Alex Byrne
Youth Services Librarian
Pierce County Library System
Mastodon: @TheyofHIShirts @ glammr.us
for
Washington Library Association Conference
10 April 2025
#wla2025
Fart Around and Find Out
F.A.F.O. is not just an internet meme, it's also a way of approaching problems in the real world and a suggestion on how to make classroom and programming environments more real and more meaningful to those who participate.
In regular parlance, when FAFO is invoked, it's usually with a negative idea, that there are consequences, and inevitable consequences, that happen when a person start Farting Around in their lives. Adopting Fart Around and Find Out as an intentional idea acknowledges that there will be consequences, and encourages seeking out those consequences so as to better understand both the problem and a potential solution that may work for it.
Research into Maker methods and real-world problem-solving suggest that learners get more benefit and more involvement in their learning when the problems are suited to their own contexts and life situations, especially when compared to textbook problems and scenarios. Real-world problems are less likely to appear in school classrooms or library programming settings, and school and library programs sometimes have space and time constraints that prevent full engagement in trying to solve those real-world problems. Classroom and library programs, however, can encourage tinkering and put sparks in motion, but without further ability to explore scenarios, or support for continued learning and tinkering outside of the library or classroom, the leap from getting someone started to keeping them interested and working on long-term and real-world problems doesn't happen easily. Independent motivation and investment in tools to study and try and enact solutions are often the province, and privilege, of a certain few. We can do better.
Fail Around and Find Out
The idea of Failing Around and Finding Out is embedded in the scientific method, although it's not necessarily understood or taught that way. When we teach the scientific method, the process seems neat and tidy. We have a hypothesis, we do an experiment, we get results. Most diagrams and explanations of the Method point out the possibility that experimentation may not prove the hypothesis, and that it may be necessary to discard the original hypothesis or modify it in light of the evidence, but it's not usually reported in final papers how much wrong there was before something finally went right, and how much of experimentation in science is about being wrong about something before something finally goes right.
Somewhat tongue-in-cheekily, but if you play the game "PhD 2048," you get a good representation of the amount of time spent and complications produced when trying to create a work worthy of a doctoral degree. It takes the already difficult game of 2048 and adds complications to it related to the life of the researcher.
But more seriously, the Best Practices in Science project at Stanford University maintains a list of journals and blogs that are specifically about publishing high-quality experiments in different disciplines that return results favoring the null hypothesis. That is to say, the experiment happened and nothing new came out of it. They also maintain articles about why scientists shy away from admitting their failures, even if those failures are good science. So many incentives skew toward publishing positive results and papers, that the amount of work that went into finding the things that were not the results is basically hidden and discarded.
Fiiddle Around and Find Out
Merely giving someone the opportunity to fail does not a learning environment make. Tinkering and making have lowered the cost of failure by encouraging rapid prototyping and sourcing their materials from donations and castoffs, or by investing in things that are expensive, but then usable by the community, so as to take the price of each individual thing down significantly. By emphasizing process over product, even if there is a desired product in mind, makes failure about learning ways that something doesn't work, on the way toward learning what does. And it puts the focus of the exercise on all of the learning that happens along the way, rather than reserving judgment of success based on whether or not the final product functions as intended. The best environments for process-based learning and experimentation, then, come from where it's safe and encouraged to Flop Around and Find Out, with no pressure to produce a working result, except from whatever internal motivation there is for the learner to find a useful, working, or even partially-working solution to their problem.
Classrooms and the pressure of grades sometimes sour attempts at building this environment, but public libraries and library programming is generally offered without this expectation of either a finished product or an evaluative grade. This makes public libraries ideal for this kind of experimentation and process-based learning in whatever programming they offer, whether it's high-tech, low-tech, or just messing around with things to create art.
For example, taking apart known non-working technology just to see what it looks like inside will help people get familiar and comfortable with the tools that they'll need, as well as giving them a subtle idea, or an obvious idea, about how difficult some technology is to disassemble and repair, and how easy some other types might be. Plus, having gone at something with devices that you can make mistakes on, if the opportunity or requirement comes up where they have to unassemble something of their own to try and fix it, they'll have had practice with how the process goes and what things to watch out for. Creating art of just about any form, so long as it focuses on the process instead of the product, gives people more familiarity with the tools and their own creative processes. Making sure there's enough time and materials on hand to work through the processes of Fiddling Around and getting to the Finding Out phase, is the important part.
Flail Around and Find Out
It is sometimes helpful to have expertise on hand so that when someone runs into a problem, they can be scaffolded into figuring out how to either retreat from what they're doing and try something else, or untangle the situation they're in and find a useful result. The Flailing Around and Finding Out method is particularly effective when it comes to technology learning and instruction, but there are significant issues when it comes to enacting that method for many library users. It sounds like it should be easy to make this work. After all, the American Community Survey for 2021 [PDF] reported that across the United States, 95% of households in the United States had at least one computer inside. That certainly makes it feel like there's all kinds of technological and computing resources available to students and their accompanying grownups, but if we take a deeper dive into the numbers, we start to see some cracks in the belief that everyone has computing for days.
