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A comment on In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss Redefined Workflow. Parent comment

Re:In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss ... by js8 on Saturday February 03, 2018 @03:23AM (#16296770)
As I understand it, they point out that Levy-Strauss discovered two kinds of approach to solve problems, engineering and bricolage. The former is careful planning and solving the task by building an exact tool that resolves the problem, the latter is putting together whatever you have available in an approximate solution and moving on.

In software, we would probably call them "software engineering" and "hacking" approaches. For example, in the Linux Kernel init discussion, systemd is an engineering solution, while traditional init system is a bricolage solution.

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Re:In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss ... by Pamar on Saturday February 03, 2018 @03:32AM (#16296790)
Also, as someone else noted in a comment to the sane article months ago (yep, it’s a dupe) the Unix set of single-task CLI utilities (sed, grep etc.) encourage a bricoleur approach at solving problems without having to write a throwaway application (or extend an existing one) every time.
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Re:In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss ... by tebruno99 on Saturday February 03, 2018 @03:15PM (#16299361)
This is only if you hold them as individual items outside the context of the system. These utilities are an engineered solution as a whole. Look how they work together and interact with one another.

If you break an engineered system down into its components and never consider all the ideas and fabric that link them together in an engineered system, you could reduce anything to bricoleur.

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Re:In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss ... by js8 on Saturday February 03, 2018 @03:38PM (#16299503)
> If you break an engineered system down into its components..

I disagree. Yes, Unix is deliberately engineered to allow for bricolage. But many (most) things aren't. Take for example classic PC and the iPhone. You cannot break down iPhone to it's components and remix them. You could do that with a PC, to some extent.

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