I've been thinking a lot lately about search and serendipity and bricolage. Really. How they're related. I'm never quite sure what I'm looking for, but I find all kinds of interesting things. Does my looking for something long enough bring whatever it is I find into being? Is a certain kind of curiosity really a form of invocation? Sometimes it seems so. Or is what I eventually find an entirely different thing than I thought I set out looking for? Don't answer all at once. Or too quickly. Let's explore. Let's search around a bit.

When I was a kid I used to hunt for lizards in Silicon Valley. Only it wasn't called Silicon Valley back then, because there wasn't any, except at the beaches. But there were lizards if you looked for them. Under old boards in bean fields. Under burlap sacks soaked with rain then baked back into the black adobe. You had to be still for a while. You had to notice everything. Because you never knew what might happen next. Hold that thought.

Application of unusual tools, methods and technologies; creating experimental products; Bricolage; multiple iterations and testing.

the above quote and all subsequent indented passages are taken...
from: Minimal structures: From jazz improvisation to product innovation by Miguel Pina e Cunha
source: Organization Studies
1 September 2001
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2001 Walter de Gruyter und Co.

So there's search. But there are various kinds of search, and some of these "kinds" are more unalike than they are similar. That's part of the challenge of searching. Figuring out what you're looking for, and whether the things you turn up are really things-of-a-kind. Or not. But you can't know until you find them, and you wouldn't be searching if you already knew where they were. Am I right, Dude? This is where serendipity comes into it. The happy accident, the stochastic glitch, the cybernetic analog of grace. That changes your direction. Sometimes changes your life. But let's not get too heavy too soon. We're talking about search. And don't worry for now that this is an extended koan. Don't try to understand too hard. Maybe it's just cut-up poetry. What did Freud say? "Evenly-hovering attention." Yeah, that's what we need here. Bear with me.

A working definition of improvisation may be taken from jazz music, where it entails composing and performing contemporaneously. Within organizations, it can be described as the conception of action as it unfolds -- acting without the benefit of elaborate prior planning. It is generally understood in terms of fortuity, serendipity and the unexpected discovery of solutions, often in times of crisis. Some commonly cited examples include: Honda's success in introducing 50cc bikes into the US market; the actions of crew members to save a ship whose navigation system had broken down; and the rescue of Apollo XIII by NASA scientists working with unfamiliar concepts...

Float your evenly hovering attention especially over this bit here: because there are so many different ways of doing things, the way you do things determines not only the results you see, but how you see them. Which translates to: what they are. Yes, Grasshoppa, it's getting very subtle in these postmodern woods. You're in so deep now you can barely see the trees. So let's come back to earth for a minute.

I used to be a carpenter a long time ago, before I got into what you might call naive computational linguistics. Long story for another time. And one day I needed to sink about 6,000 screws to finish a job that was pushing the drop-dead completion date. I thought about buying a screwgun, an expensive tool I was sure I'd never use again. But I bought it and it did the trick. We finished the job on time, got paid, got drunk. Forgot about everything. Yee-hah! And then a funny thing happened, which was that I started to use this new tool for all sorts of things I'd never imagined I could do. Different ways to put things together. I became a cabinet maker. I bought a computer. I went to Tokyo and got myself hired into the hottest artificial intelligence project on the planet at the time. Yeah, just like that. With no background, no formal education, no credentials. Knowledge engineering struck me as another way to put things together. When I discovered that it didn't work, I started writing. Words, sentences, pictures, stories. Bricolage. Little bits of stuff you pick up along the way, having no earthly idea what they might be good for. Then encountering situations where, oh look, that bit might fit right here. How cool. And this thing that looks like a Dada bicycle pump might make a good paragraph ending.

In the past, the literature on product innovation focused on well-planned approaches which followed a clearly-understood structure based on a rational-functionalist paradigm. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that this model is inappropriate in today's highly competitive business environment.

Back to search. What many people mean by this term is hunting for answers. Quick, get me Google! I need to know the current market price of bulk-imported Brazilian weasels because Gen-O-Byte just patented a process for using weasel stem cells to generate new frontal lobe tissue, and if we could just inject some of that extra brain material into our um political leadership... Look, just trust me, we corner the weasel market, it'll be motels on Boardwalk and Beamers for everybody. Right. Find the data to populate the spreadsheet, the fixed-field database. Find the -- ta-da! -- Right Answer. This is what schools teach our kids to do. Which is why so many of our kids do drugs. Hell, I did. Who could stand that kind of boring existence without drugs. I mean, unless you're a natural-born suit. Or just plain weird, like me in my stone-cold sober twilight years. Anyway, that's not the kind of search I'm talking about. Serendipity doesn't exist in that scenario because any result conflicting with the forgone conclusion is perceived as noise. This is anti-learning.

Knowledge of the productive process is helpful in creating an ability to use whatever materials/tools are on hand and to apply them to the task in a manner similar to the art of bricolage... Constant experimentation and trial-and-error have the potential to achieve individual and organizational learning.

Search that's not anti-learning, not about discrete data points and perfect-fit puzzle pieces, tends to be all about learning. It's about stumbling across seemingly unrelated ideas that sometimes turn out to be strangely related. Like everybody's favorite 150 year old Ralph Waldo Emerson essay on self-reliance and the rising tide of pathological narcissism in America today. Like the pedestrian platitudes of New Age mystic wannabes and the racist occultism that fed the Third Reich's twisted imagination. Like the behaviorist and psychoanalytic roots of late 20th century mass marketing.

Some of these connections just can't be... well, connected. Can they? Well no, of course not. Not as long as you're looking through the wrong end of the right-answer telescope they can't. That old "rational-functionalist paradigm" referred to in the quote above is a major reason -- perhaps the major reason -- business has taken so long to get its collective head around the net. And the web. And blogging. And file sharing and podcasting and all the other vectors of human conversation that are still coming out of the freaking woodwork. Because none of it is based on finding the right answer. What it's based on is linking to the next question. What it's based on is curiosity. Tinkering with bits of stuff and funny tools to put that stuff together into entirely new and heretofore unimagined kinds of stuff.

bri-co-lage
n.
Something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available: "Even the decor is a bricolage, a mix of this and that" Los Angeles Times.

[French, from bricole, trifle, from Old French, catapult, from Old Italian briccola, of Germanic origin.]

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright© 2004, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

OK, so the usage example sucks, but you get the idea. And how do I know this? Simple. You wouldn't have read this far if you didn't.

NOTE: All the images in this post were randomly generated by TYPOgenerator, seeded in each case with the word "bricolage." As to the floating text you see here, I found the code in an HTML file automatically translated by google from a PDF. The resulting effect looked nothing like the original. It was, ambiguously underscoring the point of all this, much more interesting. Mandarin Design ran an item on this yesterday. I've hacked the code further since, and -- as it says of itself -- I invite you to do likewise. So to search, serendipity and bricolage, perhaps we should add recursion.