“Six Degrees of Separation in the Ceramics World” By Kevin Van Winkle

The purpose of “Six Degrees of Separation in the Ceramics World” is to provide an educational activity for all San Antonio Potters Guild members to participate in. You can trace your clay “roots” and see how you connect to others on a large scale map which may peak your interest to research people on the map you are not familiar with.

“Six Degrees of Separation” is the theory that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world, so that a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.

The game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” was invented as a play on the concept. The goal is to link any actor to Kevin Bacon through no more than six connections, where two actors are connected if they have appeared in a movie or commercial together.

Facebook's data team released two papers in November 2011 which document that amongst all Facebook users at the time of research (721 million users with 69 billion friendship links) there is an average distance of 4.74.

Here’s how to play:

Step 1. Create your connection list.

Your first connection must be someone you studied with, as the ceramics class instructor or ceramics workshop leader.

Your subsequent connections (2-6) should be someone the previously named person studied or was affiliated with.

You can send as many lists as you want as long as your first connection is a different person from your previous list. (Example: You took a class from Dennis Smith and a class from Ryan Takaba, so, you can submit two lists.)

Step 2. E-mail your list to van_wink@swbell.net 

(See list example below.)

I will add you to the “Six Degrees of Separation in the Ceramics World Map” and “the map” will be available for viewing at the monthly SAPG meetings.

Here is an example of one of my lists and how a list should look when e-mailed to me:

Kevin Van Winkle, studied with:

1.       Karl Borgeson,

2.       Warren MacKenzie

3.       Bernard Leach

4.       Shoji Hamada

5.       Itaya Hazan

You don’t have to have six on your list but if you only have one or two, you should research further.