the non-problem and experiential reality...
June wraps up my 3rd Fellowship Year at the Foundry Makerspace, and the 11 month have flown passed with ups and downs. I have enjoyed working with all the amazing teachers at John Harris and SciTech, as well as building connections to other schools through the amazing work with other Fellows at the Foundry. This year’s take away has been the relationships between school and community. I’ve talked about this in past blog posts, but what has transpired over June has been significant within the internal transitions of the District and the relationship with the community and community capacity building.
June is also a time when my family takes a week off for vacation. I usually spend this time trying to catch up on reading. I have a hard time trying to decide what books to take to the beach. I never know the mood I will be in, but I at least make an effort to take very hard hitting books about the issues facing our society. The list this year included this list, which was added to those I listed in my May 2019 blog "what a difference 119,600 hours makes..."
The sweetness of summer reading/listening
will continue...
I don't know why I have a huge stack of books around me. It has always been this way through college, but not in high school. I bounce around a lot between books, because it takes all the “free time” to allow my mind to sift through topics. I also enjoy trying to make connections between the books. A game I play is have the author's points interact in each book drawing parallels. Many times this isn't difficult because I am using looking at a certain type of book within non-fiction - life journey, technology or sociology. All of them have similar overarching threads.
June also signals my participation with the annual STEAM Camp at Marshall Math and Science Middle School. This summer will be the 4th year that I will be participating through LifeInPa.org. I work with Justin Williams, who runs LifeThruMusic, and back in 2015, he had the idea to have me start LifeThruTech. It has been an amazing experience ever since. The focus for this year’s camp is Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs.)
It has been a fascinating process of working with teachers and artists to develop a main theme. I love working a 4Cs mindset (communication, collaboration, critical-thinking, creativity) helping flesh out a 5 week camp. Besides the overall theme, each year we all work towards a final showcase on the last Friday. We never know what it will look like. We just “trust the process.” I help students understand it in a Design Thinking mentality.
In the STEAM Camp I created a Scratch Studio for the students to follow my work - 2019 Marshall STEAM Camp, and I also build to Scratch Projects - One Sample for the HBCU Quiz and One Sample for the HBCU Presentation. Both of them feature Morgan State University.
It is a beautiful thing because the camp becomes a tangible model to help students exist in ambiguity. It is always interesting to see students and faculty deal with unknowns. Sadly our society pushes everything into either a plan or a schedule. While these are not inherently wrong, we tend to place a high value in things that are PLANNED or SCHEDULED. I see this within the District, within the City of Harrisburg, and within some of the work at the Foundry.
What should be stressed is in the documentation of a Process or Flow. I try not to use the word “plan” because that suggests that it must be followed at all times, no matter the cost. Having multiple meanings causes confusion. Sometimes the negative meaning builds a solid foundation in people's minds, because of how they have experienced the words in daily conversation or through the journey of life.
I see these parallels in Urban Design & Planning. We forget about the inherent iterative mechanism within planning. Plans are guides and are not meant to be very strict or stored on a shelf as a checklist. The lack of planning workflow in Harrisburg and current disarray of the Harrisburg Comprehensive Plan is an example of those mindsets. The initial impetus of the Comp Plan was to follow the PA Municipal Planning Code as a checklist, to make sure a cyclical 10 year planning effort happened. When it was demonstrated that more was needed to address the needs of city residents, the dialog changed to the Harrisburg Comprehensive Plan as being too specific. This was seen in the open comments at two public meetings in 2017 and 2018.
So you might ask, what does all of this have to do with making? Simple, it is about valuing ideas.
I have to confess that during a group trip to the 2017 World Maker Faire in Flushing Meadow, Queens, a disturbing thought-worm (ideas that persist). At the time I didn’t think that is was disturbing. It was the phrase “idea-rrhea.” It was a word mashup of idea and diarrhea.
While even mentioning the word can invoke a pretty intense visual and I apologize. This came up when another Fellow used the term to describe the phenomenon that ideas were just throw around in a very loose way. Doing more research, I found that the term goes back to 2003 from an Urban Dictionary.com 031008 post. It is helpful to describe how people are loose with idea generation. I have used the term in discussions, because it does help to talk about the problem of excessive ideas.
One of the problems that I had in discussing the term while attending the Maker Faire was that idea people didn’t have any “follow through.” What was missing was a “process.” At the time, we thought that this was valuable. And that evolved into getting to ideas that had value. And continuing the logic, what determines that value? Getting to an end product.
What I have realized in reflecting through the STEAM Camp and on vacation is that ideas should be valued, not because they produce, but that they even exist. I apologize in ever looking down at ideas because they were just mentioned on the cuff without having a basis for completion. It wasn’t intentional. I am working to change my mindset. I now see that looking at ideas in previous mindset, is like looking at a child and asking, why aren’t you an adult yet.
Part of the breakthrough comes through digging into one of the books I mentioned in the May blog titled Refuse to Choose, by Barbara Sher. I picked up this book to support a concept of Scanners. She developed this concept back in her 1994 book, I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was. This was further developed in her 2006 book, Refuse to Choose.
