Tinkering Quotes

“If you tell somebody something, you've forever robbed them of the opportunity to discover it for themselves.”
― Curt Gabrielson, Tinkering: Kids Learn by Making Stuff

“When you engage with people, you build your own insight into what’s being discussed. Someone else’s understanding complements yours, and together you start to weave an informed interpretation. You tinker until you can move on.”
― Marcia Conner, The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media

“From the dawn of time, whenever humanity has wanted to know more, we have achieved it most effectively not by removing ourselves from the world to ponder and theorize, but rather by getting our hands dirty and making careful observations of real stuff. In short, we have learned primarily by tinkering.”
― Curt Gabrielson, Tinkering: Kids Learn by Making Stuff

“he connected the mechanism for the clock to a mechanical ballerina,and the toy danced uninterruptedly to the rhythm of her own music for three days.That discovery excited him so much more than any of his other hair-brained undertakings”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising.”
― Sebastian Barry

“Tinkering is a fun way to learn about the world around you! You get to play with materials, experiment, and work through ideas.”
― Ryan Jenkins, The Tinkering Workshop: Explore, Invent & Build with Everyday Materials; 100 Hands-On STEAM Projects

“From the dawn of time, whenever humanity has wanted to know more, we have achieved it most effectively not by removing ourselves from the world to ponder and theorize, but rather by getting our hands dirty and making careful observations of real stuff. In short, we have learned primarily by tinkering.”
― Curt Gabrielson

“The children are intrigued by these invitation, and it's only a matter of minutes before they find themselves engaged in a new world of possibilities.”
― Rachelle Doorley

“A creative invitation is a combination of materials and context that intrigue children with a suggestion of play.”
― Rachelle Doorley, Tinkerlab: A Hands-On Guide for Little Inventors

“Like most visionary utopias, though. IDN (Integrated Data Network) was never to be. Perhaps it was simply too ambitious a project: infrastructures seldom respond to a single vision or a master plan, as Paul Edwards (2010) writes, and conjuring up a platform that would serve the entire marketplace was an almost Quixotic task. Infrastructures emerge not through planning and calculated foresight, but through the meandering paths of history, in the mangle of making, tinkering, and wrestling with the obduracy of organizations, practices, and their installed base. The system eventually introduced for Big Bang reflected this fragility and contingency of infrastructures: it was the creative result of reshaping legacy devices into a system that did the job for the time being. A band-aid. A product of creative, recombinant bricolage.”
― Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets

“On the left, in the fragile category, the mistakes are rare and large when they occur, hence irreversible; to the right the mistakes are small and benign, even reversible and quickly overcome. They are also rich in information. So a certain system of tinkering and trial and error would have the attributes of antifragility.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“The more you tinker, the easier it becomes. You get used to remixing and improving your projects. You do research and get excited about what to try next. You get inspired by other people’s work. You might fall in love with an idea or get obsessed with finding the answer to a question. You’ll discover you don’t know all the answers.”
― Ryan Jenkins, The Tinkering Workshop: Explore, Invent & Build with Everyday Materials; 100 Hands-On STEAM Projects