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The wick is only string (on making do) · Soft Ratios Research

• 0:09
  Figure: Soft Ratios Research.
• 0:12
  Ground: The voices are synthetic [pause] no act, just the thinking.
• 0:19
  Figure: Hoyd Breton, a designer at Soft Ratios Studio, teaching himself in the open [pause] which works better with a reply. [pause] If this is interesting, write a review with your thoughts.
• 0:31
  Ground: One subject at a time, twice a week [pause] Tuesday and Thursday. [pause] Today, the craft of making do.
• 0:38
  Figure: There's a word people reach for when they watch someone do this well. They call it a knack. Somebody digs through a junk drawer, and ten minutes later the broken thing works again, and everyone in the room quietly decides that person was simply born able to do that.
• 0:54
  Ground: Born with it. Like perfect pitch. You either have the MacGyver gene or you don't, and the rest of us stand there holding the useless part.
• 1:03
  Figure: That's the belief I want to take apart, because it's wrong in a way you can measure. The thing we're calling a knack is a skill. It has a mechanism, the mechanism has a name, and there's a technique that reliably makes people better at it.
• 1:17
  Ground: Then don't hand me the technique yet. Give me the moment. When does the knack actually show — or fail to?
• 1:25
  Figure: Picture a candle, a book of matches, and a small box of thumbtacks. Your job is to fix the candle to the wall so it burns without dripping wax on the floor. Most people try to tack the candle straight to the wall, or melt it and stick it. Both fail.
• 1:43
  Ground: And the answer's sitting right there.
• 1:45
  Figure: Empty the box. Tack the box to the wall, stand the candle in the box. The box is a shelf. [pause] This is Karl Duncker's candle problem — his work was published in 1945, though he'd built it in the thirties. And here's the number that matters. When the tacks are inside the box, so the box reads as a container, only about forty-three percent of people solve it. When you dump the tacks out first and present the box empty, close to everyone does.
• 2:17
  Ground: Same box. Same everything. You just changed what the box was doing a second earlier.
• 2:23
  Figure: Duncker had a German phrase for it — Funktionale Gebundenheit. Functional fixedness. The object gets bound to its function. And he had a cause: pre-utilization. Once you've just used the box as a tack-holder, that use fixes it. You've stapled the box to the word container in your head, and now you can't see the shelf.
• 2:46
  Ground: So it's not that you can't see the shelf. It's that you already spent the box. It went into your hands labelled, and the label stuck.
• 2:55
  Figure: Robert Adamson replicated it in 1952 — three problems, same result. People given empty boxes were about twice as likely to solve as people whose boxes had been used as containers. It's one of the most durable findings in the psychology of problem-solving.
• 3:11
  Ground: But that's the box in a lab. Where does this bite in real life? Where's the wick?
• 3:18
  Figure: The wick's the whole point of it. This is Tony McCaffrey's example, and it's better than the candle. Two steel rings. You need to join them into a figure-eight. All you're given is a candle and a match. People reach for the wax — try to glue the rings with it — and it's far too weak, and they give up.
• 3:35
  Ground: Nobody touches the wick.
• 3:37
  Figure: They don't, because the word wick means the thing you burn for light. It's bound. But run it down a level: a wick is a piece of string. Run it down again: string is strands of cotton fibre. And the moment you've said cotton fibre, the answer is obvious — pull the wick out, tie the two rings together with it.
• 3:56
  Ground: The solution didn't appear when you got cleverer. It appeared when you stopped saying the word wick.
• 4:03
  Figure: That's the mechanism. McCaffrey built a procedure out of it — the Generic Parts Technique. For every part of the thing in front of you, ask two questions. Can this be broken down further? And does the name I'm using imply a use? If it does, re-describe it generically, until the use drains out of the word.
• 4:22
  Ground: Wick to string to cotton. Box to open rigid container. You're peeling the verb off the noun.
