Book Review: Phaidon’s Do It Yourself: 50 Projects by Designers and Artists

The Chinese artist and political dissident Ai Weiwei has designed a sock puppet. It looks like any sock puppet, with button eyes and a blobby body, but the creature is an alpaca, he says. One Chinese word for alpaca, caonima, is similar to the phrase cao ni ma, which means “f--- your mother.” Recently the animal has become a symbol of protest against China’s Internet censorship.

Now anyone can “cao ni ma.” The artist contributed step-by-step instructions to the guide Do It Yourself: 50 Projects by Designers and Artists ($29.95), from Phaidon, the British art and design publisher. “This idea of making something that Ai Weiwei thought through is quite amazing,” says Emilia Terragni, a publisher at Phaidon. Inside, there are also how-tos for a lampshade by Yves Béhar and a wheelbarrow chair by Christoph Böninger. All of them are fairly cheap, stuff the designers probably wouldn’t deign to sell for profit. Still, Terragni says, “you can recognize their style.”