Self-Awareness of DNA

 

One of the things I’m learning as a designer is how important it is to make things. Make anything that comes into your head.  Make it if you think it’s going to be bad.  Make it, because even the failures — especially the failures — will teach you important things.

This is just a silly meme.  It’s serious and funny and insightful all at the same time. And yeah, it’s dumb.

But I made it.  It’s here.  You can think it’s dumb or you can think it’s powerful, or you can groan at how mediocre it is.

But I’m farther up the learning curve of design because I made it, than someone who didn’t.  And that’s a powerful insight all its own.

Cardboard castle

Cardboard castle

Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
I made this little cardboard castle today in the Design Lab, for the use of our first grade.  I was thinking about this Design Exercise I have in mind for them.  At first I assembled it using Makedo parts, and then I used a hot-glue-gun to assemble it the rest of the way. Once I had the overall design done in rough draft with the Makedo rivets, I reassembled it with hot glue. I’m thinking of designing some small buildings and some small “paper doll” figurines to go with these buildings…

I’ve also realized that we can have 5-6 different building designs all assembled in roughly the same way. And if we can assemble castle keeps this way, we can assemble royal fortresses and tenements the same way. We can build New York City slums to talk about immigration, and royal castles and cathedrals to talk about the middle ages, and Japanese pagodas and Mongolian yurts.

Buildings that used to be photographs in expensive books can now be three-D models. Not virtual or digital, but real and 3D, to be handed around the classroom. Learning the building techniques for a medieval tower allows one to build a New York Tenement. Building a tenement allows one to build the Petronas Towers or Chartres Cathedral.

In cardboard.

You can’t think with tools you don’t have

Three short stories, and an axe to grind. Bear with me, and I’ll get to the point.

You can’t think with tools you don’t have. Seems simple enough, right?

Story number one. My mother saw the new computer at college that I’d bought through the tech department’s arrangement with Apple Computer, and said, “what do you need one of those for?” I told her, “writing papers, making art, sending email, publishing a newsletter. You have to get one.” she asked me, incredulously, “what would I use it for?” I told her to get one first, and find out what she used it for later. Twenty-five years later, she’s used it to be the president of a board of trustees, to be a graphic designer, a home-business entrepreneur, an accountant, a data-gatherer, a phenomenal correspondent and a journalist.

If she’d waited to get a computer until she knew what she was going to do with it, she’d still be waiting.

Story number two. My friend Josh has built a pair of headband-mounted cat ears on servos, attached to an EKG reader and an Arduino chip. When you wear the ears, and mount the EKG sensor on your forehead with a little grounding clipped to your ear, the ears swivel left and right, up and down, depending on how much attention you’re paying to what’s going on around you. To build them, he needed a soldering iron, a Cupcake MakerBot (3-D printing), various electronics parts, and a community of folks interested in Arduino devices and having them read code from EkG sensors. Ultimately, he even needed the expertise of some serious electronics designers to solve a power problem.

But he couldn’t have done any of it without a set of tools he already knew how to use, and some ambition (in the form of a cosplaying lady friend).

Third story. Around a million years ago, more or less, our hominid ancestors started making tools. They’d been making “tool” for around a million years, but the Acheulian Hand Axe was our go-to device for a million years. The archaeological record strongly suggests we didn’t know how to make anything else. But then, over a few thousand years, we invented a stunning number of tools in very short order — hammers, knives, needles, fishhooks, harpoons, bowls, cups, baskets, fishing line, arrows, bows, swords… The list goes on and on, and really the business of inventing specialty tools hasn’t stopped at any time in the last million years. A million years of tool-making.

I’m simplifying these tales a lot, because I want to grind an axe, and then I want to chop a point onto this spear I’m pointing. Today, an adequate “school kit” should contain more than just pens and pencils. I realize we’re worried about violence in schools, but safety scissors are dumb. Can we please give kids real tools, and let them have at least a pocket knife in their school bag? For a million years, kids as young as two have been given sharp implements and instruction in how to use them effectively. This is the patrimony of the planet, and if a kid doesn’t know how to use a knife safely by the time she learns to read, how is she going to feed herself, hmmm?