• 4:32
  Figure: And it works. McCaffrey trained people in it and gave them eight insight problems. The trained group solved sixty-seven percent more of them than the untrained controls, and got them right more than eight times in ten. His dissertation puts the effect size at roughly one-point-six — that's enormous, for this kind of study.
• 4:51
  Ground: Hold on. Sixty-seven percent, one study — how big was it? Because a number like that gets repeated until it feels like a law of nature, and half the time it's twenty-eight undergraduates in a room.
• 5:05
  Figure: It was twenty-eight people, on toy problems. Fair to flag. I'd call it strong, replicable in principle, not settled. But the underlying claim doesn't ride on that one number — it rides on Duncker, on Adamson, on the whole run of fixedness work behind it. The technique is a clean way to act on a finding that's been solid for eighty years.
• 5:28
  Ground: Fine. I'll take it as a good handle on a real thing, not gospel. What I want to know is why the technique even needs to exist. Why is the default so bad? Why do we walk in with everything pre-labelled?
• 5:42
  Figure: There's a positive way to name the thing we're failing at. James Gibson, 1979 — the idea of affordances. An affordance is what an object offers you to do. A flat, rigid, knee-high surface affords sitting, whether it's called a chair or a crate or a stump. Perception, in Gibson's account, is supposed to be tuned to what things let you do.
• 6:06
  Ground: So a good improviser is just someone whose eyes still work the Gibson way. They walk into the room and see everything as a list of dos, not a list of names.
• 6:17
  Figure: And functional fixedness is exactly the failure to see the non-obvious affordance. The label crowds out the offer. Which raises the real question of the episode — where does the label come from? Because it isn't there at the start.
• 6:32
  Ground: What do you mean, not there at the start?
• 6:35
  Figure: Five-year-olds were effectively immune to it in that study. German and Defeyter, 2000 — give a five-year-old the box problem and they don't get stuck, because they treat any use as a fine use. A box is a shelf is a hat is a boat. The fixedness only comes online around six or seven. So it looks like something we install. It's the price of learning what things are for. Expertise and familiarity build the block.
• 7:01
  Ground: That's a lovely story and I don't believe it. If fixedness is installed by living in a world stuffed with single-purpose gadgets, then take that world away. Somebody who grows up with almost no manufactured tools — where every tool already does five jobs — should be freer. They should never build the block. Is that true?
• 7:26
  Figure: It isn't. And this is where I have to give ground. [pause] There's a study — German again, with Clark Barrett, 2005 — that tested this among the Shuar, hunter-horticulturalists in the Amazon in Ecuador, a culture with very few tools, most of them multi-purpose. Exactly the natural experiment you'd want. If the block were installed by gadget-saturation, the Shuar should be clean of it.
• 7:52
  Ground: And they weren't.
• 7:53
  Figure: They showed the same effect. Prime an object with its normal function first — demonstrate the spoon as a spoon — and people were markedly slower to see the other use. On the spoon task, something like eighty percent slower to reach the solution. The authors concluded the opposite of what I just told you: fixedness isn't a Western artifact of consumer culture. It looks species-typical — a core feature of how humans represent tools.
• 8:20
  Ground: So it's not that a cluttered world taught us to be blind. It's that the thing that makes us able to use tools at all — filing each object under what it's for — is the same thing that blinds us. The gift and the cataract are one organ.
• 8:37
  Figure: That's the sharper version, yes. The same design-function concepts that make tool use fluent can also produce fixedness. A mind that couldn't bind box to container would be a mind that had to rediscover the box every morning. The block isn't a fault in an otherwise good mind. It's the shadow the competence casts.
• 8:56
  Ground: Which changes what the technique is doing. The Generic Parts Technique isn't fixing a defect. It's asking a fluent adult to briefly become the five-year-old again. To un-file the box. On purpose, for one minute.
• 9:12
  Figure: Deliberately un-installing something you spent years installing. And that reframing matters, because it tells you this is a discipline, not a talent. Nobody is born the five-year-old forever. Everyone loses it. The question is only whether you can climb back.
