(2022-04-24) Matuschak Tools For Thought Science Design Art Craftsmanship

Andy Matuschak: Are Tools for thought: science, design, art, craftsmanship? J.C.R. Licklider...If you want to help make good on this destiny—to invent human-computer interfaces which radically expand human cognition and creativity—then what do you actually need to do? How does progress happen?

Can—or, should—“tools for thought” become a field of science? A design discipline? A “scene” in the arts? A practice of craft?

It’s not an abstract question for me: it’s a very real question of how to shape my work throughout the day!

My instincts draw on all four perspectives....For me, at least, no one of those labels seems quite right. Why would you expect it to?

Tools for thought as scientific field

tools for thought are not a field of natural science. That said, the drive to understand is a central feeling in my work, and an essential ingredient for most of my contributions. Likewise, some of the most valuable outputs I produce are a kind of knowledge. I don’t think of myself as a scientist, but I do feel a kinship with scientists through these traits.

Herbert Simon introduced a concept I’ve found helpful: some fields can be understood as “sciences of the artificial”.

Piotr Wozniak’s real-world experiences with the system led him to form his own theories of forgetting, which in turn allowed him to improve his artifact. It seems paradoxical, but studying an artificial phenomenon unlocked novel insights about a natural phenomenon. This loop is what Michael Nielsen and I have called “insight through making.” Bootstrapping

For me, the most powerful kinds of understanding about tools for thought are often insights about what kinds of artifacts can be made in the first place.

The graphical user interface created at PARC.

When my attention shifts away from trying to understand what is, and toward chasing what could be, that’s a way of being I associate with design.

Tools for thought as a design discipline

Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be, with devising artifacts to attain goals.
—Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

What an astonishing thing the computerized spreadsheet is... What does it feel like to invent something like this? Obviously, I’m not Dan Bricklin; I haven’t invented something on the order of VisiCalc. But I’ve had lesser tastes of the experience.

For me, it feels like tracing my finger over the seams of reality, the edges surrounding a problem space. In my other hand, I’m fiddling with a bag of puzzle pieces

In Bricklin’s case, I can imagine some of the puzzle pieces that might have been at play. I can imagine turning them in my hand. Homoiconicity. Symbolic reference. Linked representations. Array programming. Late binding.

When I’m working on primitives like this, the main drive I feel is a sense of creative possibility.

the urge to understand feels secondary in these moments to some broader process of creation

Progress in design comes from inventing new primitives, finding new ways to combine old ones, spotting new places to apply them, and so on.

We may find unifying principles and frameworks now and then, but they’re forever contingent. We’ll never “hit bottom” because problems, and their solutions, are endless. (wicked)

More recent wide-reaching primitives include “multiplayer” editing affordances, increasingly reliable voice-to-text interactions, and, yes, contextual backlinks. At the periphery, more tenuous ideas—the pervasive financialization of computational primitives (blockchain); ML-generated media; etc—may end up becoming important puzzle pieces. (band-wagon)

Can this sort of design become a science, a design science?

I’ve not read that literature deeply, but I’m pessimistic about this.

For me, at least, progress also requires a kind of expressive yearning.

Tools for thought as an artistic scene

The dominant methodology in design these days is “human-centered design”. This is a remarkably effective method for creating products and solving problems. But, among other limitations, I think it’s missing something that’s been central to many of the most transformative tools for thought: a strong perspective on how the world should be, what’s beautiful, what’s worth amplifying.

“Dream Machines” is a telling title. Ted Nelson had a dream of what computers could mean for personal creativity and freedom. This is not “design thinking”. Much of Alan Kay’s work was driven by an almost spiritual belief in the wasted creative potential of young children. Consider his metrics: “Where some people measure progress in answers-right/test or tests-passed/year, we are more interested in Sistine-Chapel-Ceilings/lifetime.” Bret Victor doesn’t want to physicalize computing because screens are too small and hurt your eyes, or because embodied cognition is higher bandwidth. It’s because he thinks being in the world, with our bodies, with each other, is humane and beautiful and the way things should be. He’s described this drive as “a yearning.” (aliveness?)

Yearnings like this are sometimes the driving force for my work, too. Orbit could be framed as a tool for retaining what you learn. That’s what every other memory system does. But that’s not how I think about it. What gets me excited is the feeling of imbibing ideas more deeply, of being supported in forming an ongoing communion. In some very real sense, this project is an expression of how I want to relate to knowledge...like a desire to manifest that which I think is beautiful.

When this drive dominates, I feel like I’m making a kind of art.

Both this modern group and the computing pioneers express a consistent yearning: the radical power of computation can be wrested from a beige-world of centralized tabulation, and instead invested in human-scale forms... That’s not a design statement. It’s certainly not a scientific statement. It’s more like a manifesto. (Neo-Victorian)

I'm not crazy about the use of "scene" here, though it's a commonly-sloppy adoption. See Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress.

Tools for thought as a practice of craftsmanship

One more impulse often shapes my practice, and I’m less certain of its proper place.

my first week at Apple...sheepish when I had to ask about the little black objects everyone had on their desk....“Oh. That’s a jeweler’s loupe. We use it to see the pixels.” The loupe is synecdoche for my whole experience at Apple...I left Apple, but the indoctrinated obsession for craftsmanship has not left me.

Sometimes craftsmanship is essential to expressing an idea at all in this space. The Mother of All Demos... The same is true of Dynamicland today.

Another factor here is that reality has a surprising amount of detail. The line between essential design elements and craftsmanship is often unclear

Another reason the craftsmanship impulse is useful is that many insights are only reachable if users make a system a part of their lives, if they use it to do something that really matters to them. (Minimum Lovable Product)

On the margin, I think this impulse is probably too strong in me.

Negotiating these forces

I don’t think I could make do with any one of these impulses. They all seem essential, in their own way, to my practice.

At least for me, the most consistently powerful lens is that of design.

• I think the "lens" framing is appropriate - there's no reason to think that a single perspective should be used exclusively.

Likewise, I think our best model for collective progress looks less like a scientific field and more like a design discipline.

Each project is necessarily bespoke. There are no formulas for creating new abstractions. Progress will continue to require the lightning strike of creative ingenuity.