Having been securely blocked from my blog for a few weeks as a result of a wordpress upgrade, grrrrrr, I will now attempt to catch up on recent events and news.
A few weeks ago I popped down to Deptford High Street for a peek at this very exciting project/ concept which was described as ‘an attempt, to demonstrate what can be created in 24 hours, as part of the London Design Festival 2008′.
Very simple, very nice!
Arriving at about 17.00 on the Friday (half way through the event) I was impressed by the great space created behind the main street, the dedication of the many teams caught up in discussion and debate and of course the weather - will you look at that blue sky!
However, I have to admit I was surprised by the lack of mess. I expected much more mad activity, noise, bustle and crazy making - an intensely charged engagement with stuff and the local community. I was expecting mess, not talk. Ok, mess and talk. But definitely more mess. As a result it felt, to me, a bit distant from stuff, the community and the context despite all the outward signs to the contrary. Perhaps I arrived at a quieter, more intense, thoughtful time….? It was over 24 hours after all. Energy levels must have rollercoasted. Nevertheless, I think it was a cracking idea and would have loved to have been involved/ spent more time observing. Unfortunately I did not get back again to witness other levels of energy and rhythms of activity nor to see the results of the project in the Saturday evening installation. I’m still hoping to track down more stuff on it.
I am obviously biased towards a bit of messiness these days, having studied it for the past four years in the context of community wifi groups and freakbike makers and am now deeply anti-socially embedded in writing about it. In particular my interest is the productive possibilities of engaging with, and making, mess in the process of invention and innovation with an emphasis on visual culture. The people I had the pleasure of spending time with during my ethnography built things from the ground up, interweaving a nuanced and textured understanding of the natural, social and technical. They used their heads and their hands.
As one my respondents explains:
‘It’s really knowing, really knowing with your hands’
and
‘You ask the question of your fingers.’
And another told me:
‘No I think it’s best not to have too many plans. Have rough idea of what you want to do and just start. I don’t plan too much. It just gets in the way. When we think too much we second guess ourselves all the time and it slows down the spontaneity and stops you from achieving as much as you could in a day and you end up not getting as much done as you could. It takes a long time to build a bike if you think it out that much. But as you get the basics down it gets faster and faster. And you always eventually find a way of making it work. It’s a challenge. A huge learning curve.’
I find that my respondents and my experiences of being knee-deep in bike bits, dodging welding sparks while trying to jam things together with blackened greasy hands or helping to build antennas in suburban backyards using biscuit tins and stickytape during my fieldwork in Australia can be better understood in relation to what Turkle describes as bricolage, a term made famous by Levi Strauss. Comparing different computer programming styles, Turkle writes of the stark difference between the ‘hard’ canonical structured system characterised by ordered and organised planning and a more informal ‘soft’ approach that stems from an affinity with the materials (1995:51).
By analogy, problem-solvers do not proceed by abstraction but by thinking through problems using the materials at hand. By analogy, problem-solvers who do not proceed from top-down design but by arranging and rearranging a set of well-known materials can be said to be practicing bricolage. They tend to try one thing, step back, reconsider, and try another. For planners, mistakes are steps in the wrong direction; bricoleurs navigate through mid course corrections. Bricoleurs approach problem-solving by entering into a relationship with their work materials that has more the flavour of a conversation than a monologue. In the context of programming, the bricoleur’s work is marked by a desire to play with lines of computer code, to move them around almost as though they were material things – notes on a score, elements of a collage, words on a page (1995:51-52).
Turkle’s (1995) description evokes a visually rich and materially textured process. What permeates her writing is a thick description of engagement with materials, not just of materials. People don’t just organise materials, they engage with them and open them up. Tinkerers get inside a task, they don’t just hover about on the surface, all of which suggests tinkering is more than a process or practice. It is also about a space, the use of visual materials, personal skills and time.
