Tools

I thought it would be prudent before continuing these recent dialogues about design and the human interface to step back and frame our assessment of these somewhat abstract concepts. What is it that grounds design, that grounds interface, and interaction. I think we are led off track somewhat when we hear these words, because we’ve been told, not completely erroneously, that these higher notions are aesthetics alone, that they are no more forms of art. It’s not much of a stretch after all, to conceive great design as works of art; to equate the two as equals, though, is brutish. The two, when executed properly, express themselves emotionally. Art uses this emotion rhetorically. Design uses this emotion to communicate function. And so the essential piece, the low-order bit of the whole thing isn’t the aesthetic, because design can exist without it (though often it does so poorly); instead it is the function that design cannot exist without. And function is fundamentally contained within the tool.

Defining the Tool

What, fundamentally, is a tool then? Is it merely that amalgamation of molded iron and plastic that sat in a shiny little box in the garage when you were a kid? If it were as simple as that, one wonders why your dad couldn’t make due with the neon Fisher-Price facsimiles you had as a child when building you that treehouse you’ve always wanted. In fact a tool has little to do with where it’s found, or what it’s made of; it is in fact much more than that, and truthfully, much less.

A tool is nothing more than a solution to some problem we face.

Truly, it’s such a simple definition, but it’s one we often understand experientially rather than consciously. Consider buying a drill. We don’t go to our hardware store because our tool bench isn’t filled up to the brim – we go because we have found that we need a problem solved – in this case, our life needs more holes in it – and so we look for a solution to the problem. But logic dictates that when the person is in the store they are searching for a drill, but that’s confusing cause and effect. People don’t buy drills to make holes, but rather they find that holes are in need of making, and so they head to the store to find a way to make them. The drill itself is superfluous, it merely happens to be the best way of solving a problem.

And so our life is full of tools that represent the current best solutions to current problems. A newspaper, for example, is a tool we employ that solves the problem of knowing what’s out there; if we didn’t have newspapers, we’d have to travel to every inch of the world, everyday, to know the latest goings-on out there. Truthfully, when viewed like this, it solves an even greater problem: getting the most out of our time.

Getting Stuck with Tools

One of the biggest problems we sometimes face isn’t finding ourselves facing a problem with no tools, but rather finding ourselves choosing between too many tools to solve a problem that may not even exist. A beginning artist may walk into an art store to select a few brushes for their latest work, only to come back to the studio, see the blank canvas, and wonder if the few brushes they picked out of the thousands on display were the right ones. Why, after all, do those thousands of brushes exist unless every single one of them were needed. But the truth is that the problem doesn’t lie in the brush; you could purchase every single one from the store and that canvas in your studio would be no less blank because of it. The problem isn’t that you have the right tools to make beautiful works of art, the problem is you don’t know if your art will be beautiful. The real question you want to ask is, “How do I make things that don’t suck?”

As it turns out, we have a tool for that too. It’s called a trash can, and it’s very likely the best solution ever conceived.