikea shelving unit.)

For even more ambitious DIYers, there is Ponoko, a digital production facility with bases in Wellington, New Zealand and San Franciso, which can cut pieces to any design submitted by a customer from a variety of materials, then deliver them by post. Through the website, currently receiving 500,000 page views per month, visitors can buy one another’s designs and assemble them at home with help from online instruction videos.

“At the moment we’ve aimed it at designers, which is the market that can take advantage of the technology available; the number of consumers that want to design and build unique products is very small at the moment,” says co-founder Derek Elley. But “with education and easier use of technology that could change very fast.”