The American Community Survey, when talking about smartphone adoption, says that we have lots of smartphones in the U.S., but only 76.7% of households have a smartphone when that annual household income is underneath $25,000 per year. If you want 90% adoption of smartphones, you need an annual income of at least $50,000 or more. For desktops and laptops, there's more variation across the various regions of the United States, but when the annual income is under $25,000 per year, it's only 56.3% of people who have either a desktop or laptop computer. For desktops and laptops, you don't get 90% adoption until annual income is over $100,000 per year.
Education also matters in these situations. Smartphone adoption for those who have less than a high school education is at about 77%, and only gets above 90% when someone has had at least some college or a two-year degree. For desktops and laptops, if you have less than a high school education, adoption is similarly low, at 51.3%, and it only goes up to 90% adoption for those who have a four-year degree (a bachelor's) or higher in their education.
As you can see, depending on the economic circumstances of your audience, they may or may not have computing devices available to them. Additionally, households with high-income earners and high educational attainment are more likely to have multiple computing devices. 82% of householders earning more than $150,000 per year had a desktop or a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet, and a broadband Internet connection at home. For those who make less than $25,000 per year, only 29% of the householders had desktop or laptop, smartphone, tablet, and broadband Internet.
Education matters here, as well. 72% of households in which the householder has a bachelor's degree or higher have desktop or laptop, smartphone, tablet, and broadband Internet. Only 30% of households in which the householder does not have a high school diploma have all of those computing devices.
A limitation of this survey is that it asks whether or not someone "owns or uses" one of those types of computers, which suggests that any computers that are in the household count for the purposes of the survey. Which might very well mean that if a student is issued a computer, or a working person is issued a computer for remote work, those computers also count in the "own or use" statistics. As we go further down the socio-economic strata, the likelihood that the computers in the household are issued by work or school, or that the computing device that's in the household is a smartphone and nothing else, goes up.
Phreak Around and Phind Out
This presents problems for learning about technology and for learning about how to use technology for your own purposes, because most school- and work-issued computer are managed, and they're managed in ways that remove key functions from them. Regular casualties of this management include the ability to install or remove software, change settings, change components, or disable any monitoring software that's been placed on those computers by their issuing authority.
As a general rule, monitoring software placed on computers has much greater potential for harm than benefit. Regrettably, the truth of the matter is that schools and workplaces see their computers as assets that need to be managed, and therefore there will always be steps taken on work- or school-issued computers to ensure that the assets are protected from accidental or intentional misuse, whether malicious or otherwise. Furthermore, smartphone operating systems are designed to mediate everything through the use of apps and app stores, and they generally greatly resist attempts to access operating system-level functions, or to gain measures of control over the device that aren't mediated specifically through what designers of the operating systems or apps want you to be able to do. In some cases, even wireless carriers or hardware manufacturers specifically lock out the ability to access important functions and refuse to allow users to enable those functions through normal means. What that often means, then, is that users have to either potentially do dangerous operations or take advantage of security flaws in their devices so they can assert control over their own technology. This carries risks, and the most disastrous one is that the device might render itself completely non-functional through the attempts to gain control over the device. If the work or school computer is the only one in the household, or the computing is entirely mediated by smartphones, in addition to the imposed barriers present from organizations, carriers, or manufacturers, usually someone comes to an entirely sensible decision that the computer is necessary for work or school, and therefore is not to be experimented with. That machine needs to stay in a working order for continued studies, continued survival, continued working. And, if it's a device that's only affordable by tacking on, basically, a payment plan to the Internet or the smartphone services bill, that further discourages risk-taking with those devices. No-one wants to render their expensive smartphone, woork laptop, or school laptop non-functional.
Flounder Around and Find Out
So. What can we do about that? Well, libraries are generally in the business of providing ways of filling gaps and providing resources for people who don't have the means to independently acquire them. It's a thing that public libraries have historically done for books and movies and other sorts of storytelling media. In the context of programming decisions and the thematic elements of working with allocating space for community access, or getting community-owned objects (usually under the STEAM umbrella, so Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) library budgets are generally expended on all kinds of interesting materials, methods, speakers, and technologies for their spaces and their users.
Some librarians have been branching out into other objects than just media items, offering things like tool libraries or Internet connectivity devices, so computers for use outside of the library would be an excellent addition to all of those loanable objects, as alternatives to the managed computers provided by a workplace or a school to our users. However, I suspect that many organizations and libraries would also treat loanable computers as valuable assets that need to be managed, even if not necessarily monitored as closely as work or school devices might be. By treating these computers as manageable assets, a library would render them mostly unsuitable for solving the real-world problems of their users and patrons. It's an understandable impulse. After all, most public libraries don't have enough IT infrastructure, and they don't want to add, basically, "untangling machines from whatever the user last did that messed them up beyond the user's ability to fix" as an additional task. Making loanable computers that are resilient against user error is important, if the purpose of those loanable computers is to help users accomplish tasks through the normal use of their computers. But if the purpose of the computer is to help the user solve problems and get comfortable with using, breaking, and fixing technology, then the user needs much more space to mess up than a typical managed computer provides, up to and including full control over system elements. This makes people worry about loaning computers and liabilities if their loaned-out computer does malicious things or gets hooked up to botnets, but there are several libraries that explicitly forbid the illegal in addition to other actions as part of their acceptable use policy, so presumably they have talked through with their lawyers and figured out what their liability requirements are.
