hackers and painters …
Hackers and painters = hacking the paper….
So after reading this essay I am very excited to lear more about what hacking is.
I made tons of notes and I felt that there is a tight relationship between creativity and science. Since I came to ITP I have felt as a outcast. Most people, at least that is the stereotype, of the people who are into Fashion and that are “Fashionistas” seems not to care about the power of technology: how it can brings us closer to each other and to ourself, because Fashion more than anything provides the framework for self-expresssion.
On the order hand , I felt that by embracing what I call sometimes “my shallowness” I was a complete outcast in an environment like ITP. What I consider my shallowness is the relevance that fun and beautiful things have to me. There is beauty in all beings even if they do not fill the standard, but I cannot help myself in being attracted and inspired by aesthetically beautiful things.
When reading Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters” I felt so identified in many ways. I respect his willingness to expose his vulnerability and his reflections on his process, and not being afraid to share it.
In relation to the work that I am trying to do.
“The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.”
When he talks about how writing is an craft acquired by copying, pasting, paraphrasing in order to come up with our own creation
“Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.”
It is part of human nature, we imitate what we think is right, beautiful and interesting. The after imitating our thinking process starts its own road. This is how I see my experience with Fashion: by imitation I have being able to come up with my own ideas. This has also depend upon the lack of resources [not being able to afford certain clothes, and working with materials that are available to me].
I also really like Graham’s emphasis on learning by doing, and that is something that come across in a lot of the readings you have assigned us in class. This is true to any craft that involves the human factor, as you might say ” there is no perfect network, only highly efficient ones”. I really share this approach to technology and to design at any level!
His insights on project development and what he calls sketching is something I share. When you are designing, I personally never get it right on a 100%, I only manage to get figure out parts of the puzzle at the time, and I never thought of programming in this way.
I think this is a great coincidence you referred me to this article, since I have been struggling to figure out my creative process and how it embraces the environment in which I am developing [ITP] , with my “lack of technical knowledge”. Technology always felt unfitted to me: I am not precise, I can have thoughts or ideas that do not have a especific answer, but many possibilities and it is hard to settle for one. Also, I felt a lack in my background, I felt that not having a rigorous background in the sciences I was not worthy of doing interesting work, like the “lucky” people who had it.
SO … empathy and intelligence not really related , you can have one without the other. This is such an interesting concept. Math is precise to approach hacking as a liberal art is an interesting concept and this is were I fit better. I never understood why someone with the technical and scientific knowledge , like many of my classmates and professors here at NYU’s ITP would want to spend time explaining over and over concepts that naturally I would not grasp by myself. They were suppose to be snobs, and see me as a outcast who do not have their same mentality and skill, how wrong I was to expect that from those people. In part was my own insecurity, but I realize that it is a stereotype that has been created and that unconsciously many people like me have nurtured. Within myself I am fighting these silly misjudgments.
Same way I am misjudging,
Copy , learn, be emphatic , be original, do not be afraid of precision deal with the anxiety, and get use to it because in the real world things are not as precise and smooth as math
“Prices are determined by supply and demand, and there is just not as much demand for things that are fun to work on as there is for things that solve the mundane problems of individual customers. ” I guess assume that this is true because people want o invest their little free time on fun stuff ….
“Because painters leave a trail of work behind them, you can watch them learn by doing. If you look at the work of a painter in chronological order, you’ll find that each painting builds on things that have been learned in previous ones. When there’s something in a painting that works very well, you can usually find version 1 of it in a smaller form in some earlier painting. ” This concept of growth and improvement is very important in my thesis, since as in Fashion things are constantly improve, or at least change every given period time. This ephemerality of fashion is one of its most appealing characteristic and at the same time one its biggest disadvantages, since these involves a veery structured system of forecasting and production, so the use of new/radical technologies take a longer time to develop and being implemented. I want a symbiotic relation between fashion_technology and costumer/creators. Then I ask … is every costumer a creator?
The concept that hacking come in cycles is very clever. In order to do good work you have to do it in cycles
his insight in group work is something worth testing = give ownership to the hacker!!! this makes it successful !!
“You need to have empathy not just for your users, but for your readers. It’s in your interest, because you’ll be one of them. Many a hacker has written a program only to find on returning to it six months later that he has no idea how it works. I know several people who’ve sworn off Perl after such experiences. [7]”
The fashion industry alienates, [at least in my experience ] . Enlightenment maker better users and it enhances their creativity, which enhances other aspects of their lives. Fashion sells a fantasy. It makes me dream, I love these fantasies the same that I get from music videos. I want to make people dream, but there is an awareness that needs to be created of the existence of the real world, in order to translate abstracts experiences into our everyday life. \\
This are my notes on this paper!! very good reading …..
http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html