End of axe-grinding. Onto the point.

If the Kavad, and my designer friends, have taught me anything, it’s that you can’t learn to think through problems with tools you don’t have or have never learned to use. Walking around my friend Matt’s new house with him, we thought nothing of looking at misplaced doors and locations where there should be windows. He’s a carpenter! Walls in old houses aren’t solid to him. He has the tools and technology to rebuild them. My friend C takes apart commercially-made toy puppets because they don’t serve his hands very well. He rebuilds them to suit his improv games. He knows how to use a sewing machine and a glue gun, and he knows how fabric behaves when it has a head-shaped piece of foam under it. My friend Jared codes websites for a living, because he understands CSS and HTML and Java from the process of goofing around on his computer, and learning these tools. My friend K is a moderately successful chef in large part because he was cutting vegetables and making food from an early age. He knows his way around a kitchen.

These are anecdotes, of course. But it doesn’t change the reality — tools are the heritage and patrimony of the human species, and yet most schools expect and count on students to graduate with only a strong familiarity with six of them: pencil, pen, college-ruled lined paper, textbook, and correcting pen. If they’re really lucky, scissors, glue stick, ruler, rubber band, and (cheap, plastic) geometry compass will appear on the secondary list. oh, and one of the most villainous tools of all, they learn to use quite well: the bubble test.

This is appalling.

One of the things that appears so often on the list of things that American businesses want from employees is creativity. Yet they can’t get creativity from their employees because their employees learned to be creative despite (rather than because of) schools. It’s seen as an “extracurricular” skill at best. Kids learn to analyze literature only, instead of learning to create it. They study history to learn what they’re stuck with, rather than how to change it, or how to make it. And left to themselves, students learn how to use Facebook instead of learning how to make memes that take over Facebook.

So, in the comments here, i’d like you to name five tools that belong in a new, revamped “back to school kit.” They can be digital or analog. They can be online tools or physical objects. At least one of them has to be sharp, and one of them has to be upsetting. You can specify grade level or type of class, but be a little risky, and a little frisky.

Go on, I dare you.

Tweaking the Dominant Narrative

Diana the Huntress – the board version for the kids to copy…

Gordon over at Rune Soup, in his “Whiskey Rant” says repeatedly that it’s time to make some changes in the dominant narrative of our time, and place magic in that narrative where it belongs.  I don’t know that I agree with him, but there was an astrological window for the Moon which Chistopher Warnock told me about last week,  that opened about 8:20 am this morning in my neighborhood that I wanted to use.  As an artist, I find that these kinds of astrological windows are kind of interesting.

Only problem was, I was going to be in class. (Actually, as it turned out, we weren’t in class; we were taking the all school photo, and attending a meeting on various end-of-year stuff).  How to design a lesson for the kids to do, that would allow me to slip off to make a talisman? No. Wrong thinking leads to wrong action.  And even if I don’t think the dominant narrative should be overthrown, I do think it needs to be tweaked a bit.

So, when my class came in from their interruptions, I didn’t allow questions.  I handed everyone a rectangle of paper, and I put a quick image of Diana the Huntress on the board.  ”Everybody copy this down, quick! We don’t have much time.”

Diana the Huntress as I re-drew her

To say that they asked lots of questions is an understatement. There were lots of complaints about inability, about drawing skill, about why are we doing this, about what’s the purpose? How does this relate to Latin?  About 15 minutes before the end of the window, I told them to STOP working on the drawing, and I wrote a couple of phrases on the board. We chose one, and they used their exam-prep-buffed Latin skills to translate that English sentence into Latin.  We talked about the use of the nominative, accusative, and dative; and about the imperative tense.  A great review of skills in the short time we had in class (and admitting that I asked them to do a task that had little to do with Latin). We did three pass-throughs of the sentence — putting it into Latin vocabulary in Latin, then altering the latin words to fit the correct endings that seemed appropriate, then a third write-through to put the words in the right order.  And then we wrote that quick ‘prayer’ in Latin onto the blank space we’d left on the square of blue paper.  I finished my work, said a brief sotto voce word or two and waved my hand (as if I were a Jedi)…
And the astrological window closed.

