When my daughter was an adolescent, she decided she wanted to become a rocket scientist after watching the Apollo 13 movie. She was impressed by the scene when the spacecraft was in trouble. The scientists on Earth looked at a pile of things they had on the ship and told the crew how they could rig up something to fix it. She thought that was pretty clever and wanted to be those guys. I wanted to tell her that you don’t need to be an engineer to rig something up and you don’t have to watch a movie to be inspired by someone who does that. All you need to do is watch your father who does it all the time and be inspired by him. I reminded her of the time the muffler fell off and was dragging on the ground. I rooted around in the trunk for a way to tie it up. The only thing I found was a set of jumper cables, so I wrapped them around the car like tying a ribbon around a birthday present. She hadn’t been inspired by that, she was embarrassed to drive into town that way. The thing that inspired her in one instance and embarrassed her in another is what the French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, called bricolage. Bricolage is a French word that means a do-it-yourself project in the sense of cobbling things together with whatever tools and materials are at hand. People also call it tinkering, messing around, jury-rigging, ghetto-rigging, and Afro-engineering. In England, it’s called bodging. New Zealanders say it’s having a number 8 wire mentality. The folks who create bricolage are bricoleurs. These tend to be people who lack resources, but have plenty of resourcefulness; they lack training, but have plenty of intelligence. Their productions are crude and inelegant, but ingenious. MacGyver is the ultimate bricoleur. My daughter didn’t grow up to be a rocket scientist, but she came close. She became an aeronautical engineer. Unfortunately, in doing so, she became the opposite of a bricoleur. The case of Apollo 13 was an exception, engineers normally plan methodically. They start with clear specifications, create detailed plans, follow best practices, use tools and materials selected for optimal performance, and work within standardized frameworks, prioritizing efficiency, precision, and predictable outcomes, and test against predetermined benchmarks. Engineering is an applied science and systematic, deductive science is as far from bricolage as you can get. In contrast, a bricoleur starts with what they have, rather than expecting perfect materials for an idealized project. You can often tell a card-carrying bricoleur by the collection of junk they keep around, in case they might need it. They allow solutions to emerge organically through experimentation or in a sudden insight rather than by following a blueprint. The bricoleur thinks relationally, rather than rationally, considering how different things might interact in surprising ways rather than viewing them as isolated components with fixed purposes. When facing limitations, the bricoleur doesn't see obstacles but opportunities that inspire novel solutions. They are receptive to serendipity, those happy accidents that spawn innovative outcomes... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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Monday, May 26, 2025
You May Be a Bricoleur and Not Even Know It
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