Thoughts on making | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on making

vincentsanders.blogspot.co.uk

30 pointskyllikki20 comments

I would add to the list - "just do the stuff one damn time".

Everything has been done. There is a better technique and better tool and reference design for everything you will ever think of.

For amateur, this overload of information can prevent you actually doing anything, especially in the physical world where anything you do must respect the laws of physics (varnish needs to dry, cannot just set the boolean to true).

Talking from my experience in hobby jewellery making. Only read about something when you fail to do it or after you have done something. Otherwise you will end up like me, spending my free time watching youtube tutorial after youtube tutorial and not touching my workbench.

This self-efficacy problem has grown in times of mass media. This is a great point from experience, thank you, and it rings true with me for certain! It's a well-researched sociological understanding, that the "perfect" in our mass media aggregation does often ddispirit the local, craft and beginner in any field ( for example, think music: it used to be really hard to make anything that sounded as good as what you had on a record, because there were not the tools at home). It's only now that I have found friends and a meta-community who are into making things that I feel enabled again, after years (decades!) of feeling alone and with way-too-high a mountain to climb.

I'd peg them as sophomores -- they know enough of the names and stories to feel like authorities, but don't have any depth of understanding. The Eames example is particularly hilarious, since Charles and Ray are pretty famous for starting with some basic goals, learning everything about the materials at hand, and figuring out first-hand the best way to use those materials to solve the problem. They developed techniques for molding plywood in their apartment, for chrissakes!

The rebranding of "having a hobby" into "being a maker" -- there's a blog post I'd like to read.

I may be mistaking your tone (and if so, sorry for impugning your intent), but as your post reads to me I'd hate to read an article like that. To encourage people to make things, we surely ought to be lowering the barriers of entry, and that includes not raising social barriers of ridicule to new makers, almost all of whom will start these things out as a hobby. And indeed, a hobby is a good thing, because it's teaching people to create, think, solve problems etc. I'd be sad at any article that focused on "maker" being morally superior to "hobbyist". They are much the same thing.

My tone was partially poking fun and partially genuine interest.

On the one hand, I find the rebranding to be self-aggrandizing and kind of funny. Your dad went out and worked in the garage just because he wanted some time alone, and probably enjoyed working with wood, and got some satisfaction from building something. It seems this narrative is no longer good enough for us, and the same act elicits a greater investment of one's identity, one that partakes of the cultural mystique of the artist: One is not merely a hobbyist furniture maker, or robot builder, or computer programmer -- one is.... A Maker.

On the other hand, whether you think this is a shift for better or for worse, I do think it's worth noting and reflecting on. It is recent -- I've only really been struck by it within the past few years -- and it seems related to the ever-growing ascendancy of computers and technology within mainstream culture, and an attendant rise of power for nerd/geek culture.

I think you're partly right about it being branding, and I don't think that's bad. It's okay to put a label on something to make it easier to communicate the differences. Hobbies can be many things but not all of them involve making stuff. So a Maker Faire couldn't be Hobby Faire, that's a different event. Craft Fairs tend not to involve things like electronics or say, fire or robotics. And if you can hook into the mystique, like you say, to bring more people in to make new stuff, fine by me.

I personally do cringe a bit at "Maker" the same way I cringe at using "creative" as a noun but it has value.

People like their tribes. You no longer play video games, you're A Gamer. I'm curious as to what the next trendy -er will be.

The best thing that I can say about that is to ignore those pretentious art school yuppies/hipsters. People like that feel a need to label and analyze EVERYTHING, even when there's nothing there to analyze.

I agree there's a lot of navel-gazing and self-aggrandizing. It's one of those regrettable personality traits that comes with the territory, I think.

But this post in particular was a nice contrast with that, a defence of not having to analyze one's own design influences.

To my eyes the whole "maker" concept is exactly that. If you like making stuff, awesome, but don't pretend it somehow makes you better than people who don't.

Also massive confirmation bias for people who blog. Who knows what non-blogger-makers are like.

The novelty of doing something that appears to be 'new' can blind you to the fact that people have been doing it for millions of years. The only difference is that you now can blog.

I don't mind people who analyse everything. It's great that there are people who know why processes are how they are.

