Finally reaching the end of Dyson’s biography, and the impression I’m leaving with is mostly this notion of “all of you, everyone really, can MAKE things.”
Use cardboard, or fold paper airplanes to test wing shapes, or weld together metal bits — it’s not that hard, really.
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As a software person, this idea is … alien to me?
Dyson talks about how the Concorde engineers folded paper planes and threw them in the office to test wing shapes. How his earliest vacuum cleaner prototypes were cardboard shoved into the back of an existing vacuum.
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It’s a very liberating idea, this notion that even the shiniest, most sophisticated hardware products start out with jerry-rigged, duct-taped prototypes.
What a wonderful idea to communicate!
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youtu.be/jlif5nk8LMA
Do things for the fun of it. Fun needs good feedback loops. You cant have playfullness without actually manipulating cause and effect. You can try hard to invent something with rational effort and create some manifestation of an untested theory. Have fun.
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Try to do something incredibly hard, and important… and do it with childish playfullness
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I think there’s something wonderful about that — you don’t really get as visceral a sense when making software, because it’s all bits in the ether.
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Oh, it’s just that as a software person, I think everything hardware is ready made and unhackable. (Of course I don’t think that re: software). And so seeing this “if it’s expensive I can just MAKE my own” attitude in hardware is … refreshing and alien and weird!
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