• 9:26
  Ground: All right. That's the perception half — see the properties, not the product. But you keep saying there's a second move. Name the function, not the object. Those sound like the same thing said twice.
• 9:42
  Figure: They're two sides, and the second one is older than the psychology. It comes out of a factory, not a lab. General Electric, 1947. A man named Lawrence Miles. [pause] During the war, GE couldn't get materials — no skilled labour, no raw stock, missing parts. So Miles was forced to hunt for substitutes. And he noticed something that reorganized his whole career: the substitutions often ended up cheaper, or better, or both. Scarcity wasn't a tax. It kept finding him improvements he'd never have gone looking for with a full storeroom.
• 10:18
  Ground: Because the full storeroom lets you grab the obvious part. Empty shelves force you to ask what the part was even for.
• 10:25
  Figure: Which is precisely the method he built out of it. Value Analysis. And its core rule is almost aggressively simple. You are not allowed to describe a component by its name. You describe its function in exactly two words — an active verb, and a measurable noun. What does it do, and to what?
• 10:45
  Ground: So you don't say mousetrap.
• 10:47
  Figure: You say kill mouse. And the second you've written kill mouse instead of trap, the trap stops being the answer — it becomes one answer among many to a function that a hundred other things could also perform. Miles even had a way to diagram it — the FAST chart — where you read left and right by asking how is this done, and why is this done, so you're always mapping functions instead of listing parts.
• 11:14
  Ground: That's the same move as the wick, then. Wick to string is peeling the use off the noun. Trap to kill-mouse is peeling the object off the verb. You come at the label from both ends.
• 11:27
  Figure: From the object and from the need. And in the field, the function side is the one that does more work. The single most useful thing you can do when you're stuck is refuse to name the tool you wish you had. Don't say I need a tourniquet. Say I need wide, secure, adjustable pressure on this limb. The moment it's a verb-phrase, half the room qualifies.
• 11:49
  Ground: A tourniquet's just a wide strap and something to twist it tight. A splint is just rigidity, padding, and a way to hold it in place. Once you say it as functions, the purpose-built object turns out to have been three cheap properties wearing a name.
• 12:07
  Figure: There's a whole engineering tradition that formalizes this against harder problems — TRIZ, from the Soviet engineer Genrich Altshuller, who started in 1946 reading patents as a naval examiner. He found inventive solutions repeat in patterns. Two of his ideas are pure improvisation. One is the Ideal Final Result: imagine the fix already done, for free, with the situation solving its own problem — then work back to it. The other is resources: before you ask what tool am I missing, you inventory what the situation already contains. Substances, waste, heat, gravity, empty space, even wasted time.
• 12:48
  Ground: So the question flips. Not what do I lack. What's already here that I haven't drafted into service yet.
• 12:56
  Figure: And Altshuller named the enemy too. Psychological inertia — the pull to keep reaching for the obsolete method because it's the one your hand already knows. The Ideal Final Result is a crowbar against that inertia. It's the same fight as fixedness, fought at the level of whole solutions instead of single objects.
• 13:16
  Ground: I want to push on something, though, because there's a romance creeping in here and I don't trust it. [pause] You've now told me twice that scarcity is secretly a blessing. Miles found better parts because the shelves were empty. Altshuller says use what's already there. And the whole folk tradition sings the same hymn — necessity is the mother of invention. But that's the kind of thing comfortable people say about hardship they've never lived. Most of the time, empty shelves just mean the thing doesn't get fixed.
• 13:50
  Figure: That's the honest worry, and there's a study that draws the exact line. Acar, Tarakci and van Knippenberg, 2019, pulling together a scattered literature on creativity under constraints. The finding is an inverted-U. A little constraint boosts originality — it blocks your lazy default and forces a deeper search. Too little, and you take the easy path. Too much, and it just crushes you. The dose is everything.
