What Early Hominids Taught Us About Building Things for the Internet
Welcome to the first issue of The Shed, a publication about the tools we use to tell stories. It’s an idea we’re testing for a potential ~new~ Lab project and we’re excited to share it with you.
We sent this to our most engaged email subscribers* yesterday. If you are interested in receiving future issues directly in your inbox, you can signup for our TinyLetter.
Thanks! -@KnightLab
IN TODAY’S SHED
- What Early Hominids Taught Us about Building Things for the Internet
- We Listened To An Awesome Podcast or What We Learned About The Marshall’s Project’s CMS
- Three Definitions of A Tool
- Learn How To Build Web Notifications
HOW DO YOU SHARPEN A ROCK?
For those not reading The Shed on a phone, we recommend this soundtrack.
TL;DR: Early hominids were pretty atrocious at making quality tools until they figured out how to communicate. If we want to improve our tools today, we should get better at discussing and sharing our tools.
Humans took about two hundred thousand years to figure out that if they used sharper rocks, they would be much more efficient at digging soil, skinning dead animals, or cutting plants out of the ground.
Why did it take our ancestors so long to go from this to this (see the image below)?
The first thought was that they weren’t dexterous enough. In 2010, a team of researchers tested the hypothesis by outfitting an archeologist skilled at making replicas of these ancient rock tools with a glove covered with sensors. They tracked all of his intricate hand movements while assembling tools from different eras, and as it turned out, humans using dull rocks likely had all the dexterity needed to create sophisticated tools, like a sharpened rock hand axe. They just didn’t figure it out until they started to communicate with each other.
Within the last decade, researchers have found more and more connections between the emergence of language and the rise of sophisticated tool making. Humans got substantially better at making tools around the same time they learned how to communicate. Communication allowed them to express ideas, share learnings, and eventually teach others to build tools of their own.
#DOYOURTAGSTALK?
Late last month the product team at the Marshall Project — Ivar Vong, Andy Rossback and gabriel dance — went on the Shop Talk podcast (👋🏾 Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier) to discuss the tools that power their journalism. The hour long conversation about their CMS, named EndRun, is well worth a listen. One thing we are still thinking about…
How do our tools speak with each other?
For EndRun tags are a critical component. Here’s Ivar (and if you don’t fully follow Ivar’s technical terms, hang in there. We’ll revert to the vernacular in a few seconds):
The way our tag system works, a tag can be connected to any model on the rails app. So we have a post model that stores all the post stuff. We have a link model that stores all the link stuff… but because there is a polymorphic association between the tag and the item, that edge is polymorphic on the receiver side, it makes the queries on the record straight forward.
Let’s translate this. EndRun allows editors to do a lot of things ranging from sending email newsletters to publishing posts to viewing analytics to even sharing bookmarked URLs with colleagues. As often as possible, everything gets tagged. If you search for the “death penalty” in EndRun, you can sort, filter, and find all sorts of useful data — beyond a reverse-chronological list of what was published.
If you think about the variety of tools in your day-to-day lives, do they have a shared language allowing them to communicate with one another? How would a shared language help ask better questions (and maybe make better decisions)? What types of cross-references do you wish existed?
Three Definitions of A Tool
It’s probably time for us to define what a tool is (and what a tool is not). Let’s start with a basic definition of “tool” via Google:
- noun: tool; plural noun: tools: a device or implement, especially one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function.
- verb: impress a design on.
- slang: a stupid, irritating, or contemptible person.
At The Shed, we’re interested in these first two and will try not to act like the third. But before we get ahead of ourselves, we want to hear from you. We want to be a better resource and build a better conversation about tools**, toolmakers, and utility. We would love to know:
- What tools can you not live without? What tools require regular maintenance? Have you retired any tools?
- Who creates your tools? How accessible are your tools? What do the people who use your tools look like?
- Do your tools make you laugh? Grimace? Cry? Smile? Take deep breaths?
Want to respond to one or more of these questions (or pose one that we didn’t ask)? Leave a comment or tweet to us @KnightLab.
Learn How To Build Web Notifications
Thanks for making it to the end of our first issue. Until next week, we recommend spending ~13 minutes with Madeline Welsh of the @gdnmobilelab of the Guardian’s Mobile Lab as she documents her team’s experiments building web notifications to distribute news. We’ve read this at least three times and are still learning new things about how to
- Leverage Amazon to quickly build notifications infrastructure without breaking the bank
- Excite your colleagues and friends when asking them to test your experiments
- Design a process for future experiments based on your available data
-Your friends at The Shed
*To create this newsletter, for example, we relied on graph paper, pens, Google Docs, Atom, TinyLetter, Pixelmator, InDesign, Slack and Giphy.
**We used Mailchimp’s indexing metrics and if you are curious about their methodology, click/tap here.
