Bricolage
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- For the Amon Tobin album with this name, see Bricolage (album).
Bricolage – from the French-language verb bricoler, meaning "to tinker" or "to fiddle" – the French language's equivalent of the English phrase "do-it-yourself".
Bricolage is also often contrasted with engineering: building by trial and error rather than based on theory.
A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur. A bricoleur is a person who creates things from existing materials, is creative and resourceful: a person who collects information and things and then puts them together in a way that they were not originally designed to do.
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[edit] Culture
[edit] Anthropology
In his book The Savage Mind' (1962, English translation 1966), French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used the word bricolage to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought. [1]
Jacques Derrida extends this notion to any discourse. "If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur." [2]
[edit] Cultural studies
In cultural studies bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of subcultures such as, for example, the punk movement. Here, objects that possess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and given a new, often subversive meaning. For example, the safety pin became a form of decoration in punk culture.
[edit] Visual Art
In art, bricolage is a technique where works are constructed from various materials available or on hand, and is seen as a characteristic of postmodern works.
These materials may be mass-produced or "junk". See also: Merz, polystylism, collage.
[edit] Music
Bricolage is the name of a 1997 album by the Electronic Jazz Breakbeat artist Amon Tobin.
"bRiCoLAge #1" is a Girl Talk album released in 2003.
[edit] Television
MacGyver is a television series in which the protagonist is the paragon of a bricoleur.
[edit] Science
[edit] Biology
In biology the biologist François Jacob uses the term bricolage to describe the apparently cobbled-together character of much biological structure, and views it as a consequence of the evolutionary history of the organism. [3]
[edit] Education
In the discussion of constructionism Seymour Papert discusses two styles of solving problems. Contrary to the analytical style of solving problems he describes bricolage as a way to learn and solve problems by trying, testing, playing around.
[edit] Information technology
[edit] Information systems
In information systems, bricolage is used by Claudio Ciborra (1992) [4] to describe the way in which Strategic Information Systems (SIS) can be built in order to maintain successful competitive advantage over a longer period of time than standard SIS. By valuing tinkering and allowing SIS to evolve from the bottom-up, rather than implementing it from the top-down, the firm will end up with something that is deeply rooted in the organisational culture that is specific to that firm and is much less easily imitated.
There is also a content management system called Bricolage. See http://bricolage.cc. In the FAQ regarding its name it references the concept of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
[edit] Internet
In her book Life on the Screen (1995), Sherry Turkle discusses the concept of bricolage as it applies to problem solving in code projects and workspace productivity. 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. In her essay Epistemological Pluralism, Turkle writes: "The bricoleur resembles the painter who stands back between brushstrokes, looks at the canvas, and only after this contemplation, decides what to do next."
[edit] Organization and Management
Karl Weick identifies the following requirements for successful bricolage in organizations.[5]
- intimate knowledge of resources
- careful observation and listening
- trusting one's ideas
- self-correcting structures, with feedback
[edit] References
- ^ Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris, 1962). English translation as The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966). ISBN 0-226-47484-4. See also [1] [2]
- ^ Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"
- ^ Molino, Jean (2000). "Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Music and Language", The Origins of Music. Cambridge, Mass: A Bradford Book, The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-23206-5. (p.169). See also "Bicoid, nanos, and bricolage" by PZ Myers.
- ^ Ciborra, C (1992). "From Thinking to Tinkering: The Grassroots of Strategic Information Systems", The Information Society 8, 297-309
- ^ Karl Weick, "Organizational Redesign as Improvisation", reprinted in Making Sense of the Organization
