I would add to the list - "just do the stuff one damn time".<p>Everything has been done. There is a better technique and better tool and reference design for everything you will ever think of.<p>For amateur, this overload of information can prevent you actually doing anything, especially in the physical world where anything you do must respect the laws of physics (varnish needs to dry, cannot just set the boolean to true).<p>Talking from my experience in hobby jewellery making. Only read about something when you fail to do it or after you have done something. Otherwise you will end up like me, spending my free time watching youtube tutorial after youtube tutorial and not touching my workbench.
I'd peg them as sophomores -- they know enough of the names and stories to feel like authorities, but don't have any depth of understanding. The Eames example is particularly hilarious, since Charles and Ray are pretty famous for starting with some basic goals, learning everything about the materials at hand, and figuring out first-hand the best way to use those materials to solve the problem. They developed techniques for molding plywood in their apartment, for chrissakes!
The best thing that I can say about that is to ignore those pretentious art school yuppies/hipsters. People like that feel a need to label and analyze EVERYTHING, even when there's nothing there to analyze.
This contemporary artistic influence is surely one of the components of the definition of culture. Of course everyone is influenced by all kinds of things. It's not a crime not being able to trace the lineage though, nor not to want to. Artists create and their creations enter the societal consciousness, that's part of the deal.
Here's how i see the whole "influences" discussion. What the students did was the same as you looking at a piece of software and asking what design pattern was used? Which algorithm? Which Data Structures? How did you go about building it? Can you show me the Sequence Diagrams, Class Diagrams, ERD? Stuff like that. An amateur/hobbyist who hasn't had professional training would probably not be familiar with all this. He might have written a lot of code and might have done that by reading online tutorials etc etc. He might have written pretty good code too. But A professional would be abashed if none of the above were used at all. And they'd feel their moral duty to inform the person of these things. Is it because the professional is pretentious? Of course not. But all these things exist for a reason, and it's most useful to know about them, and apply them.
Ahh, you ran into one of my "favorite" types of people to show up to makerspaces: the self-important art-nerd who thinks s/he knows everything and is really only looking for a place to show off and find validation.<p>We had a couple of people like that show up to my old space in Philadelphia (garsh, I miss it). My favorite was the writer who thought he was liberal enough to drop the "N"-word ironically.<p>It's this sort of artist's attitude that was one of the reasons I got out of fine art in the first place. I never fit in with the other artists because, for me, the construction of the thing and the experience was reason enough to do it, not because I had any thing to "say" by the creation of it or the style I chose.<p>I suppose it would have been nice to have known where the cultural meme of flat-pack plywood furniture had come from to influence you to think it was a cool idea to try it. Or hell, maybe you did come up with the idea in a near-vacuum: I don't think it's impossible that you could have found yourself in the same conditions as the Eames' to then come to the same conclusions.<p>But that's kind of the whole F/OSS point on copyleft and anti-patents. Ideas, on their own, are almost worthless. The value of a thing is largely in the execution of it. If the execution of the thing does not lend itself to a lot of value, then the idea wasn't very valuable to begin with.<p>These people, who want to nitpick what you do and find any way they can criticize you (you don't have the right tools, you don't have the right process, you don't have the right reason), they're doing it out of jealousy. They have found themselves, for one reason or another, incapable of performing the way you do. Maybe they can't manage their procrastination and ever get anything done, or they don't have the patience for detail work and their stuff comes out crooked, or maybe they <i>are</i> capable, but only after extreme effort.<p>Never, ever let those people discourage you. Their criticism is their own insecurity. They see your work and feel it reflects on them and shows them as a failure. Just ignore them and keep working. Keep making.