Tinkering is a way to generate knowledge. What kind of knowledge results from a tinkering process in your experience?

During tinkering sessions, you are working hands on and trying things out. This hands-on approach means you are more getting practical skills that really theoretical ones. Even so there are still different things to learn. The first type can be on how tools work. Recently when I was sewing something I was fiddling around with the stich options on my sewing machine, and I discovered how to get more distance between my stitches.
A second type of learning that can happen is to discover a method on how to achieve a result. The past few weeks I’ve been working on sugar glass. First, I found a simple recipe and tried to make some glass. Then I went to making sugar glass in a mould. Here I first tried to pour the sugar in on one side. When that didn’t work (as the bottle didn’t have a bottom) I tried the other way with different materials on the bottom (baking paper, metal, cardboard). In the end baking paper got the best result. The thing I learned is the method for making sugar glass in a mould which is the second type of knowledge you can learn.
A third type of learning is more mental as it is about a mindset. Just having tinkering material in front of you is not enough to start tinkering. You need to pick up the material and start exploring. Taking this step can be difficult and a facilitator can help with this, but it is also something you can learn. An example I can think of is during the tinkering ‘’informal’’ demo session. One of the groups had a demo focused on making sounds with different moving parts and blocks. The group had built some things themselves which everyone tried out, but they didn’t try to tinker with it. Most likely the perceived “value” of what the group build was too high for the people to change it but there is also a slight lack to tinker. Taking this step and it gets easier every time you tinker is something you can learn from tinkering.
In specific cases tinkering can also teach very specific theoretical knowledge, such as what definitions mean what in coding. For this kind of learning the tinkering playground does have to be specifically geared towards this kind of learning such as in the case of the coding tinkering exercise for session 3

Tinkering with classical materials like clay, paper, colour, textiles is more related to craft. How does tinkering work with digital and electronic media?

In the lectures there is a large focus on tinkering being a hands-on experience. I do not fully subscribe to this idea as making tinkering purely physically excludes some weird activities. Take for example the modular blocks from session 2. The steps most students took in their tinkering were: sketching on paper – possibly making a model with paper/cardboard – making a 3D model - 3D print/laser cut the design. If you exclude digital and electronic media, then suddenly the students are no longer tinkering when they make the 3D model. All changes made to the 3D model based on the print wouldn’t count.
Another interesting scenario related to tinkering with electronic media is tools. Say I am sewing and trying some things. Is it only tinkering if I sew by hand or with a mechanical sewing machine? Is an electronic sewing machine allowed? An even more digital example, there are sewing machines that can embroider things based on a digital pattern. Is it now no longer tinkering because I am not doing it by hand? Yes, it is more difficult to make changes during the process, but I can still try things out and experiment.
Now to be fair both cases still had a hand on exponent. However, the examples do show that designing something digitally can be part of tinkering. I therefore believe that tinkering is possibly when working with digital media. An example would be making website design. It is something that will not lead to a physical product such as 3D prints. Regardless of this I think coding and figuring how to make elements work and testing out where on the page they can go, does count as tinkering. Possibly a specific subset of tinkering as it does not have a physical component but still tinkering.

One basic characteristic of science is reproducibility. Is that possible with tinkering? Or do we want that at all?

To my understanding reproducibility in science is about being able to reproduce the same results based on the research design. If a scientific discovery is reproducible that means everyone that does the same research in the same way should be able to get the same result. Achieving this with Tinkering will be very difficult. To recreate a tinkering session, you would need to get people with the same experiences with the same mood in exactly the same environment as the original session and then you might be able to get the same results. Interestingly tinkering is similar to archaeology in this regard. You cannot truly reproduce a dig as you would need to find the exact same excavation environment. In Archaeology you therefore need to make clear notes on methods used and artefacts found. I believe tinkering should be the same, if you write clear notes and describe how the results were achieved then you have done well enough for people to know what your findings are based on. Another argument against reproducibility is that you do not want people to reproduce what is already made. Reproducing things does not lead to serendipity which is a focus of tinkering.

Design practice changed during the past years, from long design phases to short, iterative processes, due to the availability of new prototyping technologies. Is this iterative process of prototyping qualitatively different from the cycles we do in tinkering?

I have two distinct experiences with short design phases, Scrum and the CreaTe design process. The difference between these methods is large and therefore the answer to this question also differs greatly. In the CreaTe design process the iterative design process and especially prototyping is very similar to tinkering. It is more guided however, as you often have requirements to meet. These requirements can change but often there is still a client to make happy which his different from tinkering which is freer. Scrum is nothing like tinkering, every task is very clearly defined, and the short design phases simply means you have more moments to check if you’re on track. There is very little discovery involved.

Can a co-design session be described as a tinkering session as we treat it in our course?

