Sunday, September 26, 2010

Word of the day "bricoleur"

I didn't realize until today that there is a word that really fits how I think and work.

I am a bricoleur.


As in  'She advocates the "bricoleur style" of programming as a valid and underexamined alternative to what she describes as the conventional structured "planner" approach. In this style of coding, the programmer works without an exhaustive preliminary specification, opting instead for a step-by-step growth and re-evaluation process. - Sherry Turkle '

From : 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage#Information_technology

Until now I have never had a good way to properly define, explain or defend my way of coding, which has time and time again has proven to be faster and more effective then most programming teams can do.

But it's definition extends to also explain of the inventions and design work I do and my whole general approach to life in general!  One that has always seemed to be very unique but effective.

"He is a tinkerer, a bricoleur, Dionysian rather than Apollonian."
post.thing.net - A lean, mean, media machine.

Definitions of Bricoleur on the Web:
  • Bricolage, is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts and literature, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things which happen to be available, or a work created by such a process. ...
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricoleur
  • A person who creates a bricolage; A person, such as a writer, artist, etc, who creates using a diverse range of materials
    en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bricoleur
  • French term meaning “handy-man” or “jack- of-all-trades,” now implying someone who continually invents his or her own strategies for comprehending reality. Marcel Broodthaers has been so described. See bricolage.
    thebookman.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/postmodern-terms-absence-to-curtain-wall/

BRICOLAGE: French term meaning “puttering around” or “doing odd jobs.” Claude Lévi-Strauss (see structuralism) gave the term a more precise anthropological sense in books like The Savage Mind (1966) by stipulating that it refer to, among other things, a kind of shamanic spontaneous creativity (see shaman) accompanied by a willingness to make do with whatever is at hand, rather than fuss over technical expertise. The ostensible purpose of this activity is to make sense of the world in a non-scientific, non-abstract mode of knowledge by designing analogies between the social formation and the order of nature. As such, the term embraces any number of things, from what was once called anti-art to the punk movement’s reinvention of utlitarian objects as fashion vocabulary (see, for example, Dick Hebdige’s Subculture [1979]).

See also:
* who's the bricoleur?
* Are you a bricoleur?
* Sherry Turkle
* http://www.bricoleurbanism.org/
* http://www.answers.com/topic/bricolage
* http://www.wordnik.com/words/bricoleur/examples
 

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