Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Fascination with making
It seems that since the dawn of time we human beings have been making things. The distinction between producer and consumer or manufacturer and end-user are somewhat artificial. The nature provides us with ingredients, human beings somehow pick up on things and start to build stuff out of them. That seems like the essence of "end-user" involvement. The gap simply has become greater as the compleixty of manufacturing has grown ever more great. With recent efforts to close that gap, it seems to have tagged along that artificial titles of "manufacturer/producer" and "end-user/consumer".
Mick pointed me to an interesting bird called the bower bird which seems to be exceptionally interested in building things. Well, "exceptional" because it's very human-like. They build things to get chicks. ;) You should read it, it's quite fascinating. ^^
Why do we like to make things? What is our fascination? Is it the challenge? Is it the control? Is it the power? Is it the curiosity? Is it in the genes and evolution just happened to keep those willing to "innovate" alive longer until the economy as a whole was able to sustain those less willing to innovate? Does the fact that companies are providing tools to build things significant? If so, in what sense? Is it simply a nice-to-have for the end-uers willing to innovate? or is it a real booster for those who were less willing? What about the people who will build tools out of those tools to help others who are even less willing to build stuff (wow, what a sentence!)? I leave you with my hero Feynman's quote:
What I cannot create, I do not understand.
