Bricolage

It is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler – equivalent to the English "do-it-yourself", the core meaning in French being, however, "fiddle, tinker" and, by extension, "make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose)". The original engineering meaning of hacker is a similar American term.

Bricolage as a design approach – in the sense of building by trial and error – is often contrasted to engineering: theory-based construction.

A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur: someone who invents his or her own strategies for using existing materials in a creative, resourceful, and original way.

Art

Music

Instrumental Bricolage in music would include the use of found objects as instruments:

Stylistic Bricolage is the inclusion of common musical devices with new uses. Shuker [1998 Popular Music: Key Concepts ] writes "Punk best emphasized such stylistic bricolage". Two of the dominant concepts of the Punk movement: DIY (do it yourself) and anti-establishmentarism, fuel the Bricolage style. Operatic Rock is another example: it is a new use of Opera mixed with old fashioned Rock. Occasionally Bricolage appears in Pop music with the use of unusual cultural influences such as folkloric objects such as Irish spoons, Spanish modes, Slavic rhythms, Indian singing-style or Arabic chants for example.

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.

"the.bricoleur" is the name of a musical project started in 2005 by Michael Lawrence (the.bricoleur).

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.

Bricolage can also be applied to theatrical form of improvisation. More commonly known as Improv. The idea of using one's environment and materials which are at hand is the main goal in Improv. The environment is the stage and the materials are often pantomimed. The use of the stage and the imaginary materials are all made up on the spot so the materials which are at hand ar actually things that the players know from past experiences. (i.e. an improvisation of ordering fast food: One player would start with the common phrase "How May I help You").

One Production company that embraces bricolage as their platform for Improvisational Theater is the Bricolage Production Company in Pittsburgh, PA. Their Mission Statement: "Making artful use of what’s at hand, Bricolage uses the distinctive resources of the Pittsburgh region to create theatrical events that stimulate a heightened sense of involvement for the audience."

Academics

Children's Geographies

Hugh Matthews and Faith Tucker (2006) discuss the bricolage of rural teenaged girls. Their research is based in rural south Northamptonshire and portrays the ways in which young people carve out their own environments from otherwise adult-defined spaces.^[2]

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.

Philosophy

In his book The Savage Mind' (1962, English translation 1966), French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used the word bricolage to describe any spontaneous action, further extending this to include the characteristic patterns of mythological thought. The reasoning here being that, since mythological thought is all generated by human imagination, it is based on personal experience, and so the images and entities generated through 'mythological thought' rise from pre-existing things in the imaginer's mind. ^[3]

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." ^[4]

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. ^[6]

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.

Joe L. Kincheloe has used the term bricolage in educational research to denote the use of multiperspectival research methods. In Kincheloe's conception of the research bricolage, diverse theoretical traditions are employed in a broader critical theoretical/critical pedagogical context to lay the foundation for a transformative mode of multimethodological inquiry. Using these multiple frameworks and methodologies researchers are empowered to produce more rigorous and praxiological insights into socio-political and educational phenomena. Kincheloe theorizes a critical multilogical epistemology and critical connected ontology to ground the research bricolage. These philosophical notions provide the research bricolage with a sophisticated understanding of the complexity of knowledge production and the interrelated complexity of both researcher positionality and phenomena in the world. Such complexity demands a more rigorous mode of research that is capable of dealing with the complications of socio-educational experience. Such a critical form of rigor avoids the reductionism of many monological, mimetic research orientations (see Kincheloe, 2001, 2005; Kincheloe & Berry, 2004).

Popular Culture

Television

MacGyver is a television series in which the protagonist is the paragon of a bricoleur.

Computer Games

In the Bungie Software computer game Marathon, Durandal (a self-aware and "Rampant" AI) says, "Freedom is being the bricoleur, the mason" in a reference to his quest to become free. ^[7]

Information technology

Information systems

In information systems, bricolage is used by Claudio Ciborra (1992) ^[8] 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.

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."

Business

Organization and Management

Karl Weick identifies the following requirements for successful bricolage in organizations.^[9]

Links

References

^ http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bricolage
^ Matthews, H. & Tucker, F. (2006) On the Other side of the tracks: the psychogeographies and everyday lives of rural teenagers in the UK. In: Spencer, C. & Blades, M. (eds) Children and their Environments: Learning, Using and Designing Spaces. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. p. 161-175.
^ 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"
^ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Continuum edition. London: Continuum, 2004 (1972). p.7-8.
^ 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.
^ Excerpts from the Bungie game "Marathon." From Level 14, "Habe Quiddam" Terminal 2: "Success" Message
^ 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

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