• 14:17
  Ground: So necessity is the mother of invention — up to a point — and past that point necessity is just the mother of going without.
• 14:26
  Figure: And it depends on skill and knowledge underneath. A binding constraint only sparks a person who has enough materials-knowledge to search with. Take the constraint past that, or hand it to someone with nothing to search, and you don't get cleverness. You get failure. The romantic claim needs both qualifiers or it's a lie told about the poor.
• 14:46
  Ground: Then let me carry the folk side properly, because I think the tradition understood something the studies only half-say. [pause] Nearly every culture named this. India has jugaad — the frugal cobbled fix, the never-say-die workaround, named after a makeshift little vehicle. Brazil has gambiarra — the repair you improvise when the proper part is missing, born in the favelas. France has système D, from se débrouiller — the knack for wriggling out of a bad situation fast. Cuba has rikimbili, rebuilding bicycles into motorbikes, what one writer called technological disobedience. And across Latin America there's the plainest one of all — lo atamos con alambre, we'll tie it with wire. [pause] And here's the part that isn't romance. A designer, Víctor Viña, quotes a Brazilian scholar saying the gambiarra practitioner sees the world as abundant in potential solutions rather than scarce in resources. Read that again. The gift isn't the scarcity. The gift is a way of seeing that finds abundance where the untrained eye finds lack. Same room, same junk. One person sees five broken objects. The other sees fifty usable properties.
• 16:08
  Figure: That's the abundance the studies don't quite reach, yes. Fixedness is the scarcity-eye. The folk-craft is the abundance-eye. Different vocabularies — Gibson's affordances, McCaffrey's generic parts, jugaad — for one act of perception.
• 16:25
  Ground: But the tradition is also honest about its own rot, and I don't want to skip that. Every one of these words has a shadow. Jugaad, when resources come back, curdles into an excuse for corner-cutting. The clever-under-scarcity fix becomes the shoddy-because-lazy fix, and nobody notices the moment it turned.
• 16:50
  Figure: English carries that split in two separate words, and they get confused constantly. Jury-rig and jerry-built. People think they're the same. They aren't.
• 17:00
  Ground: Untangle them.
• 17:01
  Figure: Jury-rig is the honourable one, and it's old — more than five centuries. It comes from a nautical term, jory sail, from the fifteenth century, meaning an improvised sail rigged well enough to catch wind after you'd lost the real one. Jury here just means makeshift, for temporary emergency use. A sailor who jury-rigged a snapped mast from spare spars and rope was doing skilled emergency engineering with only what was aboard. It has nothing to do with a courtroom jury — that's a folk etymology.
• 17:36
  Ground: And jerry-built?
• 17:37
  Figure: A completely different word, from the eighteen-thirties, meaning cheaply and shoddily made. And no, it's got nothing to do with calling Germans Jerry — that came decades later. So the distinction is real and worth keeping. Jury-rig — resourceful and sound for now. Jerry-built — corner-cutting and unsound. A good jury-rig still needs testing before you trust it. Good improvisation aims at the first and gets accused of the second.
• 18:05
  Ground: So the shadow the folk-crafts warn about is the drift from jury to jerry. From I made this hold with what I had to I couldn't be bothered to do it right. Testing is what helps establish that a jury-rig is sound for now — a jerry-built job is the shoddy, corner-cutting version.
• 18:27
  Figure: Which is the discipline the honest tradition never drops. A jury-rig is a workaround — celebrated because it works under constraint, never because it's optimal. It's the contingency, not the default. If the proper tool exists and you can get it, use the proper tool. Improvisation is what you do when you can't.
• 18:47
  Ground: Give me the ones that actually worked. The proof it's not just a lab trick.
• 18:52
  Figure: The cleanest is Apollo 13, 1970. The carbon-dioxide scrubber canisters from the command module were square. The receptacle in the lunar module they'd fled into was round. The air was slowly turning poisonous, and there was no adapter aboard, and no store to fly to.
