Collective achievement of making in cosplay culture

Cosplay is a Japlish combining of Costume and Play. They are aimed an expression of affection for anime and manga’s story and characters. The majority of cosplayers in Japan are women, mostly high school and college students and people in their twenties. Cosplay is a female DIY culture. The DIY spirit embodied by this practice has become a standard in the cosplay community. Cosplay can be seen at dedicated cosplay parties at amusement parks and events for fanzine sale. They gather in cosplay events with costumes of their own sawing or readymade ones, and are photographed by the audiences or each others. Cosplay events and dedicated SNSs for cosplayer’s are a valuable venue for exchanging information, peer reviewing, and collective learning from each other about costume making, as well as for evaluating each other's work. Ito et al (2013) study the possibilities of learning with friends and peers in fan culture in the US. They said that learning in fan culture is characterized as peer-based and friendship-based learning. First, according to their perspectives, we will indicate the cosplay community characterized as interest-driven, peer-based reciprocal learning environment. For example, some schools are engaged in efforts to design a learning environment that encourages peerbased, reciprocal learning (for example, Johnson et al. 1993). This kind of learning environment goes against the dominance of top-down instruction that has been institutionalized in most schools. Then, we will focus on how do women's cosplayers socialize and learn with their friends and in information and knowledge ecology from the point of view of Brunner’s “Scaffolding” theory. The original notion of Scaffolding assumed that more the knowledgeable person, such as a teacher, helps individual learners, providing them with the support they need to move forward (e.g., Bruner, 1975; Wood et al., 1976). We think that the notion of Scaffolding might be expanded in this networked and connected world. Compared to learning environments in most schools, the cosplay community has always been based on peer-based scaffolding environment, with members creating their own skills and levels of conduct. As a purpose of this study, we might look to them as models for designing interest-driven communities and collaborative learning environments, and we’d like to expand “Scaffolding” concept to more reciprocal one, rather than an interaction between individual learner and a knowledgeable person.