Tool-being
- ââTo be truly simpleââ
In his piece [for Time] Lev Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really invent many new features, it just made those features a lot more usable. "But that's important. When our tools don't work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers...When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole."
There is the famous story by Eddington about some people who went fishing in the sea with a net. Upon examining the size of the fish they had caught, they decided there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea! Their conclusion arose from the tool used and not from reality.
Tatiana von Preussen, cofounder of London practice vPPR Architects, says that certain software comes with constraints that encourage a particular style:
âSomething Iâve noticed with new buildings is that you can almost tell which software they were designed in. For instance, if you take Revit, itâs very hard to freely create non-orthogonal, non-linear geometries, and itâs very easy to create repetitive elements, so it lends itself to a particular way of building.â
I worry that unlike Kahn's process and tools, the processes and tools we use are aimed at helping us satisfy the demand for moving fast and breaking things, not to be good, or to better ensure the doing of good work.
My son Gerrit told me about a YouTube video from a conference where the presenter asked for a show of hands from video game developers in the audience who could produce or successfully compile their own code from the previous quarter. Or from the previous year. Or from two years ago. And by that time the point had been made: nobody had their hand in the air.
The teleology of tool-building suggests that the real value lies in the end use of the tool, rather than in its origins
Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in a haptic contact with the object, or space.
Our electrical appliances should be humble servants, to be seen and heard as little as possible. They should ideally stay in the background, like a valet in the old days, that one hardly noticed. â Erwin Braun
They should accompany an individual over a long period of time without hindering or disturbing through âextravagant forms, loud colors or flashy proportionsâ.
A young man named Michelangelo stands in front of a huge granite monolith. He stands there at a time in history before the technologies that brought us the hammer and chisel have occurred. He gazes at the rock. He dreams his dream and the best that he is able to say is, What a wonderful stone you are.
âŠ
Michaelangelo now stands in front of the same rock. Thrust into his hands are a hammer in one and a chisel in the other. He looks at his hands, at the technological tools that they hold, and gazing at the same stone, with epiphanic zeal, says I must let Moses out.
The man of today planes to perfection a board with a planing machine in a few seconds. The man of yesterday planed a board reasonably well with a plane. Very primitive man squared a board very badly with a flint or a knife. Very primitive man employed a unit of measurement and regulating lines in order to make his task easier. The Greek, the Egyptian, Michaelangelo or Blondel employed regulating lines in order to correct their work and for the satisfaction of their artistâs sense and of their mathematical thought. The man of today employs nothing at all and the result is the boulevard Raspail.
It is not right that we should produce bad things because of a bad tool; nor is it right that we should waste our energy, our health and our courage because of a bad tool; it must be thrown away and replaced.
But men live in old houses and they have not yet thought of building houses adapted to themselves.
Hereâs the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it.
When you produce your whole site by hand, from HEAD to /BODY, you begin in a world of infinite possibility. You can tailor your content exactly how you like it, and organize it in any way you please. Every design decision you make represents roughly equal work because, heck, youâve gotta do it by hand either way. Whether itâs reverse chronological entries or a tidy table of contents. You might as well do what you want.
But once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly â but only in a certain way â every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost.
Movable Type didnât just kill off blog customization.
It (and its competitors) actively killed other forms of web production.
The myriad tools of the digital age that provide quick ways to capture words, images, and data have added to the perception that handwritten field notebooks are passé. As someone who routinely encounters objects that can speak to us over millions of years, I may have a bias towards things that have stood the test of time. That said, it is clear that there is still much to recommend preserving records and information in traditional paper field notes.
Over the course of my career, I have developed a habitual field note protocol in which a paper notebook is used both to record information and to integrate records made on standardized data sheets, in computer files, and in photographs.
I read an article when I was very young in Scientific America. It measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet â you know, for bears and chimpanzees and raccoons and birds and fish â how many kilocalories per kilometer did they spend to move? And humans were measured too. And the condor won, it was the most efficient. And mankind, the crown of creation, came in with rather an unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list.
