I am struck by the differences between industrial/ Modernist and post modern ideas about tools that we saw in the quotations about tools that Jean-François brought today, and throughout the working group sessions.
Modernist writers use the language of master and servant: tools serve us as we master, control and use the Earth and natural things (for example, by industrial and mathematical means). Goals are linear and clearly-defined. There are no unplanned side effects, or at least, they are considered to be minimal and not worth noting. The image is muscular, efficient, deliberate and a one-way action of humans taking and making what they want.
The post modern theorists, including McLuhan and David Wills, use the language of mutual shaping and co-emergence: humans are shaped by tools as much as we shape them, and things arise unnoticed or by chance as much as by design. Whatever goals we might think we have are a kind of distraction from the really big effects of interactions between people and technologies. The unintended side effects are always much greater than the intended effects. The image is of a complex co-emergent ecology where no one is in control, intentions and human 'will' are constantly reshaped by interactions, and where mastery is impossible and, in fact, undesirable.
Even the post modern is very human-centric, as Richard pointed out. Perhaps a next move might be to recognize the being-ness of all beings in the more-than-human, greater-than-human world. These beings could be as diverse as trees, rocks, fellow animals, cell phones, hammers and language...
So I am struck by some of the ideas Yasmine, J-F and others introduced where tools are personified and have agency (and perhaps intentions different from our own!):
"Tools need us as much as we need them" --JF
"Do tools learn?" -- Richard
"Tools accumulate knowing" -- Yasmine
"I am interested in what happens when tools go wrong or don't work. Does this open up new possibilities?" -- JF
"What if we had a calculator that sometimes (randomly) gave wrong answers?" -- Nat (I think!)
"What is interesting is when a tool is used for unintended purposes -- as in the video where Laila used the TV remote control for counting by 3s" -- Yasmine
"We shape our tools and then our tools immediately shape us" -- McLuhan
I'm also interested in the materiality and aesthetics of physical tools and the ways they are constructed. So many of the typical manipulatives used in elementary math classrooms are made industrially (by others) from coloured plastics, and cost money. I'm interested in how this differs from tools we make ourselves, outdoors, from more natural materials that we find, forage, grow in our gardens, etc.
What effect does this have on us as physical, earthly creatures? What effect does this have on our senses and sensory perceptions and awareness/ noticing? How might it affect in-depth understanding? Certainly people who walked a terrain, grew to love a certain place, became friends with the rocks of a waterfall, closed their eyes and walked backwards to feel the balance and texture of the land, who became intimate with ropes and knots, who saw their family appear symbolized in their quipus... felt emotions, pleasure, depth of knowledge, surprise.
We also felt pleasure and surprise as we experimented with Cuisenaire rods, with Babylonian square root algorithms, with slide rules, with fraction circles and with drawings. Perhaps it is that freshness of knowing (and suddenly not-knowing!) that we hope to reach by taking up the constraints as well as affordances of particular tools?
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| Toronto Stock Exchange Art Deco bas relief |
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| Douglas Coupland art exhibit-- 2014 |
Even the post modern is very human-centric, as Richard pointed out. Perhaps a next move might be to recognize the being-ness of all beings in the more-than-human, greater-than-human world. These beings could be as diverse as trees, rocks, fellow animals, cell phones, hammers and language...
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| More Doug Coupland |
So I am struck by some of the ideas Yasmine, J-F and others introduced where tools are personified and have agency (and perhaps intentions different from our own!):
"Tools need us as much as we need them" --JF
"Do tools learn?" -- Richard
"Tools accumulate knowing" -- Yasmine
"I am interested in what happens when tools go wrong or don't work. Does this open up new possibilities?" -- JF
"What if we had a calculator that sometimes (randomly) gave wrong answers?" -- Nat (I think!)
"What is interesting is when a tool is used for unintended purposes -- as in the video where Laila used the TV remote control for counting by 3s" -- Yasmine
"We shape our tools and then our tools immediately shape us" -- McLuhan
I'm also interested in the materiality and aesthetics of physical tools and the ways they are constructed. So many of the typical manipulatives used in elementary math classrooms are made industrially (by others) from coloured plastics, and cost money. I'm interested in how this differs from tools we make ourselves, outdoors, from more natural materials that we find, forage, grow in our gardens, etc.
 |
| Shoes, baskets & other fibre art made from grown & foraged materials. EartHand Gleaners, Sharon Kallis, Vancouver. |
What effect does this have on us as physical, earthly creatures? What effect does this have on our senses and sensory perceptions and awareness/ noticing? How might it affect in-depth understanding? Certainly people who walked a terrain, grew to love a certain place, became friends with the rocks of a waterfall, closed their eyes and walked backwards to feel the balance and texture of the land, who became intimate with ropes and knots, who saw their family appear symbolized in their quipus... felt emotions, pleasure, depth of knowledge, surprise.
We also felt pleasure and surprise as we experimented with Cuisenaire rods, with Babylonian square root algorithms, with slide rules, with fraction circles and with drawings. Perhaps it is that freshness of knowing (and suddenly not-knowing!) that we hope to reach by taking up the constraints as well as affordances of particular tools?
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