a framework for toolmaking
What is your Need?
I am not making an object. If I could banish one question it would be “so, what’s the tool you’re making.” I don’t know. I don’t think it matters right now because I’m not expecting anyone else to know when they start, either (see section on audience). So, as for my need, it is to not be bored. My need is to have constant challenge. My need is to balance my own ability to generate one thousands thing to do today with creative constraints that will ensure one that one of them actually does. That is my need, and that is why I am “building” a system. I will succeed on this axis if I have a series of exercises and readings that I think are fun and useful and interesting for people who want to make their own creative tools. I might not have done them all by the end of the semester, but I should have critical justifications for all of them.
My other need is to reflect on the human condition, my condition. How do we think? How do we interact with stuff? What happens when we have more power over the world? This is arena that I care about and why I’ve picked a pedagogical framework. In the most disgusting, self referential, meta sort of way, the system itself is my best answer to “so, what’s the tool you’re making.”
What are people going to be able to see when you are done?
No matter how barefoot in the park I want to leave things, I do admit that I need to be clearer about how I, and others, will engage with the resulting process going forward. I was hoping that that would have been where I could have gotten help from the critics, but I did not present enough for that to be part of the conversation. Part of the difficulty is the usual schism for the ITP program, how to create engaging documentation for things that are part software, part hardware, part model airplane kit. Here are some options… not all of which are exclusive.
Who is this for and how will they interact with it?
The format issue can’t be resolved until I answer the audience question, at least in part. I do know I’d like to think of my results as being more Leonardo di Vinci Journal than Creativity for Dummies, and yet I want it to be accessible.
Skill level: I don’t know if I have solved my lowest common denominator issue, but for now I am going to work with the idea that my target would be people with skill level equal to a minimum of a second semester-itp student skill level. Still very broad, but I’m choosing that level because for right now I do not want to get into very basic programming 101, but I am okay with the idea that people might not be super comfortable with it already. I don’t want to explain how to use an EPIC programmer, either. These are areas I feel can be beefed up later, supplemented or “out sourced” if need be. Likewise I expect to the audience to have been to a gym once or twice in their life or maybe have gone out dancing instead.
Why: I think the people who would be interested in engaging with the process would do so because they intrigued with the idea of making their own–perhaps purely symbolic–creative tool. If that were all, however, a simple collection of pick-and-choose exercises would suffice. My audience is people whose current process is failing them some how. No one follows someone else’s plan if they know what to do. I think there needs to be more of a sense of a guided journey–a friends highlighted, annotated, copy of Lonely Planet to travel with? In the end it should feel like their trip, but never like they were at a loss to pick what to do that day.
Venue and Duration: This is something people have to be able to have in their own territory. It belongs to them and they have to be able relate to it and own it over a period of months. I would be hesitant to incorporate formalized result sharing over the web in the thesis itself because I think that is contrary to the spirit of private dialog. What specifically I’m worried about in the case of open-to-all forums on the web is that they very quickly seem to become more about status than learning. I don’t want anyone to feel like their process is less valid because SuperKid39 has already posted 100 versions of what she did for Exercise 19. It is totally different to borrow a friends written in book than to buy your own travel journal to discover that someone has marked up all the pages. I think it is important and valuable to have engagement with fellow travelers, but that needs to be balanced with preserving the feeling of walking on your own patch of untrodden snow.
Do you have any guinea pigs other than yourself? How soon do I expect to bring in other people?
Really good questions. Can I and should I have other people try certain exercises? Absolutely. What I can do is get the exercises up, whether or not I’VE done them, somewhere other people, first years and professors and alumnae can look at them, try them out and give me feedback when and where they can. This won’t be the same as having them follow “The Program” but it would be a start. After all, these are kind of the point.
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