This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Life hacks are everywhere on social media—people reuse everyday materials and objects to create ingenious solutions to common problems and needs. While they make for a fun TikTok video (or TV show in the case of MacGyver), people who are constrained from fully participating in traditional markets find these solutions quite empowering.
You might know them as life hacks, but the process itself is known as makeshifting. Makeshifting has been very common in developing economies for a long time, where limited resources hinder people's efforts to meet their needs through commercial solutions. The challenges and their solutions can be incredibly simple—binding old books together for a knife holder or mounting a piece of PVC pipe for a bike rack—but their impact is greater than you think.
By sourcing commonly available, reusable materials from outside formal markets to produce their own solutions, these people are bypassing these markets entirely. Our research, published in the journal Marketing Theory, looks into the practice of makeshifting, focusing on gambiarra, the term for makeshifting in Brazil, which is linked to national identity and celebrated as a form of artistic expression. Brazilians are proud of their resourcefulness and ingenuity, and in addition to addressing consumers' needs, gambiarra is a source of empowerment.
We compiled hundreds of posts from platforms like YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest onto our own project website, showing how people share examples and guide one another in producing gambiarra. There are two different kinds of makeshifting: Structural makeshifting physically alters an object so that it has a new purpose—like creating a pizza cutter from a tin can and a ruler. Capacity makeshifting alters the utility of an object by giving it a new purpose—like using a fitted sheet as a windproof outdoor tablecloth.
Initially, we thought consumers were only using different materials or tweaking materials' capacities to achieve the same results delivered by market-made products. But after analyzing the huge range of content on makeshifting, we found that it actually changes consumption practices. In addition to incorporating materials like discarded packaging and parts of broken appliances into novel solutions, makeshifting consumers also challenge the informal rules of consumption and do things their own way.
For example, someone who is unable to access a stove or microwave may use a coffeemaker to boil eggs, cook rice or prepare two-minute noodles—reinventing what they have on hand to expand their cooking capabilities. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly. Our findings show that Brazilians' ingenuity and resourcefulness have the potential to transform not only how consumption happens but also who can participate in it.
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