But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle, and it blew away the condor, all the way off the charts. And I remember this really had an impact on me, I remember thinking that humans are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities.
And to me â we actually ran an ad like this, very early at Apple â the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind. And I believe that with every bone in my body, that of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near if not at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented, and I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time where this invention has taken form.
Getting better at using tools comes to us, in part, when the tools challenge us, and this challenge often occurs just because the tools are not fit-for-purpose. In both creation and repair, the challenge can be met by adapting the form of a tool, or improvising with it as it is, using it in ways it was not meant for.
The all-purpose tool seems a special case. In its sheer variety, a flat-edged screwdriver admits all manner of unfathomed possibilities; it, too, can expand our skills if only our imagination rises to the occasion. Without hesitation, the flat-edged screwdriver can be described as sublimeâthe word sublime standing, as it does in philosophy and the arts, for the potently strange.
The resonances arising in workmanship are often very subtle. The fact that the material itself guides the tool differently in different processes of working introduces changes in the overall relationship of curvatures. The smooth curves of surfaces approaching the edge of a jade axe that come about from innumerable abrasive particles moving against a slightly yielding and mechanically unconstrained backing would seem incongruous if other surfaces or outlines were present that had come from cleavage or from the geometric motions of a machine. These could be produced easily enough, but the eye would not establish larger resonances among them.
The success and spread of a particular tool â and this tool can be organizational or administrative as well as mechanical â has another consequence. Any task tends to be structured by the available tools. It can appear that the available tools represent the best or even the only way to deal with a situation.
Thus is may be wise, when communities are faced with new technological solutions to existing problems, to ask what these techniques may prevent and not only to check what the techniques promise to do.
There is a particular joy in a product that just does what you need done, in about the way you expect or (thrillingly) better, and isnât hard to figure out, and doesnât change unnecessarily. Here are three to learn from.
Conventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought.
...The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. Itâs to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture. You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.
Though you might not think it from the comic, Iâm actually sympathetic to questions about tools and process, as I myself am a kind of process junky. I love hearing about how other writers work.
Iâm also not someone who dismisses questions about tools with the line âthe tools donât matter.â In fact, I think tools matter so much that if you donât talk about them correctly you can do some damage.
...What I love about John Gardner and Lynda Barry is that they believe that the tools you use do matter, but the point, for them, is finding the proper tools that get you to a certain way of working in which you can get your conscious, mechanical mind out of the way so that your dreaming can go on, undeterred.
You have to find the right tools to help your voice sing.
Iâm sure yâall find these things just as useful as I do. They donât make us lazy, they make us efficient. I know how to make a pattern. I know how to draw a curve with a Pen Tool. I know how to convert SVG into JSX. But using a dedicated tool makes me faster and better at it. And sometimes I donât know how to do those things, but that doesnât mean I canât take advantage. Fake it âtil you make it, right?
I always have a hard time wrapping my mind around some of the classic user questions: What is this thing for, is it for novices or professionals, etc? I do my best to avoid these questions, because the best thing you can possibly accomplish as the maker of a tool is to build something that gets used in ways you didnât anticipate. If youâre building a tool that gets used in exactly the ways that you wrote out on paper, you shot very low. You did something literal and obvious.
In the middle of the 2000s, the designers at creative consultancy Landor installed Adobe Photoshop on their computers and started using it. General manager Antonio Marazza tells author David Sax:
âOvernight, the quality of their designs seemed to decline. After a few months of this, Landorâs Milan office gave all their designers Moleskine notebooks, and banned the use of Photoshop during the first weekâs work on a project. The idea was to let their initial ideas freely blossom on paper, without the inherent bias of the software, before transferring them to the computer later for fine-tuning. It was so successful, this policy remains in place today.â
One of my favorite definitions of âhackingâ is the creative reuse of tools for new and unexpected purposes. Hacking is using your email account as a hard drive, using your bicycle seat to open a beer, using Minecraftâs red bricks to create a calculator in the game.
