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.

Chapter 2: The meaning of making 1: Philosophies of craft

‘making is connecting’ looking (mostly) at the offline, non-digital world of people making things for themselves and others. we call this call ‘craft’ rise of knitting, ‘craft guerrilla’ fairs, DIY culture, and other trendy craft activities. shoved out of that space As Peter Dormer has observed: The separation of craft from art and design is one of the phenomena of late-twentieth-century Western culture. The consequences of this split have been quite startling. It has led to the separation of ‘having ideas’ from ‘making objects’. It has also led to the idea that there exists some sort of mental attribute known as ‘creativity’ that precedes or can be divorced from a knowledge of how to make things.1 There is an inherent pleasure in making. joie de faire (like joie de vivre) within the practice of making. These engaging ideals are at the heart of all artistic and creative impulses Making is both the means through which the craftsperson explores their obsession or idea and an end in itself

JOHN RUSKIN

At the point when he published the second volume of The Stones of Venice Ruskin was extremely prolific produced poetry and fiction, opposition to industrialism, and exploitative capitalism. interpret his stance as ‘obviously’ As Clive Wilmer notes:

No political label quite fits Ruskin’s politics. . . . His ‘Toryism’ was such that it could, in his own lifetime, inspire the socialism of William Morris and the founders of the Labour Party; and when he called himself a ‘conservative’, he usually meant as a preserver of the environment – what we should call a ‘conservationist’.8 his ideology infuriated Ruskin, whose moral and roman- tic instincts would not allow any system where life was abused and exploited for any purpose.

This is captured most simply in the asser- tion, which appears near the end of Unto This Last, and is spelled out in capitals: THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE

Why was he suddenly upsetting the establishment with these radical ideas? THE DIVISION OF LABOUR

Just as he is thus depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine.and from being a man becomes an abstract activity and a belly

Both Ruskin and Marx employ the notion that the male worker who is reduced to repetitive machine-work ceases to be ‘a man’. For Ruskin, the thought and the craft of making, the mental and the physical, were united in the same process.

For Ruskin, as Peter Anthony observes, work was vital in terms that were moral and spiritual, connecting ‘man’ with nature and with God

arx’s analysis is a critique of a kind of slavery, and Ruskin makes the same point, just as strongly, but it is embedded in a celebration of human crea- tivity and craft, and the moral imperative that this should be freely expressed, individual, and unconstrained.

3 THE MEANING OF MAKING II: CRAFT TODAY