(2014-03-26) Hon Victor Blame Your Tools

Episode Forty Six: Blame Your Tools. Bret Victor has done a fantastic talk[1] that you really should check out. It's called Inventing on Principle and though it's been out for a while, even if you have seen it, I think it bears and withstands re-watching. Although it's an hour long, the real meat of it is in the first thirty minutes

Over the last three years I've been doing a bunch of thinking about what it means to be able to produce great creative work - and I'm using the word creative loosely, here. Victor's got a good general principle which is that to produce good creative work, especially novel work, the gap between you and your work needs to be as small as possible

Victor's point is that when it comes to code, our tools are nigh-on useless.

there's a well-meaning drive to prototype and iterate

This is a familiar refrain from the agency world

where are the prototyping tools? Facebook ended up building their own on top of Quartz Composer

I keep coming back to Pixar, and I don't mean to, but it's just because they're so frustratingly good. They're a storytelling organisation that, in part because of its roots in computer science and the fundamental understanding that computers can help you do things, have a team dedicated to pre-production tools. Imagine that: a team devoted to building software that helps you, as an organisation, make better creative work

Victor's charge is that we need better tools. It's easy to see what might happen when software eats the creative industry in terms of metrics and analytics. But software should, and will, eat the world of creative concepting.