A true Hermetic consecration, it was not.  A perfect talismanic creation, it was not. But it led to an interesting conversation, which I’m going to try to explain here, to both an occult audience, and a (possibly) less-interested audience of teachers and school administrators (although maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’d be interested in).

“What’s this all about,” asked one girl.  ”Why couldn’t we ask questions? Why were you so secretive?”

Well, I said, “Well, the ancient Romans believed in magic, and just as they believed in Curse Tablets (called “defixiones”) they also believed that you could do magic to bring beneficial things your way… like the skills and abilities that make you more successful in the world.  They also believed that one of the ways to make magic more successful was to time events on earth in connection with events in the sky — as we did this morning.  I happen to believe that drawing and translating between languages are great skills, so we practiced both of these skills as we made these talismans — tools for calling good dreams to yourself, and also the skills to carry out those dreams.”

A boy apparently thought that was ridiculous, and said, “do I have to keep this?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not. But people all over the world, in all times and places, have made these sorts of things to try to influence the future, and make it better. You can destroy this image, or keep it, or give it away. But the Romans and the Romanists of the Renaissance would have believed this image was charged with a specific intention — the intention to call good dreams to you, and help you grow the skills you need, and the power to make them reality.”

“So it’s like a dreamcatcher?” a girl said.  ”I have one near my bed.”

“Very much like that,” I said. There was a bit of explanation required of what a dreamcatcher was to a number of kids.  ”This card is a tool like that, but operating in a different context.”

Then came the killer question: same girl, different line of attack.

“Mr. Watt, do you believe this stuff?”

I winced, and shrugged. “Belief is such a tricky word,” I said. I wrote two words on the board:

• Orthopraxy
• Orthodoxy

“In this present time,” I said, “we care a lot about ‘orthodoxy’ — that is, what do you believe? But the Romans, and Confucius, and a lot of others, would have asked a different question: have you performed the correct actions?  That’s what Orthopraxy means — performance of the correct actions at the correct moment.  And that’s what this object is about.  It doesn’t really matter that much whether we believe in it or not.  We’ve made it, and as a result we’re empowered in a way that we weren’t before.  Maybe it’s that our drawing skills have improved. Maybe our ability to think through Latin constructions on the fly has improved a little bit. Maybe our artistic sense has grown.  Maybe our ability to connect with the universe as a whole, and with the Moon in particular, has improved. Maybe our sense of what the divine is, has grown.  Whatever.  Do I believe in it? No.  Do I do and make the things at the correct times, when I know about the windows? Yes. Does it seem to work, sometimes?  Yes.”

“So you don’t believe in it?” She presses her advantage.  I love getting the last word in, though, and we have only a minute left in class.  Probably less.

“You have a dreamcatcher by your bed,” I said. “Does it work?”

She nods without even hesitating, in a way that suggests she barely knows she’s doing it.  I press in for a key thought of the day. “Do you believe in it?”

And that rocks her back in her chair.  She’s not used to thinking about these sorts of questions on a Friday.  I let them go off to their next class.

I got the talisman I wanted to make.  I got a group of kids to think about the Latin language and the ancient Romans in a new way. And I got across the idea — through a serendipitous discussion of dream-catchers — the idea that maybe we all do magic, on a lot of different levels, in a lot of different ways. And that we, as a species, as a people been doing magic for thousands of years — to have dreams, to acquire skills, to build success on success, and to make new lives for ourselves.  It’s a universal of human behavior, and maybe, just maybe, they got a taste of that today.

I might call it killing two birds with one stone.  But I’m done with defixiones.  I’d prefer to make Talismans… or maybe I should call them Adfixiones — not curse-tablets, but blessing-tablets.  That’s not striking sparrows — it’s feeding three birds with one crumb.