Tinkering, Intuitive Learning for our Future-Forward World

While conducting research for one of our client projects, we stumbled across an in depth discussion on tinkering written by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang following a conference entitled ”Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge: Production in the Digital Age” put on by the Carnegie Foundation.  His thoughts touch on tinkering as both a powerful learning tool and means of relating to our future-forward world where technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. In his notes, Pang defines tinkering as:

us[ing] materials at hand, combining heterogeneous parts and components (e.g., raw and finished materials, handmade and industrial objects, customized and personalized consumer products) in ways that push beyond the boundaries of their original contexts. As a result, tinkered objects tend to be collages, appropriations, and montages. Tinkering is bricolage.

Borrowing from Pang’s views, these are some of the interesting takeaways:

• We are no longer just consumers: Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are “consumers”– passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don’t just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself.
• We care deeply for the things we make: Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you’re making that thing more meaningful.
• We are reconnecting with our environment: Rebellion against our alienation from the physical world. Understanding the notion that designing for the world means designing in the world.
• We are evolving alongside our technology: This is how we learn, adapt and continue to innovate.  Our tools enable us and shape the way we think and create. “As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop– not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others– will be huge.”
• It is our new leisure activity: “Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity– as something that you did as an act of resistance, curiosity, participation in a social movement, expression of a desire to invest things with meaning– just didn’t exist: it’s what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter. Even fifty years ago, there was an assumption that ‘working with your hands’ defined you as lower class: ‘My son won’t work with his hands’ was an aspiration declaration. Today, though, when many of us work in offices or stores, and lift things or run for leisure, manual labor can become a form of entertainment.”

[via Ask Pang]