I dislike the amount of "post rationalisation" that goes with arts critique. See the movie "Room 237"[1] as a great example of this. Some of them sound reasonable, and make sense. And some of them just sound ridiculous, and tenuous, and make very little sense. And because Kubrick is dead and didn't tell us what he meant there's little way for us to know if these people's imaginings about his film are in any way correct or not.

I tend to go a bit too far the other way. I know someone who, when at school and asked "Why did that character do that thing?" would answer "because that's what the author wrote" which is correct, but not what an English comprehension teacher wants to hear.

[1] <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085910/>

I disagree, their pretentious 'what are your influences' discussion caused the author to analyze what his influences are. That analysis clashed with the students' initial reaction.. but this is very far from your statement "there's nothing there to analyze".

I don't agree that there is never anything to analyze, but I do agree that it is not necessary to always analyze things. The "art school yuppy" analyzes everything because that is the only thing they know how to do. You don't critique a critique, so being on the analyzing side of art is safe.

This contemporary artistic influence is surely one of the components of the definition of culture. Of course everyone is influenced by all kinds of things. It's not a crime not being able to trace the lineage though, nor not to want to. Artists create and their creations enter the societal consciousness, that's part of the deal.

Here's how i see the whole "influences" discussion. What the students did was the same as you looking at a piece of software and asking what design pattern was used? Which algorithm? Which Data Structures? How did you go about building it? Can you show me the Sequence Diagrams, Class Diagrams, ERD? Stuff like that. An amateur/hobbyist who hasn't had professional training would probably not be familiar with all this. He might have written a lot of code and might have done that by reading online tutorials etc etc. He might have written pretty good code too. But A professional would be abashed if none of the above were used at all. And they'd feel their moral duty to inform the person of these things. Is it because the professional is pretentious? Of course not. But all these things exist for a reason, and it's most useful to know about them, and apply them.

Ahh, you ran into one of my "favorite" types of people to show up to makerspaces: the self-important art-nerd who thinks s/he knows everything and is really only looking for a place to show off and find validation.

We had a couple of people like that show up to my old space in Philadelphia (garsh, I miss it). My favorite was the writer who thought he was liberal enough to drop the "N"-word ironically.

It's this sort of artist's attitude that was one of the reasons I got out of fine art in the first place. I never fit in with the other artists because, for me, the construction of the thing and the experience was reason enough to do it, not because I had any thing to "say" by the creation of it or the style I chose.

I suppose it would have been nice to have known where the cultural meme of flat-pack plywood furniture had come from to influence you to think it was a cool idea to try it. Or hell, maybe you did come up with the idea in a near-vacuum: I don't think it's impossible that you could have found yourself in the same conditions as the Eames' to then come to the same conclusions.

But that's kind of the whole F/OSS point on copyleft and anti-patents. Ideas, on their own, are almost worthless. The value of a thing is largely in the execution of it. If the execution of the thing does not lend itself to a lot of value, then the idea wasn't very valuable to begin with.

These people, who want to nitpick what you do and find any way they can criticize you (you don't have the right tools, you don't have the right process, you don't have the right reason), they're doing it out of jealousy. They have found themselves, for one reason or another, incapable of performing the way you do. Maybe they can't manage their procrastination and ever get anything done, or they don't have the patience for detail work and their stuff comes out crooked, or maybe they are capable, but only after extreme effort.

Never, ever let those people discourage you. Their criticism is their own insecurity. They see your work and feel it reflects on them and shows them as a failure. Just ignore them and keep working. Keep making.

This seems like to broad of an indictment of criticism in general, and extrapolates way to hard from the original story (which was perfectly alright).

Stop trying to come up with some general theory about all critics who don't build. Some of them will be tools, others have a unique skill. A good example is Pauline Kael, legendary movie critic, who wrote more than a few lines about the role of her profession not simply as a foil for the artist.

It seems to me that the critic's task should be to help people see more in the work than they might see without him. That's a modest function, and you don't need a big theory for it.

There are a million factors that influence execution (luck and randomness are not insignificant either), and there is no natural reason why the critic and the executioner need to be the same agent.

I think I can extrapolate well in this case, because I've been in the exact same situation, only the geographic location and particular project were different.

There is a huge difference between a critic and a jerk showing up providing unsolicited criticism. If you publish a movie to the public, you should expect to receive criticism. If you're working on something for yourself in your hackerspace, that's not really an invite to tear you apart.

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