the Discovering Technology Lab focused on DIY and do-it-together (DIT) technologies, collaborative design, making, hacking, hardware, software, and sustainable technologies. All attendees received a DiscoTech zine and were invited to “get down with Phunky Phone Phreaks, Fierce Fashionistas, Data Viz Wiz Kids, Documentation Doctors, Tech Help Desk Divas and our Wonderful Webmaking Friends

The idea of bricolage produces a new way to talk about, and think about, systems and structures without falling into the trap of trying to build a new stable system out of the ruins of a deconstructed one.

A bricoleur doesn’t care about the purity or stability or ‘truth’ of a system he or she uses, but rather uses what’s there to get a particular job done.

pre-existing things together in new ways, and makes do with whatever is at hand.

The icebreaker for meetings became what they called craft aperitifs, small projects that kept their hands moving. These events invoked a particular idea of “craft” that we elaborate later, one that drew connec-tions between women’s contemporary milestones and feminist histories of handwork.

Creolization, however, does not seek or avoid conflict but aims to transform tech-nology or come up with new practices so that the technical systems better serves user needs. Creolization draws on bricolage practices (Lévi-Strauss, 1966), identifying the components of the technology that can be re-used, modified, or recombined to create something new. Creolization finds users more deeply involved in transforming technol-ogy than baroquization.

Appropriation considers both learn-ing-by-using and learning-by-doing as central to the development of new processes (Rosenberg, 1982). Learning-by-doing in particular assumes that knowledge emerges through bricolage—tinkering with and recombining technology elements, thus enhancing one’s understanding (Lévi-Strauss, 1966). For Tuomi (2002), learning through appropria-tion is a user-centered process whereby users meld culture with material resources to innovate.

Counter to a high-minded association of “liberal projects,” projects in hackerspaces resisted a final form. The action in hackerspace is more bricolage(Lévi Strauss, 1962, p. 18)than engineering. Projects in Geekspace arose spontaneously. Their inertia drew people to the space, bringing their tools and ideas that would then supplement the ideas of others. This churn is captured by how projects were seen as a success of the new space even though very few projects were actually finished.

Scholars, intellectuals, and bricoleurs