kip/bot/blog

A couple months ago, I posted about the need to improve the way we celebrate failure. My big beef was the lack of accountability within the word fail and the inability to distinguish between a useful failure and a f#$%-up. Still think that, but have found two expressions of failure that have boundaries, express the point of failing, and are useful.

The first one comes from Mark Frauenfelder’s Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World. Frauenfelder is a founder of boingboing and editor in chief of Make Magazine. The book covers his post-dot-boom look for a less expensive, less frivolous, more meaningful life. Three goals he and his wife set out for themselves were: 1) “take more control of our lives”; 2) “cut throught the absurd chaos of modern life and find a path that was simple, direct, and clear”; and 3)”forge a deeper connection and a more rewarding sense of involvement with the world around us.” The book’s chapter are walks through of various moments and types of DIY living, thinking and playing: how to kill your front lawn to make room for a garden; DIYing a better, cheaper source of coffee than Starbucks; making music with homemade instruments. (Sadly, no electronics.)

Anyway, the second chapter is titled “The Courage to Screw Things Up.” It’s designed to get people over the learning curve of DIY, one which is messy, costs some money, might get you an electric shock, some nasty cuts, some ruined clothes, and the occasional hole in a wall. DIY types classically take on a project that’s too big for them, muck it up, and then quit. MisterJalopy, a legendary maker (who remains anonymous), counsels that you embrace those early screw-ups, not just to get past them:

No one talks of failure as anything but shameful; this is wrong-headed and foolish. Mistakes are synonymous with learning. Failing is unavoidable. Making is a process, not an end. It is true that deep experience helps avoid problems, but mainly it gives you mental tools with which to solve inevitable problems when they come up

Fraunefelder summarizes: the act of failing “is the only way to equip [yourself] with the mental toolbox of a successful DIYer”. That works for me. Fits in with the notion of failing as experimenting — failures are paths to learning more about your materials, the techniques of the craft and how they interact with environmental factors, and in taking apart a problem and putting together solutions. Dig it.

The other one comes from the Make: Electronics book. It’s a simple slogan: “Burn things out, mess things up — that’s how you learn.” Again, a call for experimenting. When you burn out a component, like an LED light, you learn about polarity (especially if it’s your last one), you learn about current, surges in electricity, resistance and capacitance. Mess things up is a nice phrase to use, since it pushes you into a ‘mixing things up’ place — the tinkerer’s idea of grabbing anything that works, taking it apart and seeing if you can’t make it work a little better or differently or just figure out what it does. Frauenfelder has a nice line about Misterjalopy:

I was charmed by his perspective of the world as a hackable platform, something to be remade and remodelled to his exacting, eccentric, yet infectiously appealing aesthetic sensibilities … In his world, the things around you should have meaning, and his way of giving them meaning is by collecting, customizing, rebuilding, and combining them in ways that make him happy.

(Mister Jalopy can be found at www.hooptyrides.com)

When I was learning to program in C/C++, for several days/weeks and on several attempts I hit the pointers plateau — that thing which, conceptually, I couldn’t get my head around sufficiently to really grok the damn things. I eventually took a class that spent three weeks on it and now I understand them — their purpose, their usage, their style and how to troubleshoot them. A couple summers ago, I took a geek vacation between jobs and worked my way through the NYU ITP Physical Computing class curriculum and dug deeper into some Arduino stuff.

After a couple weeks, I hit a plateau. I needed things like shift registers to multiply the number of LEDs I could manage with the Arduino’s 13 pins; I needed to use a 555 timer chip to get pulsing, and there was a whole range of chips starting named 74______ that were described as “hugely useful” or “workhorses”. These things were critical and basic, like pointers, but (like pointers) it was impossible to find documentation for them that was comprehensible to someone with my level of experience. It was one of the weird places where the web let me down. I must have done dozens of searches, asked everyone I could for help, and could find nothing. Which is a drag, cuz those chips are what give real ooomph to physical computing projects.

Make Magazine has fixed that with Make: Electronics, an unusually good book even by O’Reilly standards. It contains in-depth explanations of how transistors and logic gates work at the physical level — giving you a more intuitive sense of how to work with them (rather than following steps by rote); detailed descriptions of the pins at three levels: the official specs, the occasional nomenclature, and the actual function; and some simple circuits that show what the thing does. The last might be the most important. Even the most basic 555 Timer chip examples I could find had so much stuff going on that it was impossible to isolate the chip and learn, iteratively through tweaking the code, what the things does. To top it off, the Maker Shed Store has a components kit that pulls all the stuff (including jumper wires) together for you.

The one weird thing about the book is in the index:

What the hell kind of alphabetization system is this?

