Armories for tool-maker/tool-user collaborations

[jryans]

Armories for tool-maker / tool-user collaborations | Andy Matuschak

Post by Andy Matuschak (2021)

Describes a deeper, more intense 2-person alternative to ecologies for tailorable software (summarized in Philip Tchernavskij’s Designing and Programming Malleable Software.

Great tools for thought rarely come from contexts focused on creating tools. They’re usually created in the course of deep creative work in some domain, almost as a byproduct. And they’re usually made by people with significant expertise and investment in those creative problems.

In most domains, great tool-makers are rarely great tool-users, and vice-versa. There might be advantages to separating the work: the tool-maker could constantly consider abstraction and generalization, and the tool-user could focus on meaningful problems at hand without being distracted by issues of systematization.

There’s a tricky chicken-and-egg problem here. If great creative work should drive the invention of new mediums, how can the initial idea driving the creative work get started in the first place?

The pair must proactively develop an armory of tool ideas to equip the tool-user’s explorations. Tool ideas in the armory don’t have to be working software. They just have to be understood well enough that the tool-user can tinker with them in emerging creative projects.

This conception is mostly useful in the context of repeated collaborations, particularly across distinct projects.

Metadata

• suggesters: jryans
• curators: akkartik

[Offray]

During my research I inquired about “How can we change the digital tools that change us?”. So, while in practice we created collaborations between tool users and tool makers, particularly in a form of workshops called Data Weeks and Data Rodas, my main interest is about blurring the distinction between tool user and tool maker, by creating feedback workflows for that, particularly via data storytelling and a versatile self referential digital artifact, made in Pharo Smalltalk, called Grafoscopio.

The idea was to create a malleable digital artifact to write. So a user (like myself) can use the artifact to write about itself, but also about other topics, which in turn, would feedback Grafoscopio and give insights about its future developments. The feedback loop, explained in my PhD thesis, looked like this:

Because of the continuity of the Grafoscopio environment, made on Pharo Smalltalk and later ported to GToolkit, there are no strong divisions between documents, data, app or tools and the user can use his/her learning about data storytelling in a particular domain to later change the complete tool where such initial story was written, following the virtuous cycle depicted above.

The process acknowledges the messiness and diversity of digital mediated practices, while being informed in a conceptual and critical perspective with rich diverse traditions (metasystems and metatools, autopoiesis, complexity, hacktivism). So we also use Grafoscopio to bridge other curated tools that are relatively “closer” (in such conceptual and critical tradition) than others and provide us with a good expressiveness/complexity ratio. We call this interstitial programming that is more about extending sociotechnical systems by enriching the bridges between them. One of such examples was our porting prototype of the Malleable Systems wiki from Hugo to a malleable wiki, bridging TiddlyWiki, Pharo/Grafoscopio and Fossil.

We acknowledge the divide between tool-user/tool-maker. But we try to overcome it by focusing in bootstrapping the co-evolution between metatool and community with set of localized principles, related practices and toolkits for such co-evolution to occur. For that, we created a metatool (a tool that describes itself and its workflow with external tools) and put it inside a community of practice (in our local hackerspace) and we try to approach meaningful projects of such community to see how to metatool evolves while the community’s practices are happening and changing, thanks to the new possibilities offered by the metatool itself.