Tinkering is a very important concept that I find myself explaining to people now and then. I thought It would be good to gather in a post, some of those quotes related to tinkering that have framed it for me.
Those Quotes
“An overwhelming majority of the time, it is the Great Tinkerer that arrives at something, via experimentation; only later does theory follow. Sometimes the discovery and the theory are many years apart.”
— Radek Osmulski, Meta Learning.
“Nature works as a tinkerer. It innovates with the materials it has in its surroundings, and works towards achieving maximum results with minimal effort.”
— Pranay Lal (Indica)
“Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don’t quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity. When you tinker, there are no instructions—but there are also no failures, no right or wrong ways of doing things. It’s about figuring out how things work and reworking them. Contraptions, machines, widely mismatched objects working in harmony — this is the stuff of tinkering. Tinkering is, at its most basic, a process that marries play and inquiry.”
— Massimo Banzi.
“Obliquity describes the process of achieving complex objectives indirectly. In general, oblique approaches recognize that complex objectives tend to be imprecisely defined and contain many elements that are not necessarily or obviously compatible with one another, and that we learn about the nature of the objectives and the means of achieving them during a process of experiment and discovery. Oblique approaches often step backward to move forward.”
—John Kay, Obliquity
“A life of making isn’t a series of shows, or projects, or productions, or things: it is an everyday practice. It is a practice of questions more than answers, of waiting to find what you need more often than knowing what you need to do. Waiting, like listening and meandering, is best when it is an active and not a passive state.”
— Ann Hamilton
“A work of bricolage is never science, [Jared,] but it can still astound, make sense, and stimulate thought. It can still impress with its veracity, validity, soundness, and cogency.”
— Daniel Quinn, The Story of B.
“The experience of understanding involves a shift from what seems initially chaotic or formless, to a coherent stable form or picture, a Gestalt - or from an existing Gestalt to a new and better one, that seems richer than the one it replaces.”
— Ian Mc Gilchrist, The Matter with Things.
“What if the music is not Mozart, but something like some sublime jazz, or and Indian raga or Portugese fado? Something we improvise - within bounds. Whatever it is will emerge from a balance of freedom and constraint. It won’t exist until it is being performed: no-one can know exactly what it will be like. But it will not be random: It will emerge from the player’s continuous interaction, and from the music’s own ‘history’ as it unfolds; what comes next will be anticipated by what has gone before. It will also be moulded by the imagination, skill and training we bring, our past experience of playing (together and apart), the conventions of certain traditions, and shared expectations, quite apart from the fundamental laws of acoustics. Our co-creation of the music does not occur ex nihilo, and is not just a projection of ourselves. yet we, and you partake of its making, even if we are only listeners.”
— Ian Mc Gilchrist, The Matter with Things.