Of course, it’s not like I have time to do anything on my nifty hand-made workbench. But it’s nice to have it when I’m ready. Hope springs eternal. Put differently.

while (!endOfUniverse)
hope.spring();
;

Ha!

I continue to be crotchety about generalism and the speed with which people think they can learn to be something (see crotchety posts here, here, and here. Here too. Oh, and here. God, do I ever stop? Well, no, but this one here isn’t grumpy.). Listening to Studio 360’s podcast about Moby-Dick today (while I was engaged in the years-long journey of becoming a better cook — in this moment by trying to improve my chicken stock and mushroom barley soup), there was a surprisingly great interview with Ray Bradbury. Why surprising? First, because, despite my love of SF and other genre fiction, I tend not to expect profundity from SF writers. Second, having never read Bradbury, I assumed whatever acclaim he gets is because of the ideas behind and the clever titling of Fahrenheit 451, not for any skill as a writer. (I need to make that right and at least buy, if not actually read, something of his on my Kindle.) Third, it’s just such a nice way of putting something I and the voices in my head are often on about that my head snapped up and I almost cut off the tip of my left index finger when he said it.

Anyway, I spend lots of time trying to convince people to respect craft and the time it takes and the value behind going deep in subject areas. But I see lots of people assuming they’re experts in things after they’ve done something once, or read a couple articles and books about it, or memorized a couple catchy phrases. Malcolm Gladwell recently helped highlight the fallacy that conversancy == expertise or that once is enough to be a guru when he highlighted the thinking that indicates you need 10,000 hours to get really good at something. But that factoid alone doesn’t quite get it across, because it’s not 10,000 accretive hours only that get you there. It’s 10,000 accretive and repetitive hours, with an emphasis on repetitive — you don’t learn new things so much as you learn more about the richness of the things you know. Describing this process and helping people understand it is challenging.

So, Bradbury wrote the screenplay/adaptation for the Gregory Peck film version of Moby Dick. (I didn’t know that, so already I’m happily smarter as I chop my leeks — working on getting more rhythm and precision and speed with my 8″ knife.) He apparently rather famously talked about being Herman Melville for a day during the writing of the screenplay and the Studio 360 host asked him to explain the why and the how of that:

what you try to do is get it into your bloodstream, get it into your unconscious. You can’t intellectualize it, that won’t work. But if you read a book 80 or 90 times, which I did, some sections I read 120 times, and you put that all into your bloodstream . . . and then you ignore it and let it come to the surface, emotionally, passionately . . . then you become the chaser and chased.

I like the image of getting it into you bloodstream and waiting for it to surface. Even more, though, I like the idea of ignoring the material and letting it sit in your unconscious.

I’m starting to look for a piano teacher (my previous teacher has, alas, moved to the west coast. A moment’s homage to her: she was awesome, played my piano beautifully when she walked me through Mozart sonatas and had a fun mix of stern teacher (reflexively pushing my elbows up and straightening my back) and music lover (listening to any vague musical connection I made between a theory assignment and something I was listening to.

So, a teacher I’m looking at has all sorts of things to love, chief among them his professional/academic work around Mahler. But he has a section on his site called Why study music? which highlights some of the benefits of taking a craft seriously and going deep into something. His key reasons, paraphrased below:

Dealing with pressure — the site refers to children learning to deal with pressure, but there’s something impressive for adults to, on a weekly basis, confront a piece of music that doesn’t come easily to them. Knowing that a lesson is coming up is just enough pressure to force you to take a longer view, break the piece down and work on it. It’s also long enough to be rewarding when, by the end of the week, you being to master it.

Responding to Criticism — I’m surprised how many design focused places don’t ‘workshop’ things and how many times we hold back from really working over a piece of work. One of the key, but most frequently overlooked, tenets of design thinking should be/is iteration and revision. While anyone’s first rev should be excellent, it should be understood that further revs will only improve the final product. Even if you come back to the original design, you’ll have a stronger, more confident understanding of it.

Persistence — in my world of marketing and interactive, there’s a borderline obsessive interest in the next thing, newness, novelty and never seen before. Sitting with someone for a while, working on something for longer than a quarter, doing a truly better v2.0 that is continuous with the previous version is not only hard to do, but often scorned. That said, however, there are a lot of creative types in the field who know when to dig in and fight the good fight or keep on pushing to validate an idea.

Multi-leveled focus - inset Steve Jobs quote about zooming in and zooming out and the design trope of ‘rinse and repeat’.

Project management - taking a long view of mastering a craft or something within the craft requires some PM like thinking. For a piano piece, my instructors regularly tell me how to break it down: “start with the left hand until it feels smooth and you find some melody in it, then focus on the melody right hand only, and work on the middle section until it feels clean, then you can add the intro, do dynamics last.”

