Tools As Ways of Being

I took notes from Sean Voisen’s call for more hybrid tools. He speaks for a moment on generative AI and its inclusion into existing tools, but reading between the lines the insight I found was how our tools can trigger empathy for people and disciplines:

One of the greatest goals we can have for [making] tools…is that in expanding all of our respective capabilities, we do not replace our human teammates, but rather we participate more deeply in the creative process together.

A good tool improves your output.

A great tool improves your output and your understanding and empathy for others and their disciplines.

If designing tools is designing ways of being — “we shape our tools and they shape us” — then the tools we use together are shared ways of being. They facilitate us not only getting stuff done together, but being together. And that being can bring a better understanding of each other.

I don’t think that’s too crazy to assert, especially when you look at communities that coalesce around tools, like Clojure. People love their tools, and they identify with the principles they embody and the communities that support them.

Our tools are ways of being. How important, then, that we carefully consider their design as well as proliferate their diversity.