by Alec Foege
The jazz critic Gary Giddins once wrote of Louis Armstrong that few fans of the legendary jazz trumpeter and entertainer, known for his virtuosic improvisational abilities and genre-busting experimentation (musical tinkering?) as much as for his comedic stage persona, understood how truly influential he was: “How many of those who enjoyed Benny Goodman’s swing caravan in the thirties or rocked to Chuck Berry in the fifties or savored the increased vibrato that became fashionable in the brass sections of symphony orchestras knew the extent to which they were living in a world created by the famous gravel-mouthed clown?”
True American tinkerers are like Louis Armstrong. They operate within an existing vernacular and yet break new ground by the sheer force of their creativity and exuberance. Certainly there are those operating in the scientific and engineering fields who meet these criteria, but to limit the role of tinkering to their efforts alone would be nothing short of foolish. While not everyone is a brilliant tinkerer, everyone has the ability to be creative.
In their misguided attempt to become more results oriented, many American school systems have become more focused on raising test scores than on immersive, process-based learning that incorporates some of the ideas put forth by Gever Tulley’s Tinkering School.
Some are trying to correct the effects of this trend at the graduate level, In 2005, David Kelley, founder of IDEO, a renowned innovation and design firm based in Palo Alto, California, established the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, a nondegree program known as the d.school, to teach students in the university’s seven graduate schools how to embrace ambiguity, experimentation, and the possibility of failure. George Kemble, the d.school’s executive director, told the Wall Street Journal in 2011 that much of what the d.school did was help students unlearn what they learned in elementary school. Kemble explained that a fear of failure was very common among students accustomed to taking standardized tests. “What we want the graduate students to do is work with others and go out and take risks,” he said.
My own daughter’s experience one year in elementary school was, I worry, far from atypical. We live in a Connecticut suburb not far from New York City known for its exceptional public schools. It’s the kind of town families move to primarily because the schools are good and well run. Generally, the caliber of teachers and students in these kinds of school systems matches those of the nation’s best private schools.
But one year, in particular, my daughter had the misfortune of being placed in the class of one of her school’s less-inspiring educators. Whereas most talented teachers know instinctively that “teaching to the test” is a bare-minimum requirement that must be augmented with other materials and creativity, this teacher was adamant about sticking firmly to the curriculum as stipulated by the school board and by state requirements.
Even worse, the teacher was maddeningly literal in her interpretation of her students’ performance—she once excoriated our daughter for decorating a penmanship exercise with color markers after she had completed the assignment, scrawling “Be Neater!” across the top of the page—and overzealous in her use of discipline and scolding as a motivator. Beyond those qualities, she expressed little interest in topics that didn’t pertain directly to the day’s lesson, and made no effort to incorporate current events into her class’s discursive flow.
For that whole school year, my wife and I gritted our teeth and tried our best to shield our daughter from what we couldn’t help but judge to be a harmful influence on our daughter’s educational development. During our family time, we sought to augment our daughter’s classroom experiences with other, more stimulating experiences: favorite books, museums, theater, word puzzles, and math workbooks. She has always been artistically inclined, so we enrolled her in after-school art clubs and weekly piano lessons.
After some prompting from us during a parent-teacher conference, the teacher offered our daughter the opportunity she had been waiting for: the chance to develop an optional project she would later present to her classmates. My daughter was visibly nervous, but also quite excited. Finally, she would have an opportunity to highlight her individual interests and creativity.
A budding art fan, she chose Pablo Picasso as the subject of her presentation. My wife and I couldn’t have been more pleased. We enthusiastically took her on a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she studied original Picassos close up, and chose one to focus on in her presentation. Her ambitious plan was to explain cubism to her classmates, what they were looking at, and why Picasso painted the way he did. She began her research online and dutifully wrote out key points on index cards to coalesce and organize her thoughts.
Unfortunately, her teacher seemed to have forgotten all about the assignment by the next week and made no effort to follow up. My daughter was unbowed, however, and continued developing her ideas, even without her teacher’s input. She made her own rendition of a Picasso-style painting and combed through a few art books she checked out from the local library.
After a round of parental intervention, the project gained steam again and finally was scheduled. By all accounts, it went off very well. However, at the end of the term, there was no mention of the project on her standardized report card (alas, these days, even the comments on report cards are often standardized, chosen from a prewritten list).
My wife and I gave a collective sigh of relief once the year was over. One moment during the first few weeks of summer, after enough time had passed since the end of the school year, my daughter off-handedly confessed that one of her favorite experiences during the school year had been packing up the classroom at the end of the spring term. She explained how she enjoyed figuring out where things could fit and how she gained a sense of accomplishment once everything was finally put away. “It’s more fun than just sitting at a desk all the time,” she told me.
