Great tools can enable co-creation between humans and computers. Molly Mielke joins Mark and Adam to talk about her thesis on the subject. They discuss product design as a fusion of creative and analytical; how consumer preferences may conflict with the Engelbart/Kay vision of computing; the emerging social norms of collaborative software; and why we should bring back skeuomorphism.

That a good tool is one that hones your form, and into which you can project your uniqueness and soul. ​ Curiously, I can’t think of any “spiritually significant” tools for mathematicians. Unless you count the running joke about Hagoromo chalk, which I can attest is the Rolls Royce of chalk. Perhaps it’s time for someone to build one.

please make more creative tools that 1) are not controlled by a publicly traded entity, 2) can be owned and used indefinitely instead of rented. artists having to rent their tools concentrates capital and ensures only certain people can create, concentrating *cultural* capital.

A thing that affords play, then, is a thing that suggests playful uses; a thing that naturally guides its user towards a playful state of mind. ​ The very existence of a reliable undo command is an open invitation to engage in playful experimentation A canvas or sketchbook serves as an “external imagination”, where an artist can grow an idea from birth to maturity by continuously reacting to what’s in front of him. ​ Consider what it’s like to play Super Mario Bros. for the first time. Now consider what it’s like to write, say, a shell script for the first time. In both scenarios, your challenge involves learning how to manipulate a wildly complex system in order to achieve a desired outcome. But so far, I’ve yet to meet anyone who had a harder time learning Super Mario Bros. than learning to program ​ an unfortunate trend in contemporary games is to spell out every detail in a hand-holding “tutorial” session at the outset of a game – unfortunate because it shows both a great deal of contempt for the player’s intuition and a lack of confidence in the designer’s own design. but more than that, it’s a design failure because it tells the player the rules instead of allowing her to learn them. ​ sharp relief Why, then, do people learn to program through tutorials and exercises that tell rather than show? Perhaps because the tools, languages, and environments embraced by modern programming practice are at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile to play. When you first launch Super Mario Bros., you’re greeted by an engaging, reactive first level designed to guide you gently into the world of the game. When you first launch the Unix shell, you’re confronted by an empty, inscrutable command line that will reject, with a tersely worded error message, almost anything you choose to type.