Wednesday, April 07, 2004
I've been coming across cool things on the web recently and been reacting to them in a disturbingly curmudgeony fashion. What is it, I wonder? The Mandela quote about being afraid of our light rather than our inabilities or something to that effect?
More likely, I've been noticing a cognitive dissonance between two very different ways of thinking. In English, I've been overly accustomed to one way of going about things and my mental muscles in other neglected areas protest when newly exercised again. Wait, that was verbose and non-plain english as well. Ah, fuggit.
Anyway, I've noticed that in art and science, there is tinkering for the sake of tinkering and then looking for applicability, problems that need to be solved, etc. Imagine the lone Linux hacker at night, contributing source code to the latest distro. Or the design kid giving open source 3-D software a whirl to spice up the Flash animations she's been slapping together. All for no reason at all other than the best of reasons: these people feel a need to get something in their heads out, whether programmatically, artistically or both. The temperament has to be just right - I've met too many young people in the last 3 years driven to madness in Ph.D. programs with no real world applicability or relevance to their efforts. You have to be a certain type of bookish introvert that prefers bench work in a lab to the company of others, you can't just engineer yourself into becoming that way.
On the other hand, there is another approach: identifying a need or problem then looking for the answers to it. Seems to be real day job type of thinking, but that's not strictly true. A lot interesting things need a high-level view of what direction things should go in. Think of librarians acting as information architects on huge websites, making them easier to navigate through. Or Steve Jobs, whipping up the idea for the flat panel iMac during a walk through a Japanese garden with his lead designer, who was in turn inspired by a sunflower, then leading the charge by engineers to actually create the damn thing.
Both seem to be at odds with each other at times, yet each is indispensable to the other. I noticed this disturbing trend within myself recently when my initial reaction to recent "
running iPod on Linux" articles was "well, what the hell for?" That's when I realized the answer - that there is no answer and that it's beside the frigging point to look for a point in this things. That's the nature of creativity... hacking... punk rock. If we could all be half as productive as
this indie rocker kid (free registration required) there could be some amazing shit out there in no time flat.
So, moral of the story - maybe it's time to get out of the too-practical day job mentality, open up my head and start fucking shit up old school-style in my spare hours, a structured and dedicated approach to less structure, more experimentation. We'll see what comes out of this.