Over the past few years, a new kind of company has emerged in the United States that seems to acknowledge that preaching the importance of learning more practical skills is not a very good way of encouraging tinkering or the innovation that it produces. And though each company does it somewhat differently, the basic idea is the same. Rather than attacking the problem from the front end and putting pressure on the tinkerers, these companies address the back end by, in effect, financing tinkering that seems to exhibit some degree of promise but that for whatever reason has not found backers or a traditional support system to help it flourish.
Many of these companies conduct business through a model known as “crowdfunding.” Crowdfunding harnesses the interactive power of the Internet to convince strangers to donate money to sponsor a particular invention or creative project and then provides them with a reward once the project is completed. The best-known crowdfunding company at the time of this writing is Kickstarter in New York.
Another related business model is known as a “seed accelerator,” a reference to its rapid approach to seeding, or funding, start-up technology companies. Unlike the traditional world of venture capital firms, in which a large number of entrepreneurs compete for a relatively small number of lucrative funding opportunities, seed accelerators create a framework that provides smaller funding opportunities to a much larger group of start-ups, as well as a support organization that provides advice and contacts to fledgling companies. Y Combinator, based in Mountain View, California, is probably the most established. Another is TechStars, out of Boulder, Colorado.
Y Combinator, cofounded in 2005 by Paul Graham, a former computer programmer with a PhD from Harvard, organizes itself as a boot camp for start-ups, holding two three-month-long sessions a year, during which fifteen to twenty entrepreneurs learn the ropes from Y Combinator’s experienced pros in exchange for 6 percent of the resulting company’s equity. Each start-up is given a relatively small amount of capital, usually between $14,000 and $20,000, depending on the number of founders, just enough to allow participants not to work additional jobs while participating in the programs. Some of the more than thr
ee hundred companies Y Combinator has helped launch have gone on to great success, including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Scribd.
TechStars, started by serial entrepreneur David Cohen, takes more of an American Idol approach, auditioning more than one thousand applicants for each of its start-up programs in Boulder, New York City, Seattle, Boston, and San Antonio, and ultimately accepting less than one percent. Its spring 2012 event in New York had fifteen hundred applicants, of which fourteen were chosen. TechStars provides winners with $14,000, expert guidance, unlimited access to a network of technology mentors, as well as free office space, also in exchange for a 6 percent equity stake in each company. SendGrid, Sensobi, and Filtrbox are a few of the resultant concerns.
While Kickstarter is adamant about its role as a booster of artistic projects rather than businesses, it comes closest in my mind to playing the role of a tinkering incubator. Maybe that’s because its founders have the kinds of generalist backgrounds that most resemble those of the tinkerers being undersupported by the contemporary American business community.
Kickstarter was the brainchild of cofounder Perry Chen, also the company’s chief executive. While living in New Orleans in 2002, he decided he wanted to organize an electronic-music concert featuring Austrian DJs Kruder and Dorfmeister. The show never came together, as Chen quickly realized it required too much personal financial risk. He wondered whether he could create a web application that would help raise money for such an event from others, thus lessening the burden on the individual innovator.
Chen didn’t make much progress on his idea for the next three years, but he didn’t stop thinking about it. He returned home to New York in 2005, and found work as a waiter. One day he found himself describing his concept to a customer, Yancey Strickler, a young rock music journalist. Strickler was intrigued, and the two began devising a plan of action. Together with a third partner, Charles Adler, who brought technological knowhow to the table, Chen and Strickler struggled to make Kickstarter a reality. They nearly gave up more than a few times over the next few years, but Chen persisted. Kickstarter officially launched in April 2009.
Kickstarter’s selection process for each project it sponsors is something apart from the traditional route followed by tinkerers. Applicants pitch their idea on Kickstarter’s website and must choose a specific amount of funding they need to complete it and a deadline for raising the money. They also must offer a reward to participants, anything from a personalized thank-you note, a credit on an album cover, or a customized T-shirt. The typical donor gives a small amount, commonly $25.
If the project fails to generate the dollar amount requested by the deadline, it doesn’t move forward. If it raises enough money in time, the project goes ahead, financed by the group of small donors.
Not any project can get funding via Kickstarter. The company employs a staff of screeners to filter out proposals that don’t fit their concept of supportable endeavors. In general, Kickstarter won’t sanction charities, political causes, careers, or start-ups—these goals are apart from pure creativity and receive support elsewhere—nor will it approve projects that consist of nothing more than a request for handouts to buy something. The company encourages participants to craft clever pitches for their idea, which frequently include homemade videos.
One of the earliest successful Kickstarter campaigns was a project pitched by Allison Weiss, an Atlanta-based musician, who wanted to raise $2,000 in sixty days to fund the recording of her latest CD. Weiss raised that amount in only ten hours and eventually received $7,711 from more than two hundred donors.
