The craftsman and his tools.
Aaron Seigo gives, in an interesting blog entry, two very interesting quotes "The handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user's hand. and That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcomes guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.. Reading that made me pause to think.
First an aside: he also instances three people who have trouble organizing their information on their macs -- I don't think that this has much to do with either remark from All Tomorrow's Parties. Nobody has much experience with organizing a small library-worth of information, unless they are trained librarians (are librarians craftsmen?). This is something completely new -- and I guess that google-like interfaces on our own data, combined with some intelligent way of working with and organizing bookmarks are currently our best bet to allow people to handle all that information.
But back to the craftsmen:
A craftsman is someone who has learned his tools, simple tools that can be used in surprising ways. A painter can do a myriad of things with a brush, and when that brush has finally been so worn out it has completely lost its bristles, he can do at least half a myriad things with them. The usual way of allowing a myriad things to be done on a computer is to give the craftsman a myriad tools. All the modalities (if that's the right word) or possibilities of a simple tool are made explicit and discrete, instead of left to the craftsman's inventiveness in using and abusing a single thing.
Not that it's simple to learn to use that single thing: nobody who sits down with a brush, some paint and a canvas can use the brushes. It takes years of learning (much like vi...), and even then paint has all kinds of surprising properties and brushes have a way with them that's often best described as recalcitrant. But all that adds to their usefulness as a tool; all that means that the result is surprising.
Which neatly hooks in with the second quote I quoted from Aaron's quote of a book I have never read... The anticipation of the result that stifles the result itself because it strait-jackets the process (nasty word, process, but I don't have better one at the moment, maybe flow?). You can see the same thing happening when people want to sketch a particular thing, a scene or an illustration and pertinently want it to end up like they imagined the result in their mind before sitting down and letting the paint do its work.
In paint apps, all that layer tom-foolery, all those myriad bezier tools, all those potato-stamp paintbrushes (even when a little randomness is thrown in), in Painter, in the Gimp, in Krita and in Photoshop, all those filters, they all are designed with a certain final effect in mind, not with the process of creating an image in mind. So there's my little contribution to the quest for more useful computers: if you make a tool, don't think just of the results that tool makes possible, but of the work, the flow the serendipity using the tool should enable. And that doesn't hold just for paint applications. I think.
Practical examples? Don't have any, I'm just typing away waiting for KDevelop to compile before I can continue on Krita.
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