I believe a co-design session has the ingredients needed for tinkering, but there is more to it. In a tinkering session you are all working together and tinkering together, with possibly a facilitator present. In a co-design session, you also work together to design a product, however differently from tinkering there is a divide in groups and in goals. The goal of the ones leading the session want a good design and a good understanding of the group they are co-designing with. The group co-designing wants a good design. Therefore, I believe the second group can be tinkering but the first group is also doing something else. Tinkering can be part of their experience but is not the only goal. Therefore, a co-design session is not a tinkering session, but a tinkering session might be part of a co-design session.

The choice of materials (seed, tools, scaffolding, facilitation) has an effect on the outcome, the knowledge and products made in a tinkering session. How can we use that in a co-design session? Can we really influence the kind of results here, and do we want that?

Of course you can influence the results of a co-design session. If you give a group of inhabitants a ton of different bricks and ask them to start designing ideas for a wall the changes, they want a wicker wall seems small to me. People tend to ‘’think inside the box’’ and use the materials provided to them. An example of this was when I played an ‘’escape room’’ board game. One of the solutions required you to look at the side of the box where in the advertisement for a different game there was a code. We struggled quite some time with finding this solution. This shows how people tend to use the materials they think are ‘’allowed’’ to solve the issue. Now for the question if you want to influence the people in the co-design session there are a few things to consider. First you might only have a limited number of materials available to design your solutions, so adding more materials will likely disappoint your co-designers when they cannot use the materials. Second adding uncommon materials might help improve creativity as they have unique constraints within, they have to work. Thirdly specifically deciding for a preferred solution and providing the materials needed for that hoping to get your solutions is not great. By doing this you are taking away the openness from the session and it is likely no longer tinkering. In short, guiding your participants to some regards with materials provided can offer interesting results but guiding too much might stop people’s creativity.

In “research through design” can tinkering fill in the design part?

As in the question above about design cycles, I believe the difference between tinkering and “research through design” (RTD) is the difference in motivation/requirements. The seed is not discovered during the session, but the inspiration and general goal are set down. There is also a large focus on knowledge generation in RTD which tinkering does not have. In the first question I did say that you can learn from Tinkering but that is often focused on the process and not the results. Even then I believe tinkering can not fill in the design part because it is too unconstrained to fit with the requirements of RTD.

Are there design questions where tinkering is not a possible or useful approach?

This question also came up in the lecture in which it was discussed that some questions are too unsafe to apply tinkering to e.g. nuclear fission, life altering medicine and weapon design. Another type of question that tinkering does not answer well are subjective questions. Often design questions ask for a specific groups input. In module 6 of CreaTe my group was designing a language app. Our design questions were: “what do people prefer in their language apps?” and “what interaction helps students with their studying?”. We could have used a lot of tinkering to try interactions ourselves but however much we did it would not be as effective as trying it with the target group. Tinkering could help with thinking of interactions but in this case, I still believe interviews and prototype testing are more effective ways of answering these types of design questions.

Read Invent to learn page 41. how to balance real-world (criticality) with the fruitful mindset of tinkering?

A method that I think embodies this balancing well is the 6 thinking hats. Each hat represents a different “mindset” and way to approach a problem. The green hat is creativity which stands for creativity. This hat is similar to the fruitful mindset of tinkering. The black hat is the cautious one and is critical. Often in a brainstorm there are multiple phases and depending on which phase you are different hats are more represented, so you start with more green ones and later there are more black ones. I think these ideas of it being hats you can put on and off is a great way of thinking on how to use these mindsets. In some situations, it fits better to use the green/tinkering mindset and in some the black/critical one works better. When to use what is up to judgement and based on what you are trying to achieve. Multiple times I’ve been told, mostly joking, to be less of a black hat when I was critical of an idea. So, the balancing is in focusing on one mindset at a time and switching when needed.

Source: Jayne, P. (2019) Six thinking hats – Active Learning at King’s, King’s college London. Available at: https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/activelearning/2019/05/17/six-thinking-hats/ (Accessed: 15 April 2025).

what is the critical impact your tinkering exercise could have? (on you, your design/engineering practice or problem, both positive and negative)

The exercise is motivated by the possibility of motivating people to use origami. Origami offers a lot of possibilities, but people don’t know how it works or how to apply it in science. Therefore, the hope is that it could have a positive impact on students designing toolkit. On a more personal level I have learned a lot on origami which I hope to apply in a design problem.

what is the impact your session have regarding (more) stuff, ecological footprint and impact on our planet (i.e. how can you avoid that STEM workshops with waste material result in more waste material?)

One of the reasons we wanted to explore origami as a method is that paper is an easy to procure material that is low impact. However, there is still paper waste at the end which is unfortunate. One thing we could improve is using paper that has already been used for something and is now ready to be thrown out. This would be Reuse as it would be difficult to Reduce the amount of paper we use. We cannot really have one piece of paper per group as that would seriously affect the amount of tinkering possible.