The opposite of hacking is marketing. Marketing tells you that this particular non-stick pan is the pan youâll use to make omelettes, and youâll do it in the morning dressed in fashionable clothing in a nice kitchen. It includes a photo and inspirational copywriting to drive this home. Marketing dictates a style, context, and purpose for even the most general-purpose products. This narrative needs to be specific so that you can readily imagine it: itâs you, in an Airbnb, laughing with friends.
Technology is seeing a little return to complexity. Dreamweaver gave way to hand-coding websites, which is now leading into Webflow, which is a lot like Dreamweaver. Evernote give way to minimal Markdown notes, which are now becoming Notion, Coda, or Craft. Visual Studio was âdisruptedâ by Sublime Text and TextMate, which are now getting replaced by Visual Studio Code. JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues, which is getting outmoded by Linear. The pendulum swings back and forth, which isnât a bad thing
How a tool for sensemaking reconciles two distinct software design ideologies.
It was clear that [Hewlett-Packard] recognized that its true value was in its employees.
How do you learn to run a company at 21 with no business experience?
Throughout the years in business I found something, which is, Iâd always ask why you do things, and the answers you invariably get are âoh thatâs just the way itâs done.â Nobody knows why they do what they do, nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. Thatâs what I found.
Iâll give you an example. When we were building our Apple Is in the garage we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, accounting had this notion of a âstandard cost.â Where youâd kind of set a standard cost and then at the end of the quarter youâd adjust it with a variance. And I kept asking, âwhy do we do this?â And the answer was just âwell thatâs the way itâs done.â And after about 6 months of digging into this what I realized was the reason you do it is because you donât really have good enough controls to know how much it costs, so you guess, and then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you donât know how much it costs is because your information systems arenât good enough.
But nobody said it that way. And so later on when we designed this automated factory for Macintosh we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts, and know exactly what something costs, to the cent. And so in business a lot of things are what I would call âfolklore.â Theyâre done that way because they were done that way yesterday. And so if youâre willing to ask a lot of questions about things and work hard you can learn business pretty fast. Itâs not the hardest thing in the world. Itâs not rocket science.
I think everyone in this country should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. Itâs like going to law school â I donât think anyone should be a lawyer, but going to law school could be useful because it teaches you how to think in a certain way. So I view computer science as a liberal art.
The technology crashed and burned at Xerox.
What happens is, like with John Sculley, John came from PepsiCo, and they at most would change their product maybe once every ten years. To them a new product was like a new size bottle. So if you were a product person you couldnât change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore they were the ones that got promoted and they were the ones that ran the company.
Well, for PepsiCo that might have been ok, but it turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM and Xerox.
If you were a product person at IBM, or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer? So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company isnât any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people end up getting driven out of the decision marking forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibilities and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship thatâs required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
So thatâs what happened at Xerox.
People get confused, companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think that somehow thereâs some magic in the process that theyâve created. And so they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long people get very confused that the process is the content.
In my career Iâve found that the best people are the ones who really understand the content. And theyâre a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because theyâre so great at the content. And thatâs what makes great products. Itâs not process, itâs content.
Whatâs important to you in the development of a product?
One of the things that really hurt Apple was that after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease â Iâve seen other people get it too â itâs the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people âhereâs this great idea,â then of course they can just go off and make it happen.
The problem with that is that thereâs just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs you have to make, there are just certain things you canât make electrons do, there are certain things you canât make plastic, or glass, or factories, or robots do. And as you get into all these things, you find that designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and just fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover a new problem or a new opportunity to do it a little differently. And itâs that process that is the magic.
What Iâve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like, is like when I was a young kid, there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his 80âs, and a little scary looking, and I got to know him a little bit â I think he paid me to cut his lawn or something â and one day he told me, âcome into my garage, I want to show you something.â
And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a band between them. And he said âcome out here with me,â so we went out to the back and we got some rocks, just some regular old ugly rocks and we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grit powder, and he turned the motor on and said âcome back tomorrow,â as the tumbler was turning and making a racket.
