Bricolage and the adjacent possible

[I]deas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we've inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape…

You can see this process at work in the primordial innovation of life itself. Before life emerged on Earth, the planet was dominated by a handful of basic molecules: ammonia, methane, water, carbon dioxide, a smattering of amino acids and other simple organic compounds. Each of these molecules was capable of a finite series of transformations and exchanges with other molecules in the primordial soup: methane and oxygen recombining to form formaldehyde and water, for instance…

The scientist Stuart Kauffman has a suggestive name for the set of all those first-order combinations: "the adjacent possible." The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup. Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside that circle of possibility. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

Steven Johnson writing about The Origins of Good Ideas. (I'm on a bit of a Steven Johnson kick lately). I've always liked the idea of bricolage, which I first encountered reading Claude Lévi-Strauss at university (the perils of being a cultural anthropology major). But Lévi-Strauss' idea of bricolage is very different from the way I've come to think of it. Whereas Lévi-Strauss makes a distinction between experts (in the form of engineers) and bricoleurs, I think that experts are by definition bricoleurs. Experts are the people who can see the adjacent possible where others see nothing more than a pile of unrelated parts. Steven Johnson gives the fantastic example from Apollo 13, but I'm thinking of the people I know. People who can take APIs and create something no one has ever seen before: a mashup.