• 19:10
  Ground: And they didn't go looking for the missing adapter.
• 19:13
  Figure: They couldn't, so they didn't. They named the function — route the cabin air through the square canister — and rebuilt that function out of what was on the spacecraft. Manual covers, plastic bags, a hose, a sock, duct tape. And crucially, they built it on the ground first and tested it before they told the crew to trust it. Function over object, verified before use. That's the whole method in one emergency.
• 19:41
  Ground: Give me a smaller one. Something that isn't three astronauts and a nation watching.
• 19:47
  Figure: The egg in the radiator. It was a real trick a young fan sent in to the MacGyver writers, dramatized as an episode — the producer Henry Winkler called it his favourite. [pause] Your radiator springs a small leak. You crack a raw egg into it. The heat cooks the egg white, and it coagulates right at the breach and seals it, at least long enough to limp home.
• 20:08
  Ground: And the reason it works isn't egg-equals-breakfast.
• 20:12
  Figure: The obscure feature is albumen — a protein that solidifies with heat. You had to stop seeing food and see a heat-triggered sealant. Same move as the wick. And there's one more McCaffrey loves — the solar bottle bulb, now spread worldwide as Liter of Light. [pause] In a windowless shack, they cut a hole in the roof and set a clear two-litre bottle full of water through it, with a little bleach so it doesn't go green.
• 20:39
  Ground: Water in a bottle, stuck in a roof. What does that do?
• 20:43
  Figure: The daylight hits the water and refracts, scatters roughly all the way around — a free light bulb, no wire, no power. The obscure feature of water isn't water-equals-drink. It's water-refracts-and-disperses-light. Somebody looked at a discarded bottle and a puddle and saw an optical instrument.
• 21:04
  Ground: That's the one that stays with me. Because a bottle of water is about the most invisible object on earth. And the whole invention is just refusing to let it stay invisible.
• 21:18
  Figure: So we've got the mechanism and we've got the proof. Let me put the question back on the table, because it's shifted. We started asking, is the knack a gift or a skill. We can now ask the sharper thing: if seeing properties instead of products is trainable, why does almost nobody do it — and is anything actively working against it?
• 21:39
  Ground: Because that's the piece the whole thing leaves out. Everyone treats improvisation as a personal virtue — train your eye, do your drills. But you don't improvise in a vacuum. You improvise on objects somebody else designed. And the objects have opinions about whether you're allowed to see inside them.
• 22:00
  Figure: Say what you mean by opinions.
• 22:02
  Ground: The candle gives up its wick. The box gives up its shelf. Those are honest objects — you can read their parts with your eyes. But some modern products are sealed, or just hard to open. Glued shut. Glass on both sides, no screws, a battery you're not meant to reach. You can run the Generic Parts Technique on it all you like — the object refuses to break down into parts. The label isn't just in your head anymore. It's been manufactured into the thing.
• 22:36
  Figure: There's a design history to that, and it's older and more deliberate than people think. The Phoebus cartel — the big lamp companies, Osram, Philips, General Electric among them — signed an agreement at the end of 1924 to deliberately shorten the life of the incandescent bulb. Bulbs of that era ran around twenty-five hundred hours. They agreed to engineer them down to a thousand, and ran a testing lab in Switzerland that fined any member whose bulbs lasted too long.
• 23:06
  Ground: They fined you for making it too good.
• 23:09
  Figure: For making it too durable. It's the textbook case of planned obsolescence. And the phrase is often credited to Bernard London, a New York real-estate man, whose 1932 pamphlet was called Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence. He genuinely proposed that the government assign every object a legal death date — after which you'd surrender it and buy a new one. He thought that was the cure for the Depression.
• 23:35
  Ground: So the cartel and London show an older replacement-first impulse. And modern sealed products create a related obstacle — they can limit what owners are able to inspect, repair, or repurpose.
