My life – in DIY snapshots

My DIY life

My life – as DIY moments

I did not realize that DIY has been such a big part of my life all along.

It is so much in my blood, it seems, that I never questioned this attitude of mine that seems so natural to me.

Only when I finished the recent article about “How do we prepare our kids for a future that is unpredictable and rapidly changing in major ways?” I noticed how much I valued this kind of “do it yourself” attitude and how essential I see it as a key quality for a future that will challenge us with perpetual change.

When I look back, I see that my life path has been shaped repeatedly by my willingness – sometimes boldly and often just naively – to move into new areas of activities, projects and professional endeavors that I had no prior knowledge or education in.

And simply by doing it – Just Do It! – by trial and lots of error too, I learned everything on the job. And one thing followed the other, and what first started as some vague interest – or simply an existential need – very quickly turned into an activity that brought the bread to the table.

DIY

– do it yourself

– to perform for oneself a task usually relegated to an expert.

– making things yourself, rather than paying someone else to do it for you.

Cambridge Dictionary

– DIY has been described as a “self-made culture,” one of designing, creating, customizing, and repairing items or things without any special training.

– DIY has grown to become a social concept with people sharing ideas, designs, techniques, methods, and finished projects with one another either online or in person.

– DIY can be seen as a cultural reaction in modern technological society to increasing academic specialization and economic specialization, which brings people into contact with only a tiny focus area within the larger context, positioning DIY as a venue for holistic engagement.

– DIY ethic is the ethic of self-sufficiency through completing tasks without the aid of a paid expert.

– DIY ethic promotes the idea that anyone is capable of performing a variety of tasks rather than relying on paid specialists.

Wikipedia

Here is my story, in a series of DIY snapshots, so to say.

I have a distinct memory about me as a 5-year-old and my mom.

Me, trying to build a large bridge with LEGO, and the bridge collapsing again and again.

Mother: “Come on, Chris, let me help; let me show it to you.”

Me: “No, no, I want to do it myself!”

And through all the frustration of starting again and failing again, I slowly managed to learn that a bridge needs some kind of a smart architecture to be able to stand the load.

I suppose that this has not been some analytical understanding that I followed, just raw learning by “trial & error”.

For me, that’s the baseline of doing new things, the gloriously naive courage not to shy away from things I don’t know.

Yet.

Next DIY phase I remember – the tube radio phase 🤓

I recall my early teenage years, with a lot of such old ruined radio boxes from the 1950s that I got from the local electrician. Full of dusty parts that evoked a magical fascination in me.

The smell of the soldering iron and the black burn marks on the table.

No idea what those parts were, but I could feel them while I took the radios apart. My first encounter with electronics has been by holding the parts in my own hands.

Next phase – Phillips Electronic Engineer EE20 Kit

I guess that pressed Santa Klaus long and hard enough before he delivered this wonderful thing.

So I could finally build real electronic stuff like a Morse code trainer, a little electronic organ, a burglar alarm, and so on. And understand a little bit what all those parts actually are good for.

Unfortunately the 20 or so predefined devices were quickly built in one two-day marathon …

Then the fun of exploring started, making up new configurations. And burning out all the fragile transistors and diodes. 😉

The cost of learning by DIY

Anyway, the spark was strong enough to inspire me to choose to study electronic engineering.

Unfortunately the curriculum was too boring and theoretical for me, so I found a new friend to hang out with for most of my student years.

Again, in my proven DIY style – with the help of a Leonard Cohen songbook – I managed to find my way on the fretboard – even without some serious training in music notation – and become a pretty good Cohen impersonator.

Those were the heady days of 68.

Times passed, and another domain called – preschool pedagogics.

Same story! The Academy turned out to bore me, so I spent those 2 years mostly meditating during lessons – with my earplugs in.

The real fun with kids started when I ended up in a little startup Waldorf kindergarten.

We wanted to have real wooden toys but had no money to buy them – one thing led to another, and I tried to make some such toys in my spare time.

Found out that my hands could do that with ease. Just like that.

The joy of creating beautiful things with my hands! Toys, little musical instruments, and other nice objects.

Well, again, one thing led to another, and some moneyed Waldorf parents ordered more elaborate toys.

Like double beds, like picture frames, like cradles, like whole kitchen furniture.

All done in the style of the – a bit awkward – anthroposophical architecture of no right angles, all with wonderful real wood, all organic-looking.

I remember a lot of sweating and the steep learning curve with no prior woodworking education or knowledge.

All learning on the job and learning it fast.

My final project, a cool two-story wooden bathhouse with 5 corners (pentagram), roof covered with handmade shingles – no right angles to be seen.

It was hard work and learning lessons, and it was great outdoor fun.

I knew that’s enough. Time to move on.

I will keep my DIY Sonnenhof community building & yoga group facilitating, would be too much to share for such a snapshot-article.

Fast forward to 1997or so, when a chance encounter with a old – half broken – Nikon camera sparked a passionate love affair with photography that lasted to this day.

[ Open website ]

Still to this day i don’t know much about the technical side of camera work, but i guess my DIY-schooled technical intuition has served me very well all along.

This kind of technical intuition – paired with a certain nonchalance that lets me try things out without fear of mistakes – has made me a natural in using computers and complex applications of all kinds.

My first Macbook pro really opened a a almost endless realm of learning and mastering sophisticated applications. No manuals needed, no computer courses either. 🤣

From this day on in the year 2000, my creativity in the digital realm started to bloom. Endless possibilities to edit and manipulate photos and do graphic design with Photoshop, create playful animations in Flash, websites in Dreamweaver, edit videos . . . and so on. 😃

Later on i naturally applied my “Just do it” attitude to learn several web code languages while doing interactive web animations, online experiments with sounds and visuals and even some baby steps into machine learning and rudimentary artificial intelligence.

Here just a few examples, snapshots from those periods of “learning on the job.”

[ the following animations are meant to be played on a computer or iPad / not optimized for phone screens ]

Making art with code – Painterly