Act 1: Creative Tools

Before we begin let’s define a concept: Creative Tools. Creative Tools in the context of this text are any entity with the purpose of manipulating ideas.

Creative tools come in many forms. Photoshop is a creative tool that let’s you shape your visual ideas. Piano is also a creative tool for the sake of playing music. The soul purpose of a creative tool is to get the idea as the input and return a set of outputs based on it.

A Piano is made of two parts:

• One that gets the input music from the user (keyboard and pedals)
• One that constructs the music based on the input. (all the other parts)

What a piano is meant to be is an interface for turning ideas into music. Yet, no one can just pick it up and use it to play the ideas inside of their heads unless they have years of hard practice. In the music world knowing how to make a good piece of music often takes less practice than knowing how to perform that piece whereas in the concept it must be the opposite.

This is to an extent in which people sometimes judge music based on how hard is it to play or how hard it is to sign it. While creative tools must be transparent layers between the ideas and their realities people go to concerts just to see the concept of giving the inputs to instruments. The task of entering the inputs is so hard that it itself has become an art form.

Phone is a tool which we use on daily basis to call one another. Imagine in order to call someone you needed months of practice and you had to exercise a lot just to make one call , that would defiantly make phones inadequate and inefficient tools. Now just zoom back to Piano, It literally takes months to perform a piece of music on the Piano. Isn’t that enough to say the exact same thing about Piano? Isn’t it inefficient and inadequate?

Act 2: All the Lost Ideas

When I hear music I sometimes think how different it could be. I listen to a chord progression and then wonder around a new music in my head. Often it happens that I add more instruments. Sometimes I even hear orchestras in my mind. However each time I come close to my instrument or DAW apps I become completely useless. I spend so much time entering my idea into the tools that I lose my idea in between…

I once had a dream, a wonderful one. It was a world painted in blue, people looked like the paintings of the cavemen and they all looked the same. No eyes, No ears, No mouths, anything… They were plain white just like the drawings. I could see a waterfall but It was so tall I couldn’t see its origin and there were eyes in the size of mountains floating in the water and skies. These eyes were falling and moving with the waterfall and all of those strange people were watching it. It was just the most wonderful picture my mind could ever illustrate. When I woke up I did my best to draw it but I couldn’t. It was just too hard and couldn’t make it.

I have imagined thousands of things, pipes of music, drawings, places, architectural forms, devices, etc… but I couldn’t have brought them to life.

In my opinion everyone are artists, everyone are designers, engineers, ideologists. But it is so hard to shape those ideas that we just loose them. I am a software engineer, but I don’t even recall what it was that I was trying to do when I started to learn programming. Why did I even bother to learn it in the first place?

Think of all the magnificent music you could hear but you can’t because someone couldn’t hold an idea for years and learn the instruments and tools to bring it into life. Think of those fascinating painting you could see that you just can’t. Movies, Universes, Places… Perhaps they could even change your life but who knows? We never even know what they were.

Act 3: The Cage That Is Knowledge

Have you ever wondered what is it that makes the Beginners Luck? One point of contribution is simply the fact that beginners don’t know about the rules and practices. They have such creativity because they don’t know.

Why almost all the buildings look alike? Why all websites look the same? Aren’t architecture and design creative processes?. If they are why are they so limited and conservative?

I blame it on the tools. When you start learning about walls and floors and stairs all you see form that point is a composition of these elements. You might could make a big sphere like a big dome, shape the surrounding space with arches… You see? I used arch and dome and got limited to the known elements again. Designers get limited to typography and layouts each time they do something. These schools of thought are highly tied and shaped by the tooling they use.

Therefore not even the tools limit us to shape the ideas we have they also limit us in the way we think. Because What is the use of an idea when you can’t bring it to life?

Act 4: How did we ended up here?

We are having a real issue here at the 21t century: The acceleration of our scientific and technological progress is linear and therefore the rate of progress is exponential. We really can’t say this is good or bad, there are long debates about that. The problem here is that the structure of our minds can only feel the linearity. When it comes to exponential sequences and rates we can’t feel it. If you ask about things like A.I. being powerful enough, you see that people predict them to happen in centuries or so while if you take the exponential rate of progress it might even happen in less than a decade.

We have advanced in computer science in such way that we have never progressed in the whole human history, however the medium we use today goes to 70’s or even 60’s. This is due to the fact that while the machines have progressed a lot we as the users are still slowly becoming aware of the potentials and possibilities. Our graphical user interfaces have become prettier and filled with motions and what you didn’t have in 70’s. Yet, the functionality and the actual Human-Computer interfaces have remained the same .

The “copy” button of the Xerox STAR is still the same concept now 50 years later and the only change has been making it a virtual button instead of having it on the keyboard. Even worse is that such important and useful key has become a composition of Command+C instead of an individual button. While we could take the idea of copy and improve it by bringing state history or tools like timelines and multiple clipboards we have hardened it for good.

And this is about the tech industry where “improving interfaces” is an actual job. If you take Piano; companies are proud that they are making it exactly the same for three centuries.

I again bring your attention that to this fact that “Tools are no holy stuff.” . We have made them to help us improve out lives. Just that. The whole purpose of a language is to make it possible to transfer thoughts and expressions. Yet we treat languages like they are really divine.