• 23:48
  Figure: And the pushback is now law, which surprised me. There's a real wave of right-to-repair legislation. The European Union adopted a Right to Repair Directive in 2024. New York passed the first state electronics-repair law at the end of 2022. Colorado passed the first farm-equipment right-to-repair law in 2023, addressing access to parts, embedded software, tools, and manuals. John Deere signed a memorandum with the Farm Bureau that year committing to provide access to manuals, software, diagnostic tools, and repair codes on fair and reasonable terms. Even Apple started offering genuine parts and tools through a self-service repair program, with repair information available to users.
• 24:32
  Ground: And I want to believe that closes the loop, but I don't think it does. Here's my worry, and it's the split I can't resolve. These rules can require covered manufacturers to hand over specified parts, tools, and repair documentation — though the exact obligation depends on the jurisdiction and product. That re-supplies the product. But the manual tells you exactly which named component goes in which named slot. That's the opposite of the wick. It hands the label back to you, laminated.
• 25:05
  Figure: You think repair-by-manual and improvisation are almost enemies.
• 25:10
  Ground: Cousins that want different things. Repair restores the object to what it was for. Improvisation asks what else it could ever be. The right-to-repair laws are a genuine good — they crack the sealed thing back open, they give your eyes something to read. But cracking the box open and seeing the shelf are two different skills. The statute can force the first. It can't legislate the second.
• 25:40
  Figure: That's fair, and I'll hold my end of it against you. The sight is the part no law can mandate. But the law is the precondition. You cannot see the affordances of a thing you're forbidden to open. Repair doesn't give you the abundance-eye — but it's the thing that keeps enough honest, openable objects in the world for the eye to have anything to practise on. Sealed everything, and the skill has no soil.
• 26:04
  Ground: So we don't actually reconcile. You're saying access is the ground the skill grows in. I'm saying access without the seeing is just a shelf of correct spare parts and a person who still can't improvise. Both true. The law gives you the openable world back. It can't give you the child's eye that walks into it.
• 26:27
  Figure: Which turns the design question inward, and this is the part the whole tradition leaves unstated. If you wanted to provision for improvisation — actually prepare for the problem you can't predict — you would not stock products. You'd stock functions.
• 26:42
  Ground: Say what that means concretely.
• 26:44
  Figure: Look at what actually recurs in every improviser's kit. Duct tape, cordage, wire, zip ties, a multitool, a can of penetrating oil. That list isn't arbitrary. Each one is chosen because it delivers a generic function with maximum breadth. Tape is adhesion and patching. Cordage is tension and binding — and unravelled, fine string. Wire is fixation that's rigid but bendable. The multitool is cut, pry, grip, drive.
• 27:14
  Ground: A lot of latent uses per gram. You're carrying verbs, not nouns. Not I brought the thing for this job — I brought the ability to bind, to patch, to hold, to cut, and I'll find out later what they're for.
• 27:29
  Figure: Stocking functions, not products. And once you say it that way, it stops being about a kit at all. It's a stance toward everything you keep. The person with the abundance-eye doesn't own more objects. They own the same objects, seen as more.
• 27:46
  Ground: And that's the quiet reversal in all of it. We spent the whole time thinking the improviser is richer in cleverness. They're not. They're richer in nothing. Same junk drawer as everyone else. The only thing they own that you don't is a refusal to let the wick stay a wick.
• 28:04
  Figure: The candle didn't change. The box didn't change. Apollo's spacecraft had nothing aboard it didn't have an hour before the crisis. What changed, every time, was one person for one minute declining to read the label — and the room went from scarce to abundant without a single object moving.
• 28:23
  Ground: So the whole craft comes down to something almost embarrassingly small. Asking what a thing is, before you ask what it's for. And most of us have gone a whole life without once doing that to an object we were sure we already knew.
• 28:39
  Ground: Pick up the thing nearest you — the one you're sure you already know the name of. If you forced yourself to forget what it's called, and saw only its parts and what each one lets you do, how much of the world would turn out to be sitting there unused, waiting to be seen?