As Barbara describes on page 5, “what is a scanner?”
“Scanners love to
read and write,
to fix and invent things,
to design projects and businesses,
to cook and sing,
and to create the
perfect dinner party.
(You’ll notice that
I didn’t use the word
“or,” because Scanners
don’t love to do
one thing OR
(italics on or) the other;
they love them all.)”
“To Scanners the world
is like a big candy store
full of fascinating opportunities,
and all they want
is to reach out
and stuff their pockets.”
Barbara continues with “who isn’t a scanner?”
“Well, specialists aren’t Scanners, obviously. If you’re someone who is happy being completely absorbed by one field, I’ve labeled you a Diver. Some clear examples of Divers are professional musicians, scientists, mathematicians, professional chess players, athletes, business owners, and financiers. These people may ‘relax’ with a hobby, but they’re rarely passionate about anything but their field.”
Now before you say, “but wait Rob, you always talk about not categorizing folks, why are you supporting a book that looks at just two categories?"
I agree that it isn’t helpful in categorizing people, but it is helpful in self examination to look at patterns within ourselves and others. Our brain works in part / whole comparison / contrast operations (REF: 190204 NPR Hidden Brain, One Head, Two Brains: How the Brain's Hemispheres Shape the World We See.)
Why do I find this helpful? Because it relates to the topic of the STEAM Camp. It seems that there is pressure within STEM folks that the A in STEAM just isn’t important. I continue to argue that it is important because Art is the process that builds understanding in the other areas - STEM. It also is extremely helpful to look at things in a wholistic mindset of relationships. Sadly our educational system separates out STEAM into individual classes and doesn’t always help students connect the dots between S-T-E-A-M or connect those to real life applied thinking.
Barbara brings up an interesting premise to a change in thinking from the technology race with the Soviet Union after World War II. Prior to this time period, people who were considered “generalists,” were the majority, and in Barbara’s worlds “admired.” It is interesting to see that competition with Russia pushed our thinking (or values) to things that produced.
As Barbara explained “university faculties turned into specialized training centers; science and technology - the realm of specialists - reigned supreme.” (Sher, 9)
She continues “departments of literature, the humanities, even history were seen as irrelevant luxuries.” (Sher, 9)
Her book focuses on analyzing one’s life to in a world that considers “non commitment to a career path” as being distracted.
This is all important to be reflecting on at the beach as space is made to pause. I always enjoy walking the beach to allow my mind to decompress and untangle from the frantic pace of “putting out fires.”
This is a breakthrough and again, I am sorry to myself for that letdown / slip in thinking.
So the topic is very fitting because life is never static. Things are continuing to transform, and that should be something to be embraced. We never know what elements discussed at one point in time will pop up again in the future.
And this is where the lightbulb lit up. All through college I had sketchbooks of my design ideas, which focused around my undergraduate and masters level projects. Sometimes sketches and ideas would fill up the notebooks dedicated to my general classes. What never clicked for me was to translate this process into a daily design journal/notebook. It isn't that I don't keep track of my thoughts, I find myself doing that through email and photographing whiteboards / or sketches. Sher explains the idea of a Scanners Daybook, which took the idea of a Design Journal / Engineering Notebook to the next level - the LEVEL of LIFE. It was the idea to see life as the DESIGN PROJECT. That was a mindset so necessary to provide structure just turning 46.
The concept of a Engineering Notebook / Design Journal shouldn't be new. Some examples are found at Sciencebuddies.org. The website has a great overview for teachers and shows some historical examples of past notebooks of inventors. The site also provides a Using a Lab Notebook guide to help students set up notebooks for use in Science class.
Sher describes The Scanner Daybook as... "simply a blank book devoted to what you do each day - as a Scanner, of course." (Sher, 11) She makes mention to Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, and I've always considered it as something of an Engineering Notebook. Meaning that it was a place to document the process or outcome of a particular invention / device / product. This is where Sher's book helped me to free my mind to consider it a place to capture all the elements. It wasn't a diary or journal as I've tried that in the past and seen them as very linear. This Daybook was a way to map my goals & objectives through time - day, week, month, and year.
So at the beach I picked up a blank Sketchbook to start the process to build the format of a Scanner Daybook. I have started the process of setting daily time to add to it. It compliments my already extremely handy Mead 6 Ring 5" x 3" Memo Book that I carry in my back pocket everywhere. This has been extremely important in following the dialog of any lines of communications while being a Foundry Fellow. I highly recommend them. Now I will have a larger "bigger picture" outlet for daily / weekly connections that is also analog.
So here is to the getting ideas down on paper and the letting go of a drive to produce. The summer has already been a transition into experiencing the process. Ultimately, I hope that I build value on that within myself and others that I work with on future endeavors.
Epilogue: On the topic of information abundance and the necessity of allocation...
"What information consumes
is rather obvious:
it consumes the
attention of its recipients.
Hence a wealth of information
creates a poverty of attention,
and a need to allocate
that attention efficiently
among the overabundance
of information sources
that might consume it."