Wild Design in China’s Lifestyle Magazines (1978–1992)

Abstract “Wild design” refers to do-it-yourself (DIY) and makeshift solutions between 1978 and 1992 during the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) early reform period. For self-design and making activities, the lifestyle magazine was a channel to access and circulate self-help manuals and DIY prescriptions. Investigating two lifestyle magazines – Culture and Life (wenhua yu shenghuo) and Beyond Eight Hours (baxiaoshi yiwai), this study examines advice and self-help manuals, and analyses the scope and value of wild design in creating a new perception of modern life. Unveiling the conditions within which people were making, and the processes and ideals of making that were prevalent in the PRC’s early reform period, wild design broke down the binary tensions between the real and ideal, native and foreign, old and new, and the vernacular and the modern. The vernacular modernism demonstrated a desire to extract the maximum value out of objects, a love of the “new,” and suggested a set of pragmatic approaches to obtain that “new.”