When computers get involved in the process of Feeling Around and Finding Out, there needs to be an explicit understanding that failure with computers is not only acceptable, but encouraged. As is finding ways out of that failure, changing settings, or opening programs to see what they do, or trying to install or create new programs to see what happens. All of that permission to play with a computer has to be backed by some method that can be invoked if everything goes completely off the rails to restore a working system from a garbled mess. For families and user groups that have only ever had managed technology, and who have had it impressed upon them that the technology is frightfully expensive, cannot be replaced with the funds that the family has, and needs to be handled with care, having technology that is meant to be experimented on will give them the opportunity to try things they wouldn't dare do on their expensive and managed machines. For users who have only ever interacted with technology in high-stakes, mission-critical situations, and who are regularly given messages about the unreliability and malice of technology, having an experimental object to try things on (and fail at) and not have to worry about what it's going to take or cost to fix them, or what they will lose by experimenting, can go a significant way toward changing them from being terrified of technology to working with it as a tool. Even if it's a tool that gets no benefit of the doubt, and potential hostility toward it.
Supporting these users will mean finding inexpensive ways of getting computing in the hands of users, and significant reassurances that these computers are meant to be experimented with, broken, fixed, and otherwise used as training grounds for figuring out how to get technology to do the things that the users want to do with it. At the moment of this presentation, options for low-cost new computers will likely be of the single-board computer variety. They usually need a display to go with them, which is usable. Most people have TVs that can serve this function and have the appropriate connectors to hook up to the single-board computer. If there aren't any low-cost options in the single-board computer department, used and refurbished laptops may step in to fill the void. One of hte biggest drawbacks to single-board computers and used laptops is that they generally prevent the user from being able to look at the hardware inside and tinker with that, one of the time-honored practices of the Flounder Around and Find Out method. At this point, though, the benefit of tinkering with hardware can be sacrificed in favor of getting experimental computers into the hands of users.
More importantly, and potentially more terrifying than getting appropriately cheap hardware, is the high likelihood that the operating system of choice for these machines will be Linux. Generally, neither single-board computers nor used laptops are likely to have an operating system pre-installed on them, and the costs of licenses for Windows or the Mac operating system, if there exists a version for that computer, will likely be far more expensive than the computer itself. Despite the popular perception of Linux as an operating system with scrolling characters and text-only interfaces, most Linuxes these days come installed with graphical tools to manage things like installing software and connecting to the Internet. And their desktop designs often closely mimic either the Windows environment or the macOS one. So, it won't be a completely foreign environment to begin experimenting with. Most crucially, no one has to go to the command line if they don't want to, which will make things less scary for everyone, at least for basic experimentation. Some tools may only work from the command line, but those tools are generally not going to be the first choices for people who are just beginning to experiment with computers and their new environments.
Loaning out experimental computers will also require library staff to have an easy method of resetting the machines to a working state after they have been thoroughly experimented with, and to make sure they are properly updated when they go out to the next person they'll be lent to. Library staff are sometimes equally as afraid of touching and experimenting with computers as their users and patrons are. So they also get to benefit from having to regularly restore and reset computers from their experimental states, using their installation media, their recovery modes, or disk image writing software. Having to interact with computers in these ways will prove to both staff and users that it takes a significant amount of effort to actually wreck a computer completely beyond repair, at least, without doing physical damage to it. Library staff may be worried about the first reset, but by the time they're doing their hundredth, they will have the process down sufficiently that they don't have to worry about what happened while the computers were out, so long as they can get to the point where they can reset and reinstall. Additionally, seeing firsthand how hard it is to unrecoverably wreck a computer will also possibly help them start thinking about their own problems and how they might apply computers and tools to at least some of them. The more that you are able to Flounder Around and Find Out, and then recover and reset, the more likely it is that someone will continue with their experimentation.
Fuck Around and Find Out
So: If we accept that experiential and process-based learning is better for most people, and that learning happens best when it's situated in the context of someone trying to solve a problem in their own lives and their own contexts, there have to be more opportunities for learners of all ages to not only experience these problems, to gather resources and attempt knowledge, and try to solve them, either partially or completely. School environments will help with some of this, but library environments and materials are more likely to have the latitude to tailor their programming options and their material availability toward solving these kinds of real-world problems. With the understanding that many lower-income families do not have access to computers to practice problem-solving and technological competencies on, libraries are also well-suited to expend resources toward acquiring low-cost computers with minimal management requirements that they can loan out for the explicit purpose of experimentation and problem-solving in their communities.
In short, because we're libraries, we have the ability to not only expend budget, but help people Fuck Around and Find Out.