zwilichkl made me do it

At dinner today, I was talking w/zwilichkl about environments that are conducive to "doing stuff". She described a lab instrument as (to paraphrase) not so new you were afraid to poke at it.

This reminded me of some architecture reading I did a while back. The guy was describing how this wood frame "temporary" building put up during WW2 produced lots and lots of interesting science because people weren't afraid to swap spaces or cut holes in the walls or basically do whatever they wanted. This was contrasted with the building that later replaced it, which was carefully designed to be an ideal workspace, but which the occupants didn't like nearly as much.

That reminded me of a student group I belong to (LEM), whose atmosphere encourages people to take on projects or just go ahead and make something happen, regardless of whether they're officially leaders, which is an atmosphere I really enjoy. (It doesn't hurt to have a productive place to use avoiding-thesis energy, nor that the group is fantastic in a number of other ways.)

We also talked about how this manifested at Mudd. For me, it was mostly the ability to go buttonhole profs in random departments and ask them things. I have one particularly clear memory of charging down from Time Suck to the Physics dept one afternoon carrying the clock, which we'd suddenly realized we only partly understood. Eventually we had a couple profs drawing on the little magnet-donut with markers, working out exactly how it was moving with each tick.

(I also know a number of do-stuff people, but that doesn't spill over in exactly the same way.)
[EDIT: that should read]
I also know a number of make-stuff people, but their activity doesn't spill over in exactly the same way. (Some other entry I'll write about my longstanding admiration of make-stuff people or the distinction between do-stuff and make-stuff)


Anyone else have have examples of "do stuff environments"?

(And now enough provisioning of procrastination, back to work with me)