Posted by Jacques Pochoy on December 08, 2001 at 02:50:04:In Reply to: Re: Self Controlled Wheelchairs-our inventor dads posted by Hollie on December 07, 2001 at 21:04:20:
Well, In your grandfather's time, when they were kid's, they must have dreamed of soapbox cars, trying to design the fastest one or the lighter one, searching for days in junkyards the bearings they could use for the wheels and so on.
Folks didn't buy "finished" products for their kids. To play, kids had to "invent" their games, and some times build themselves the "props"...:-)
Attics and basements were treasures of "junk" that waited there to be "recycled" in junior's dreams... Sort of fantastic Ali Baba's cavern, in wich some crude tools could do miracles.Those people, because of that "self-training" had a good feeling of materials, tensileness, structure and assembly. Further in their lives, they called it "intuition" because it was there, somewhere in their mind when they needed it....
Today, most kids get a nervous breakdown when their very own tv set breaks down, or when they can't find the same "processored" game than their friends, or if they don't have the latest game device (same thing for music anyhow)!
I'm not against Ford's idea of producing the T model,nor do I really believe in Malthus, but I'm truly against raising childrens as we would produce cars (Everybody can't have the Harvard or Princeton model, bad luck, try next year sales).What I wanted to state, is that I'm discovering as a teacher, that I have today to teach things that were "natural" some years ago (instinctive, intuitive, subconscious or whatever). The trouble is that I would hope that this "training" (old fashioned, nuts and bolts, pencil and paper) could have been replaced by "something else", a "new" way of thinking ( quantic versus analogic) or a better phased "intuition" that would profit in a "state of art" designing process.
Alas, I 'm still trying to find out the hidden gem in the useless (non recyclable) crap our societies produces in their "education" systems... Even "common sense" has disappeared and maybe should be called otherwise...
People like FLW or Bucky (I prefer Nervi and Le Ricolais, but of course, I'm biaised..:-)) were not "genuises" (I don't believe in bottled genies) but people who had a good deal of "data" acquired in their young days and had the "knack" to use it efficiently in their designing proess.
Their "common sense" was several notches higher than the usual one of their time.Mostly they had the capacity of "looking" at their surroundings not as a flat "image" but as a complex machine, and spent a lot of time figuring how they could disassemble it to reassemble it in a "better" way ( How many alarm clocks went MIA in those times..:-))!
Most of today "theories" (continental or not...:-)) are just layers over a basic background, if you look only at the layer, it hasn't any sense. As Paul Malo stated in another post, the "heroes" of today must be situated in their context, with the knowledge of their epoch, wich is usually far greater than the layman believes. Then, and only then, can we "learn" from their work, seeing through all the layers up to the core.
As I say (too often, I know.. Wee bit boring, eh?) the "cut, copy, paste" process can only give us "collage", not true understanding without which no designing can be made, never.
High level studies are not done to acquire "data" but to train in processing them.The wheelchair anecdote is one between many of the loss of a culture that could be vital if not really replaced by "something"!
When I look at how people built buildings circa 8000 BC, I'm amazed at their level of technology, of knowledge, of "savoir-faire"! I can't find their equivalent in today's work!If somebody has a vague hint of any form of "value" in today's way of thinking, I'll be glad to read about it...:-):-):-)
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