CONCEPT
Bricolage
Making-do with materials at hand: the cook's improvisational meal from refrigerator scraps, the craftsman's assembly from oddments. De Certeau adapted Lévi-Strauss's term for mythical thought into the operational logic of everyday practice.
Claude Lévi-Strauss distinguished the bricoleur—who works with whatever happens to be available, assembling from scraps without a predetermined plan—from the engineer, who designs from first principles with optimal materials. De Certeau appropriated this distinction and universalized it: the bricoleur is not the primitive's cognitive style but the ordinary practitioner's creative mode. The cook opening the refrigerator and making dinner from half an onion, leftover rice, and an egg nearing expiration is a bricoleur. The student assembling an essay from lecture notes, overheard conversations, and vague intuitions is a bricoleur. Bricolage is the art of making-do—judging which materials can be adapted, improvising combinations no blueprint anticipated, producing something that works from resources never designed for the purpose. In AI-assisted building, the practitioner who takes the model's heterogeneous output and assembles a coherent work is performing bricolage.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Lévi-Strauss introduced the bricoleur in The Savage Mind (1962) as a figure of mythical thought: someone whose creativity is constrained by