11–20 of 39 posts
Probably a good thread to mention the fairphone http://fairphone.com/ Not the prettiest phone but it does what it says on the box/ it's easy to fix it yourself
Ha, when I read the post title I knew it would come from a (Brazilian) Portuguese author. The way I would explain "Gambiarra": it's a quick fix that relies heavily on an ad hoc solution instead of following the generally accepted principles for solving a problem.
On the other side of Atlantic also means a cable for light extension. :)
My father is an old school car mechanic in eastern europe who (at least while i was young) hoarded all kinds of things and reused/repurposed them. I inherited his mentality. At some point he partnered up with a guy and they started their own business. His partner is more of a capitalist. He would run the computer diagnostics on the car, replace whatever the computer says is broken without much root cause analysis, then the old parts are thrown out. This gets repeated until the car runs. They make money on each part. The insurance company pays and everyone is happy. My dad's quality of life is better. He has a weekend house now. He sometimes complains how in the old days one would really fix things instead of replacing them, but he is getting older and not in a position change how the world works.
My own story is playing out a very similar way and I am constantly struggling to decide what is the right thing to do and what kind of person I want to be. Most people of my age (especially in the US) don't even think about these things though.
Edit: formatting.
Felipe Fonseca's critical thoughts about the last 10-15 years of the "makers" movement. Very insightful reading how the general culture of the movement has changed from a repair-reuse-recycle to a prototype-industrial-capitalistic mentality.
Looks like it is from 2015 since it mentions the Obama administration in the current tense.
Ha, when I read the post title I knew it would come from a (Brazilian) Portuguese author. The way I would explain "Gambiarra": it's a quick fix that relies heavily on an ad hoc solution instead of following the generally accepted principles for solving a problem.
Ha, when I read the post title I knew it would come from a (Brazilian) Portuguese author. The way I would explain "Gambiarra": it's a quick fix that relies heavily on an ad hoc solution instead of following the generally accepted principles for solving a problem.
Ha, when I read the post title I knew it would come from a (Brazilian) Portuguese author. The way I would explain "Gambiarra": it's a quick fix that relies heavily on an ad hoc solution instead of following the generally accepted principles for solving a problem.
Accurately translated in English as "hack".
Where and when I grew up, the term was "jury rigging", which I think much more narrowly captures the same meaning as "gambiarra", and likewise escapes the commercial colonization of "hack" and "make". Jury rigs by their very nature are one-offs - necessarily individuated applications of ingenuity, with whatever resources happen to be available, to solve problems often unique to the contexts in which they arise. You can't reasonably call such a thing a "prototype"; it's not an exploration, but rather a (semi-)permanent solution, and should it need to be replaced later on, likely it will be another jury-rig, itself unique although perhaps similar to the first, that does so. Such efforts are the very antithesis of off-the-shelf solutions.
To that point, I think the article author is both right and wrong to decry commercialization, and the commodification of industrial manufacturing techniques, as antithetical to pure ingenuity. I'd agree that when one can 3D print, laser cut, and CNC mill custom parts to a fare-thee-well, the jury-rigging or gambiarra style of ingenuity tends to fade into disuse, because why bother jigsawing together expedients when you can just design the exact thing you need and then manufacture it at a lot size of one? If it doesn't work as expected, throw it out and make another. If it does, the nature of the process lends itself well to the idea of productization (ugh, what a word), because the result is already necessarily designed for manufacture at industrial scale, with only some optimization required. And the large-scale commercialization of "maker culture" in general, with publicity and marketing firms opportunistically adopting the term in a transparent bid for the same sort of exploiting-the-naïve business as those "We Can Get You Published!" ads in the back pages of an old Writer's Market, certainly merits being looked upon with distrust and distaste.
On the other hand, human ingenuity isn't a limited resource requiring conservation; be it ever so disdained, it will nevertheless rise anew in each generation, in each person, faced with a challenge for which no easy off-the-shelf solution or CADed, CNCed custom manufacture is available. We live at a moment of historical coincidence where such solutions are far more easily available than at any time in the past - but that may not always be so, and either way, "the future is unevenly distributed". In those places where it's thin on the ground, people still jury-rig and gambiarra their way past problems, just as we have always done - it's just that we don't hear about it much, because it's not terribly fashionable, and in any case people who do it can't be relied upon to noise it all over Facebook. And should we find ourselves exiting the current historical coincidence into a world where "the future" is less available to everyone, we'll see human ingenuity rise to meet the problems that new world poses, just as we always have.
Ha, when I read the post title I knew it would come from a (Brazilian) Portuguese author. The way I would explain "Gambiarra": it's a quick fix that relies heavily on an ad hoc solution instead of following the generally accepted principles for solving a problem.
Accurately translated in English as "hack".
When the maker culture becomes eminently entrepreneurial,
we should wonder what mechanisms are set into motion. It
may as well be the old capitalist drive to turn the
critique to itself into the gears of its own reinvention
gaining ground. Could we ever escape that path?