The bolded names of the benefit are his, the interpretation mine. His page about why we should study music is pretty nice read, highlighting brain age as well as craft/life lesson benefits . . . and, oh yeah, the joy of playing music you love!

Perhaps is because I’m getting old. Perhaps it’s because, having gone through 2.5 career changes and paid my dues/been schooled 2.5 times. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I found this Zen Habits article about
how to become amazingly great at something refreshing. I’ve been to so many places where people are going to “get digital” in 3 months, or pick up a new competency through a couple hires, or “spend a weekend” with something to plumb its depth and master its rhythms. I loved the setup to this article:

Very often you’ll see blog posts or books teaching you to “master” a skill in only 10 days, or 3 days … in fact, it used to be 30 days but the time frame to master something seems to be shrinking rapidly.

I’ve even seen tutorials claiming to teach a skill in just a few hours. Pretty soon we’ll be demanding to know how to do something in seconds.

Instant mastery of skills and knowledge! Hey presto!

Unfortunately, the reality is something a little less magical. Or maybe that’s a fortunate thing.

It’s got a look (or maybe it’s the music):

We have the classic line from Picasso about artists being people who manage to hold on to their childhood curiosity, energy, and willingness to experiment. We sometimes connect them to toys and play (MAKE Magazine has the “Permission to Play” t-shirt). This ignite talk takes us into the ________ world of adult Lego fans or __________.

I’m leaving those words blank, cuz I’m not sure this talk demonstrates the value of re-connecting with toys. The speaker doesn’t talk about sparking lateral thinking, improving brain age, the wonders of a refreshed and open mind, or the chance to create. He just really digs it, and he’s amused about the mania that comes with playing with Legos.

Still, he has a great line at the beginning, “the dark ages are the time between you stop playing with Legos as a child and decide as an adult that it’s OK to play with a kid’s toy again.” (One other great moment is when he’s having dinner with a woman from Lego and he describes all “these marketing people who keep asking (in a whiny voice)’aren’t you afraid it will hurt your brand? how do you control your brand?”

A more interesting, or more immediately useful, look at Legos come from the editor of Nuts & Volts and a class he teaches at Harvard Medical School.

This video is the kind of thing that originally got me excited about the web and new media tools: someone with a compelling story to tell has the tools to make it engaging and a channel for putting it out there and finding an audience. Leaving aside the politics, this piece adds up to something great even though the individual production values are so-so.

I’m taking a two hour class about bio-electricity where I also make a DIY ECG (electro-cardio-gram, the one for the heart). Signed up yesterday, and today, there’s a video of a guy (who’s headed to dental school soon, dunno why, but that seemed an interesting detail to add), who made a really simple one:

He has a funny bit at :45 where he mentions that he needed a capacitor to smooth out the current — when he was hooked up to the oscilliscope (one of his out put devices) he was picking up Spanish radio!

The blog entry is pretty fun as well. He has lots of fun extra detail.

During President Obama’s Inaugural Address, lots of people got jazzed, and many tweeted about supporting, celebrating, and being “”the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things.” MAKE Magazine is building the Maker Faire and the most recent issue of the magazine about the transformative power of DIY — to innovate,to satisfy, and to solve problems.

In the intro to the issue, Editor Dale Dougherty, makes the big but cool claim that “makers offer one of the best hopes for the future.” He has a list of things people can do to “Make Things”; improve “Energy Usage” (monitoring and improving home usage; make “Transportation” smarter and better for us (bicycles, electric cars, reduced transport overall); better handling of “Food and Water” (raise your own chickens!, cook (gasp!)); and do more “Learning”. I hope the list gets viral (I don’t want to do two scans), but it’s worth re-typing the “Make Things” list:

Make things that people want
Make things so that you don’t need to buy them
Start a business that employs people making things
Make things closer to where they’ll be used
Repair things instead of replacing them
Harvest usable components from devices and redeploy them
Get to know your local salvage yard and recycling center

For a while I have been, not obsessed but itched, by the notion that environment and sustainability has a big maker hook. In an age where men can no longer tinker with their cars (they’re too chip-based, and the engines are increasingly black boxes), focusing on their power supply, tweeking their environment, making their stuff last longer and hacking it to work better, could be a satisfying alternative.

Sadly, for me, the first place my head goes is my last trip to a hardware/home supplies store and my urge to buy a sewing machine and make pillows and curtains, cuz I hate buying that stuff. Ah save . . . I also had the urge to hack motherlovin’ sh*t out of solar panel backup systems at Home Depot. (Flickr link provided as proof that I had this impulse BEFORE admitting to the sewing one. Excessive swearing purely out of compensation, of course.)