So I came back the next day and what we took out were these amazingly beautiful and polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in â through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise â had come out as these beautiful polished rocks.
And thatâs always been my metaphor for a team working really hard on something theyâre passionate about. Itâs that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other, and they polish their ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones.
People are being counted on to do specific pieces of the puzzle. And the most important thing I think you can do for somebody whoâs really good and whoâs really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isnât good enough, and to do it very clearly, and to articulate why, and to get them back on track. And you need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities, but leaves not much room for interpretation.
Microsoftâs orbit was made possible by a Saturn V booster called IBM.
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what that means is â and I donât mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way â in the sense that they donât think of original ideas, and they donât bring much culture into their product. And you say âwell why is that important?â Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, so thatâs where one gets the idea. And if it werenât for the Mac they would never have that in their products.
And so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success â I have no problem with their success. They have earned their success â I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them, no spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that most customers donât have that spirit either. But the way that weâre going to ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody so that everybody grows up with better things, and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft is McDonaldâs.
So thatâs what saddens me â not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoftâs products donât display more insight and more creativity.
As we look back 10 years from now, the web is going to be the defining technology, the defining social moment for our generation.
I think itâs going to be huge.
I read an article when I was very young in Scientific America. It measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet â you know, for bears and chimpanzees and raccoons and birds and fish â how many kilocalories per kilometer did they spend to move? And humans were measured too. And the condor won, it was the most efficient. And mankind, the crown of creation, came in with rather an unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list.
But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle, and it blew away the condor, all the way off the charts. And I remember this really had an impact on me, I remember thinking that humans are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities.
And to me â we actually ran an ad like this, very early at Apple â the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind. And I believe that with every bone in my body, that of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near if not at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented, and I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time where this invention has taken form.
How do we know whatâs the right direction [for computers to take]?
Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then trying to bring those things in to what youâre doing.
Picasso had a saying: âGood artists copy, great artists steal.â And we (at Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. And I think part of what made Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to have been the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hasnât been for computer science, these people would all be doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them â we all brought to this effort â a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude, that we wanted to pull in the best we saw in these other fields into ours.
There was a germ of something there. And itâs the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. I think thatâs a wonderful thing, and I think that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit. If you talk to people that use the Macintosh, they love it. I mean you donât hear people loving products very often. But you could feel it, there was something really wonderful there.
So I donât think that most of the really best people that Iâve worked with have worked with computers for the sake of working with computers. They work with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have that you want to share with other people. And before they invented these things, all these people would have done other things. But computers were invented, and they did come along, and all these people did get interested in them, either in school or before school, and said âHey, this is the medium that I think I can say something in."
I observed something fairly early on at Apple, which I didnât know how to explain then, but Iâve thought a lot about it since. Most things in life have a dynamic range in which [the ratio of] âaverageâ to âbestâ is at most 2:1.
For example, if you go to New York City and get an average taxi cab driver, versus the best taxi cab driver, youâll probably get to your destination with the best taxi driver 30% faster. And an automobile; whatâs the difference between the average car and the best? Maybe 20%? The best CD player versus the average CD player? Maybe 20%? So 2:1 is a big dynamic range for most things in life.
Now, in software, and it used to be the case in hardware, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; maybe even 100:1. Very few things in life are like this, but what I was lucky enough to spend my life doing, which is software, is like this.
So Iâve built a lot of my success on finding these truly gifted people, and not settling for âBâ and âCâ players, but really going for the âAâ players. And I found something⊠I found that when you get enough âAâ players together, when you go through the incredible work to find these âAâ players, they really like working with each other. Because most have never had the chance to do that before. And they donât work with âBâ and âCâ players, so itâs self-policing. They only want to hire âAâ players. So you build these pockets of âAâ players and it just propagates.