Bricolage is the practice of creating something new by working with whatever materials, tools, or resources happen to be available, rather than acquiring purpose-built components. The term comes from the French word “bricoler,” which roughly translates to “tinker” or “do-it-yourself.” It was popularized by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his 1962 book *The Savage Mind*, where he contrasted the bricoleur (the tinkerer who improvises with what’s at hand) with the engineer (who designs from scratch using specialized materials). Since then, the concept has spread into art, business, psychology, and research methodology, each field adapting it in slightly different ways.
The Bricoleur vs. the Engineer
The easiest way to grasp bricolage is through Lévi-Strauss’s original contrast. The engineer starts with a clear blueprint, sources the exact materials needed, and builds toward a predetermined goal. The bricoleur starts with a pile of odds and ends, leftover from previous projects or scavenged from the environment, and figures out what can be made from them. The engineer asks “What do I need?” The bricoleur asks “What can I do with what I have?”
This distinction isn’t just about physical materials. As Yale legal scholar Jack Balkin has noted, the engineer’s mindset assumes that tools are designed for specific purposes and used in purely instrumental ways. Bricolage challenges all of that. A bricoleur routinely repurposes tools and materials for something other than their original function. Cultural development itself, Balkin argues, often works this way: “the unanticipated use of the unexpected, passing under the name of rational progress.”
In practice, the two approaches aren’t opposites so much as endpoints on a spectrum. Most real-world problem solving involves some of both. But the distinction is useful because it highlights something important: you don’t always need the “right” resources to build something valuable.
Bricolage in Art and Design
In the visual arts, bricolage describes work made from found objects, repurposed materials, or fragments of existing things combined in new ways. Collage, assemblage, and mixed-media installation art all draw on the bricolage tradition. The idea is that meaning comes not from the raw materials themselves but from how they’re arranged and recontextualized.
One of the most celebrated bricoleurs in American art is Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), known for his enigmatic shadow boxes assembled entirely from found objects. Works like *Soap Bubble Set* (1948) and *Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall)* (c. 1945) combined thrift-store trinkets, old photographs, glass, and other scavenged items into pieces that feel dreamlike and surprisingly unified. As Indiana University’s arts program describes it, Cornell’s work “is constructed from materials which might appear disparate and unrelated, but which derive power from their context and placement within space.” That’s bricolage in a nutshell: the whole becomes greater than the sum of its scavenged parts.
Beyond Cornell, bricolage runs through movements like Dada, Surrealism, and punk zine culture. Whenever an artist builds something meaningful from scraps rather than premium supplies, they’re working as a bricoleur.
Entrepreneurial Bricolage
In business and entrepreneurship, bricolage describes how resource-strapped companies create value by making do with whatever they have. This isn’t just a survival tactic. Research published in *Administrative Science Quarterly* found that small firms practicing bricolage were able to “create something from nothing by exploiting physical, social, or institutional inputs that other firms rejected or ignored.”
The key insight from researchers Ted Baker and Reed Nelson is that bricoleur entrepreneurs refuse to accept conventional definitions of what counts as a “resource.” Where a well-funded competitor sees worthless scrap, outdated equipment, or undervalued skills, the bricoleur sees raw material. This constructivist view of resources, seeing them as defined by what you do with them rather than by some objective value, is central to how bricolage works in business.
Think of a startup founder who builds early prototypes from off-the-shelf parts, trades skills with other small businesses instead of hiring consultants, or repurposes a failed product’s components for something entirely different. That’s entrepreneurial bricolage. It shows up most often in environments where formal resources like venture capital, specialized talent, or established supply chains simply aren’t available.
Bricolage in Research Methods
Social scientists have adopted bricolage to describe a flexible, interdisciplinary approach to research. Rather than committing to a single methodology (say, only interviews, or only statistical analysis), a researcher working as a bricoleur draws on multiple tools, theories, and philosophical frameworks as the project demands.
Education researcher Joe Kincheloe was one of the strongest advocates for this approach. He argued that methodological bricolage avoids two common traps: the superficiality of trying to cover too many methods without depth, and the narrow vision of sticking rigidly to one discipline’s toolkit. A bricoleur researcher might combine historical analysis, philosophical inquiry, and social theory within a single study, using whichever lens best illuminates each aspect of the problem. The goal is a richer, more complex understanding than any single method would produce on its own.
This doesn’t mean anything goes. Critical bricoleurs, as Kincheloe calls them, are deliberate about why they’re combining certain approaches. The point is responsiveness to complexity, not methodological chaos.
Bricolage as a Way of Thinking
Beyond any single field, bricolage describes a cognitive style. In psychology, complex problem solving often produces solutions that are “more bricolage than perfect or optimal,” according to research in *Frontiers in Psychology*. When people face messy, ill-defined problems in dynamic environments, they rarely execute a clean plan from start to finish. Instead, they improvise, combining whatever knowledge and strategies they already possess into workable, if imperfect, solutions.
This connects bricolage to creativity. Researchers distinguish between everyday creativity (“little c”) and the kind of groundbreaking insight that changes a field (“Big C”). Bricolage sits firmly in the “little c” camp, the kind of resourceful, adaptive thinking that most people use constantly without recognizing it. When you fix a leaky pipe with duct tape and a zip tie, jury-rig a bookshelf from cinder blocks, or combine two half-formed ideas from different fields into a workable plan, you’re thinking like a bricoleur.
The deeper psychological point is that bricolage requires a constant toggle between possibility and reality. You need imagination to see new uses for old materials, but you also need pragmatism to recognize what will actually hold together. That balance between “what could work” and “what does work” is the core mental skill behind bricolage, whether you’re building a shadow box, launching a company, or solving an everyday problem with whatever’s in the junk drawer.