“I don’t know how to fix everything–but I know how to fix SOME things and I’m here to share what I know.”
The quote above comes from Kyle Wiens, the man behind ifixit.com an inspiring, collaborative project designed to aggregate user-generated repair manuals for electronics around the world. In addition to the values I wrote about in my previous posts, this project incorporates community and connectivity of knowledge to the list of benefits. To learn more about ifixit, check out this promo:
When I detached the back of my two year-old’s booster seat and placed it on the kitchen table, all I saw was curved plastic. My son proceeded to grab the seat, put it on his head and gallop around the kitchen shouting “Yee Haw!” because what he saw was a cowboy hat. He re-purposed something destined for the back shelf in the garage and turned it into fuel for his imagination.
This is how two year-old cowboys think.
A few days ago I was reading a childrens’ classic to him– Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. The book is about a man and his machine and their journey to avoid obsolescence. When diesel shovels become popular, Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel have to travel out of the big city to find work. They end up in a small town working to dig a hole for the new Town hall.
Image posted on http://noraaoyagi.typepad.com
At this point in the initial process of writing story the Author, Virginia Lee Burton, literally dug her characters into a hole with no way to escape. She couldn’t imagine a way to conclude the story.
When Burton told friends about her writer’s block over dinner one night, the couple’s 12 year old son, Dickie Berkenbush came up with the solution that makes the book what it is today. That 12 year-old boy thought it would be best to re-purpose the steam shovel and make it the heater for the new building.
We hear the phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle” a lot, but I think more important than any of those three behaviors is “repurpose.” In my first post, I wrote about how tinkering gives you a new way to see the world. I believe it does this in a more profound way than the techniques in the catchy phrase above.
The idea of “reducing” often doesn’t sit right with me. Obviously we don’t want to be wasteful, but many of the solutions involving reducing are about changing our lifestyle in ways that most people don’t want to do. Making ourselves more energy efficient reduces energy consumption and this is a good thing, but walking around in a dark house also reduces- just in a more toe-stubbing sort of way.
Re-using is like the little brother of re-purposing. Do we need to throw the coffee filter away after every cup? No, we don’t. Do we need to change our razor blades constantly? No, we don’t. Does our coffee taste as fresh and does our skin feel as smooth when we re-use less than optimal products? Probably not. Re-using is good, but it also is simply delaying the inevitable. After we re-use something enough we are still going to throw the item away.
Recycling is tricky. When taking all the different steps needed to pick up, manipulate, repackage and reship, recycling actually uses a lot of energy. Depending on how the government runs the program, it can be costly as well; because all budget items compete with all others, that money could be better spent improving our lives in other ways. Not that recycling is a bad thing, for example landfills are smelly eye-sores, but as Ken Black of wisegeek.com states:
Given the fact that any product can take a significant amount of energy to recycle, there are other options that can be considered. Some of these may be just as good as recycling, if not better.
Instead of sending a crane across the state to lift Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel out of the hole, strap it to a truck, crush it, smelt it down and send it to be remolded and reshipped as a new product– the solution was to use it for another purpose.
Re-purposing items that no longer serve their original goal is essentially the same thing in the machine world as organ donation is in the world of flesh and blood. The salvageable parts that extend the lives of the recipients also extend the life of at least part of the donor.
Don’t think of organ donations as giving up part of yourself to keep a total stranger alive. It’s really a total stranger giving up almost all of themselves to keep part of you alive.
-Anon
The gravity of the situation is different with human beings and household junk, but the concept is still the same. We can extend the life of multiple pieces of “junk” when we look at them with a young pair of eyes. Ask yourself what you can still do with this junk before sending it to a premature death in a smelly landfill.
Disassembled Toy Car/ Organ Donor
Can you take it apart and donate some of its “organs” to another dying product?
Even if it is only a temporary stay of execution for the recipient, try to train your brain to think like a re-purposer and see things the way a child sees things.
When you learn about some of history’s great inventors we see that they might more accurately be described as “great tinkerers.” Dictionary.com defines Tinkerers both as “an unskillful or clumsy worker” and “a person skilled in various minor kinds of mechanical work; jack-of-all-trades.”
