Bricolage
Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced bricolage in The Savage Mind (1962) to describe how mythological thought works. The bricoleur uses whatever materials are available, improvising solutions from a finite repertoire of tools and parts. The engineer, by contrast, designs from first principles, acquiring exactly what’s needed.
The French word comes from bricoler — to putter, to tinker, to do odd jobs. The bricoleur is the handyman who fixes things with whatever’s in the shed.
Lévi-Strauss meant the term descriptively. Bricolage produces genuine knowledge through recombination and reuse. The materials constrain the solution, but constraint generates creativity. Working within limits forces novel combinations.
Software development shows both modes. The engineer writes clean abstractions from requirements. The bricoleur patches together libraries, Stack Overflow snippets, and legacy code. Most working systems contain more bricolage than engineering.
Startups are bricolage operations. The founding team uses whatever skills they have, whatever tools are cheap, whatever market gap is unguarded. The MVP is definitionally a bricolage product — functional but improvised.
The tension between bricolage and engineering maps onto other distinctions: bottom-up vs. top-down, pragmatic vs. principled, tactical vs. strategic. Pure engineering risks over-design. Pure bricolage risks unmaintainability.
Mature systems often start as bricolage and harden into engineering. The prototype becomes the architecture. What was expedient becomes canonical. The shed materials become load-bearing.
Go Deeper
Books
- The Savage Mind by Claude Lévi-Strauss — The 1962 original. Chapter 1 introduces the bricoleur/engineer distinction.
- The Logic of Practice by Pierre Bourdieu — Extends bricolage thinking into social life. Dense but foundational.
- Improvisation in Everyday Life (various) — Sociological takes on how people make do with available resources.
Related: [[creole-technology]], [[rough-consensus]], [[adjacent-possible]]