dan mcquillan's List: social computing IS52026B - lecture 17

• Last year Golan Levin’s son decided to build a car. Aside from the minor inconvenience of being 4 years old, the younger Levin faced an engineering challenge. His Tinkertoys, which he wanted to use for the vehicle’s frame, wouldn’t attach to his K’Nex, the pieces he wanted to use for the wheels.
• It took his father, an artist, hacker and professor at Carnegie Mellon, a year to solve that problem. In the process he cracked open a much larger one: In an age when anyone can share, download and create not just digital files but also physical things, thanks to the proliferation of cheap 3-D printers, are companies at risk of losing control of the objects they sell?
• In March Levin and his former ­student Shawn Sims released a set of digital blueprints that a 3-D printer can use to create more than 45 plastic objects, each of which provides the missing interface between pieces from toy construction sets. They call it the Free Universal Construction Kit.
• The tens of thousands of consumers who now own devices such as MakerBot’s $1,100 Thing-O-Matic can download those files and immediately print a plastic piece that connects their Lego bricks to their Fischertechnik girders, their Krinkles to their Duplos, or half a dozen other formerly incompatible sets of modular plastic blocks, sticks and gears.

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• For instance, Ruskin loved the gargoyles on medieval cathedrals, even though they are often quirky and rather roughly-done, precisely because you could see in them the spirit of a thinking, creative human being: you could sense the presence of the maker. For the same reason, I would argue that we should cherish the very broad diversity of things on YouTube, no matter how eccentric or unprofessional their execution, because what you see in them is the vibrancy of human life and imagination
• I am not one of those people who think that blog posts and Tweets constitute social change in themselves (if anyone does think that). My point is rather than we need to embrace those things which may help to foster and build the creative capacity of the population.
• I don’t know the ‘answers’ to the big challenges that we face, but I do know that we will need people who have developed the ability to make and think in creative ways. The test-driven education system does not seem to be making this a priority, so instead (or, optimistically, as well) we should engage with those tools and services which people are using as places of creative communication and exchange, just because they want to, because this is one of the best sites of hope that we have got
• For instance, returning to the Arts and Crafts movement, we see that William Morris built on Ruskin’s work with a vision of communities connected through the things that they make – people filling their lives with the fruits of their own creative labour, positively embodied in their role as creators, rather than consumers.
• Morris himself mastered all kinds of creative techniques during the course of his lifetime, moving on from painting and drawing to embrace embroidery, woodcuts, calligraphy and book printing, tapestry weaving, and textile printing. He clearly felt that a hands-on engagement with a craft was the only way to truly understand it. His writings and the things he made can be seen as parts of the same project: ‘visionary accounts of an ideal world’.
• However, the twentieth century was a time when the production of culture became dominated by professional elite producers. We’ve got used to that now, so it seems normal. But things don’t have to be that way. The role of individual as consumer is now so well established that it is being imported wholesale into other spheres, such as higher education, where it has no sensible place, as we have seen.
• In Making is Connecting I argue that we could be seeing the start of a shift from a ‘sit-back-and-be-told culture’ to a ‘making-and-doing culture’: people rejecting traditional teaching and television, and making their own learning and entertainment instead.
• This connects with the ideas of 1970s philosopher Ivan Illich, who argued that people need tools to create, to express themselves, to make their mark, and to shape the environments in which they live. Illich argued that we need ‘convivial tools’, which we can use to do what we want, rather than ‘industrial tools’, which are one-size-fits-all solutions which expect us to fit in with what they want.
• Statements about the importance of ‘creativity’ and ‘community’ are often offered as aspirational platitudes, but those who are not already convinced tend to protest that these notions are warm, fuzzy, and meaningless. Therefore I drew on the extensive social science research into happiness, and social capital.
• This data shows emphatically that people who are most satisfied with their lives are those who have a network of positive relationships. It also shows that people’s satisfaction with life rises when they have a project – something to work towards – which is within their full control, and within which they can express themselves in some way. As the economist Richard Layard puts it: ‘Prod any happy person and you will find a project’.
• • Making in itself offers pleasure, thought and reflection, and helps to cultivate a sense of the self as an active, creative agent.
   
  • People spend time creating things because they want to feel alive in the world, and to be an active participant in dialogues and communities.
   
  • Individuals also like to be recognised within a community of interesting (like-minded) people.
• This is not simply the kind of point that governments would make – that we need creative people to drive the economy forward – because you could achieve that pretty well with a smallish number of super-creative people. Rather, the point here is that everyone needs creative opportunities and connections, if they are to flourish.
• This therefore means, amongst other things, that there is an urgent political need to change our school-level education system to embrace a much more exploratory approach, learning through investigating and making, rather than just memorising material to regurgitate in tests.
• It also arguably means that the creativity-fostering potential of Web 2.0 platforms should not be left to unpredictable and profit-seeking corporations, but should be supported by something a bit more reliable: a consortium, perhaps, of public institutions, such as the British Library and the BBC in the UK, and the Library of Congress and the Guggenheim Foundation in the US.

  • yeah, right...That won't happen. But how do we keep the affordances free of commercial stalking?
• As every maker knows, thinking is central to making, and making is a process of thinking.

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