Makers and the DIY Movement
It seems to have taken an all-out assault on the innate
human urge for tactile and manipulative contact with the world of physical
objects and creatures to unleash the torrent of tinkering and crafting that is
suddenly all around us. Martha Stewart, perhaps, deserves credit for
anticipating this backlash against the merchant apostles of the virtual life.
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Ms. Stewart may or may not have guessed that Dale Dougherty and Make: Magazine were coming, but anyone who knows what the term Homo sapiens actually stands for knows that no normally curious and sentient human being over the age of one would ever take a keyboard, mouse, or game controller as the first-line tools you should be using to put your body and mind into the world. A particularly interesting consequence of the Maker/DIY movement is that some people are beginning to think about its potential for radically changing the structure of formal education in this country. What do children really learn from years and years of forced immobility, ingesting simplified or frankly dubious narratives of human life and formulaic reductions of human knowledge? Increasingly, despite the bluster and bullying of the monomaniacal proponents of “rigor, assessments, and accountability” in schools, the answer appears to be “not much.” In this section of handoc.com, we will attempt to explore and develop ideas about what self-interested and enthusiastic adults and children are capable of when the culture doesn’t interfere with what comes to us biologically – what our hands and minds lead us to when we allow ourselves to be more instinctive actors in the world. |
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Ralph
Caplan - Haystack monograph #18: "Making More Than Sense,"
(2005)
reproduced from Haystack Mountain School of Crafts monograph series, Deer Isle, Maine
Dale Dougherty - Make: Magazine &
Maker Faire
The New York Hall of Science and the 2010 Maker Faire
Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski on "Thinkering"