User:Koen van Geel/Theorie

MAKING IS CONNECTING

Making is connect- ing’ a perfectly simple phrase

Tree things why making is connecting.

Making is connecting because you have to connect things together (materials, ideas, or both) to make something new;

Making is connecting because acts of creativity usually involve, at some point, a social dimension and connect us

with other people;

And making is connecting because through making

things and sharing them in the world, we increase our engagement and connection with our social and physical environments.

In the first decade websites tented to be like separate gardens. They are just there for there own being. But with web 2.0 the separate gardens become one and making and connection together.

the sit back and told culture.

highlights ways in which some teachers are beginning to reject the ‘sit back and be told’ school cul- ture described above, and instead are setting their students challenges which are much more about making and doing.

The students are just nog watch the teacher but are asking and solve the problem there selves and creates their own solutions.

Classrooms show works in progress, experiments, even things that have gone wrong.

As easy-to-use online tools which enable people to learn about, and from, each other, and to collaborate and share resources, have made a real difference to what people do with, and can get from, their electronic media.

Make magazine.

-DIY technology, Find new watt to re-use and recycle.

-sustainable ways of living.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is perhaps the best-known of today’s creativity researchers.

His creativity study was based on interviews with people who were at the highest end of observed creativity. 

He writes:

Creativity, at least as i define it in this book, is a process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is changed. New songs, new ideas, new machines are what creativity is all about.

Creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a filed of experts who recognize and validate the innovation.

This approach to creativity sets the bar very high, of course. First you have to produce something brilliantly original, that has never been seen before in the world. Then, as if that wasn’t hard enough already, it has to be recognized as a bril- liantly original thing by other people.

This book is a discussion about the value of everyday creativity, taking in handmade physical objects and real-

life experiences as well as the recent explosion of online creativity.

The Craftsman – which I also recommend – primarily con- cern the values, applied intelligence, and feelings associated with making things by hand, as well as the need to understand how our material world works so that we can engage with it, fix it, or transform it.