The contradiction in the definition is very telling because much of what comprises tinkering is experimentation with only a partial knowledge of what you are doing. Tinkerers are people who dive into a repair or repurposing project more with a desire to learn about something than to execute some previous understanding. They are the kind of people who jump into the ocean to learn how to swim.
Great tinkerers like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo DaVinci all had workshops where they spent time learning and experimenting with all sorts of gadgets and projects.
Places like these workshops exist today; they are called hackerspaces and they are amazing little decentralized engines of exploration and tinkering. While some hackerspaces have been around for a long time, many new ones are sprouting up. These hackerspaces are places where grad students, artists, engineers, sysadmins and ordinary folk gather together and manipulate and repurpose physical products that spent years sitting in a closet, a grandmother’s basement or someone’s garage. These orphaned and seemingly worthless products are recombined with circuit boards, USB drives, new source code, glue, duct tape and lots of creativity. The new purpose may be quite different than the object’s originally intended use. Many of these old appliances and gadgets were not produced by Americans, although they are being repurposed in a very American way.
In 21st century America, many of the things we produce are not “products” in the traditional sense of the word. We are not producing tangible, physical things the way we did 75 years ago. Our “products” are digital, ephemeral. We trade in “information technology” as part of the “knowledge economy”. America is becoming less and less about manufacturing as we stride further into the 21st century.
The trend over the last few decades has been to analyze the exodus of manufacturing jobs from America to places like China. For a more detailed analysis of what effects this has on our economy, you might want to read some statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, but to get a detailed analysis of what this does to our nation’s soul, you should read Matthew B. Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft.
Crawford explores the under-appreciated arguments in favor of working with physical objects. One takeaway for me was that working with something physical helps us see the world differently. It helps us overcome our spiritual myopia and see greater value in things outside ourselves.
When you tinker, you first have to take something apart, piece by piece. During this process, you begin to get an understanding of the inner workings of an object. Most of what we see in our appliances and our gadgets is the outside, the surface. The guts and wires are hidden from us for aesthetic reasons. While this approach to design may help make a product more visually appealing and, in turn, increase sales it blinds us to the nature of the object in question.
This disconnect prevents us from truly appreciating the value much in the same way that people administering shocks in the infamous Milgram Experiment didn’t see value in other human beings. If people administering shocks aren’t in the same space as those getting shocked, it is easier to justify inhumane treatment. Gaining a deeper knowledge of the person helps us gain respect for them. Intimacy breeds respect. When we discover that intimacy with physical objects, we begin to see how complicated, interesting and elegant even the simplest gadgets can be. We begin to see the function in its entirety and this helps us to respect the object in new ways. We don’t just appreciate the object for what it can do for us, we appreciate it for what it is. Tinkerers see value even in cheaply made and worn down objects.
Over the last few decades, products have become so much cheaper to make that we are increasingly viewing everything as disposable. When is the last time you heard of someone taking their blender or their alarm clock to the repair shop? It simply doesn’t happen anymore. We would rather spend the money to buy a new one than spend almost the same amount to have it fixed. At no point do we even consider taking apart the blender and trying to fix the problem ourselves. Once something stops working the way we want it to, we consider it “junk” and we throw it away.
In Cory Doctorow’s latest book, Makers, the author describes a not-too-distant future where people around America and the world begin to repurpose “junk” into gadgets en route to creating a new economy fueled by the work of tinkerers.
As interesting as the book is, it is even more fascinating to discover that this is actually happening right now. At Brooklyn-based Hackerspaces like NYC Resistor , AlphaOneLabs or the brand new one starting up on Stony Brook’s campus, Island Labs, modern tinkerers are repurposing, recombining and reinventing things that will make you see junk in a whole new way.
Some people see a mouse with a worn out trackball as junk. The people who inhabit these Hackerspaces see that same mouse as a potential remote camera shutter release, a potential skittering mouse robot, or a potential garage door opener. In other words: tinkerers see potential.
Tinkerers are more than inventors, they are re-inventors. Inventors create value from ideas in their minds, re-inventors create value from “junk.” They breathe new life, new purpose, new value into things others had abandoned and left for dead. Tinkering is more than a hobby, it is a philosophy, a new way to see the world.
