Why your toolkit may be better off with a hatchet than a corn kernel remover
In Werner Herzog’s 2013 film Happy People, a fur trapper lives happily (for the most part) for a year in one of the coldest, remotest stretches of Siberia. He goes into the bush for the trapping season with very little — rifle, snowmobile, dog, hatchet — and plans to make what he doesn’t carry.
Over the course of the film the trapper makes a pair of skis, a hut, traps, and most of a canoe with just one of his tools: the hatchet, expertly wielded. The film is an impressive portrait of human endurance, natural wonder, and, unexpectedly, the value of a single, foundational tool.
The hatchet, in fact, is so useful that its relative, the ax, “is the longest-used tool in human history.”
For those of us who are unlikely to spend a winter in the subarctic wilderness, we likely have our own version of the ax that allows us to make websites, create photographs, or manipulate data. There’s a strong argument to be made that the simplest tools are also the most versatile — a chef’s knife for example, instead of a corn-kernel remover.
Perhaps we should avoid “uni-taskers,” as Alton Brown calls them, in the kitchen, the wilderness, and in our work.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
With a focus on broadly usable tools, we may risk falling victim to the Law of the Instrument, a concept succinctly summarized with the phrase, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
What if we’re blinded to new, useful tools in the kitchen by our love for the chef’s knife? Would you really deny even the occasional baker a countertop apple peeler, a tool that’s both useful and fun?
At Knight Lab, these questions hits close to home. Though we try to offer the basic kitchen knives people need, our apple peelers sell like hotcakes. One of the most frequent discussion topics when building tools is how to limit what the tools can do. We believe in the power of useful constraints. But if we make our mapping tools do one specific thing — present single events on a map in chronological order, for example — are we contributing to a cluttered kitchen drawer? Even worse, are we keeping you from learning how to chop an onion without this thing? Would we better serve our users by focusing not merely on tools, but by helping them learn the core technology used to build the web and tell compelling stories?
We haven’t settled on an answer, and we often try to do both. We think that tools like TimelineJS are great in part because they can lure people into learning some fundamental lessons about technology, while enabling them to build a powerful story easily. We hope that success with little coding empowers people to learn more — that helping them build a timeline with a spreadsheet (a foundational tool, we think) and to publish with an iframe (requiring some knowledge of HTML) cracks open the door to deeper learning.
We’re curious how you answer this question. How does your organization enable as many people as possible to make quizzes, charts, and photo-sliders, yet not overwhelm them with available tools? Drop us a line if you have some thoughts. We’d love to hear them.
Lend me some sugar. I am your neighbor.
ICYMI, Andy Carvin shared a roundup this week on Medium of reported.ly’s favorite tools. We love peeking inside other tool sheds to pick up tips and compare notes, but what’s awesome about this list are the tips and warnings around the tools’ capabilities.
After all, a tool is only as effective as the person who wields it. A tool might help you to figure out the geolocation of a tweet, for example, but “just because a piece of information or footage is geotagged does not mean it’s accurate,” Carvin reminds us. Please use with adult supervision.
Also on reported.ly’s list is Pablo by Buffer, a powerful tool for creating a shareable quote-and-image combo to share on social media. Users can choose from a variety of background images or upload their own; you can insert text and move it around; you can change colors and font sizes; you can upload a logo to throw into the mix.
Its power comes in part from the variety of features — it puts trust in the users to create something awesome by affording them plenty of choice. This too hits at something we bat around at the Knight Lab: How much of the design should we hand over to the user? Is part of our value proposition the constraints we introduce? These questions have been top of mind as we workshop a project aimed at a similar problem: easing the amount of friction it takes to create a shareable image-quote for social. It’s harder than it should be, so we’ve spent part of our summer playing with solutions. One of the biggest ongoing debates has been about constraints — to what extent we should purposefully and thoughtfully limit features. We’re almost ready to show off our MVP and would love to know what you think. Stay tuned.
This post is excerpted from The Shed, our newsletter about the tools we use to tell stories. Subscribe for weekly issues!
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