Kickstarter is eager to keep its mission focused on creative works, as opposed to gadgets and businesses, but it’s been something of a struggle. One of the reasons is that the concept has caught on so rapidly—Kickstarter was on track to raise around $300 million in funding in 2012, three times the amount it raised in 2011—that the amounts being raised have escalated beyond the modest art project proportions the cofounders first envisioned. As example, Amanda Palmer, a musician once signed to an independent record label, launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 to raise $100,000 in thirty days to complete and promote her new album. Instead, in a month’s time, she collected $1,192,793 from 24,883 people.
The other reason is that, while Kickstarter still funds plenty of music, film, and art projects, it also has succeeded in funding some high-profile products resulting from tinkering. The best-known example is the Pebble, a customizable electronic paper watch with a display similar to that of an Amazon Kindle e-book. In classic tinkering style, the prototype of the Pebble was built from spare cell-phone parts. Pebble’s creator, Eric Migicovsky, launched a campaign for $100,000 in May 2012; he ultimately raised more than $10 million from nearly 70,000 backers.
But the essence of the Kickstarter process has remained largely intact. According to a source I spoke with close to the company, the cofounders view themselves as modern-day Medicis, reinventing the patronage model on democratic terms. That means that Kickstarter backs projects big and small, both mainstream and quirky, with equal enthusiasm. Because the company extracts a 5 percent fee from the total amount collected for each project, it certainly benefits from projects that achieve seven- or eight-figure donations. But since Kickstarter doesn’t take any equity in those projects, it quickly and happily moves on to the latest and greatest proposals.
Among the more serendipitous tinkering projects that have been funded through Kickstarter are a line of dress shirts that use technology developed at NASA to control perspiration, reduce odor, and eliminate wrinkles; a stainless steel coffee bean that prevents a cup of coffee from getting too hot or too cold; the C-Loop, a camera strap that attaches to the tripod mount on the bottom of the camera rather than the hooks on the top to prevent the strap from getting in the way of the lens; and an innovative textile printing process that uses sunlight to develop images.
The beauty of the Kickstarter approach is that the would-be patrons that sign on to fund a project become part of the story of the project’s evolution. Each concept lives or dies based on the direct interest of a relatively random group of observers. By tapping into this untethered enthusiasm, tinkerers become immersed in a very free-form process of discovery that almost miraculously removes them from the corporate ecosystem that can be so stifling.
There’s some irony in the fact that technology has helped return tinkering to a state not that far off from the way Benjamin Franklin must have experienced it: unpredictable, unencumbered, and swirling with possibility. I suspect that America’s tinkering spirit is a cyclical resource, prone to fallow and fertile periods that are impacted at times by major world events, such as World War II. And for all the disruptive power that tinkerers hold, theirs is ultimately a noble cause. After all, tinkering rescues us from a far riskier fate, that of stagnation.
As long as the United States continues to make room for and accommodate those who see things differently and remain determined to make their visions prevail against all odds, tinkering will remain our most precious, but renewable, natural resource. Whether that tinkering is physical or virtual matters less than the level of freedom and space given to those who practice it. Knowing that it is okay—indeed, necessary—to go beyond what is recommended or permitted by an authority, whether pedagogical or commercial, is intrinsic to the American tinkering spirit. Being difficult yet diligent, determined yet daydreamy—somewhere within these kinds of contradictions lies the future of our national connectedness. All that stands between here and there is cockeyed bravery.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Simply put, this book itself required a lot of tinkering.
The story of its creation is, in one regard, the tale of two Tims. It began with a conversation that my agent, Paul Bresnick, had with the book’s original editor, Tim Sullivan. Tim had an idea for a book called The Tinkerers, inspired by Daniel J. Boorstin’s Knowledge Trilogy (The Discoverers, The Creators, The Seekers). From that point, I ran with the idea and fleshed out what that book might
be. I give Tim Sullivan a heap of credit for saying yes to nearly everything I suggested. And thanks to Paul Bresnick for making it all happen.
The first Tim eventually moved on from Basic Books. My new editor, Tim Bartlett, thankfully had passion for the project and added his own enthusiasm into the mix. Tim Bartlett proved to be an expert collaborator and a pitch-perfect sounding board. His patient and careful editing of the text made nearly every sentence stronger. I am grateful for his ongoing encouragement and engaged participation. Additional thanks to his assistant, Sarah Rosenthal.
I also owe thanks to all of the contemporary tinkerers who agreed to be interviewed for this book. I had a pretty specific notion of what I hoped to get out of them and none complained, not even once, when I persisted in trying to get it.
My wife, Erica, was a true collaborator on this project, as well. She helped me carve out the time from a hectic family schedule to focus on the work and assured me at every step along the way that it was worth it.
Last, I’d like to thank my children, Charlotte and Henry, whose intelligence and curiosity partly inspired this book. Their natural inquisitiveness and interest in figuring out how stuff works helped me appreciate that the American tinkering spirit lives within every new generation, just waiting to be awakened.