Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Thoughts on Making Things

It's time to get some thoughts out of my head about making things. Physical things, software things, relationship things. You know, things. That's what engineers do after all.

Nothing is Monolithic

Nothing created by people is a monolith. It's always made up of smaller things. Something may seem greater than the sum of its parts, but only by how we treat it. Really, it is just a number of things put together.
For instance, a beautiful painting may well move me greatly, but at one level it is still flecks of paint on canvas.

Everything is a Hack

"Hack" in the sense of changing a thing to work around a problem. Nothing created by humans springs fully formed into existence; everything is an extension of what came before. Whatever you see around you has taken multiple versions to become what it is now.

Everything looks different when you think about how it was made

This was an epiphany for me at eighteen, when I began to look around me and ask "how was that thing made?". Once you consider how a thing could have been produced, you understand that thing in a different way. And just as children are no less marvelous after you've read a book on reproductive science, software and hardware is still amazing even when you're the one creating it.

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