Tools

Description

By Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell:

"This study relies on three separate formulations of “tool.” The first is our everyday understanding of “tool,” which we used early on to recognize the importance of the roles tools, specifically homemade tools, played in the space. We saw this kind of making as one that separated the kinds of making found in the hackerspace from forms that can exist easily outside of the space and, therefore, as a way in to investigating the process of becoming an established maker in this context. In this operational definition, an artifact is a tool if it is used in a process of creation separate from its own creation. In other words, we identified these tools based on whether they were used by the maker to create other artifacts.

The second formulation of “tool” is based on an emic account of the concept from the hackers themselves. When we began interviewing the members about the tools they have created in the space, we were careful not to impose our interpretations of what constitutes a tool, instead allowing them to interpret what “tool” meant for them and judge which of their projects would count. This allowed us to expand on our own notion of “tool” while staying true to an insider’s perspective of the concept. As noted in the introduction, the emic account of “tool” surprised us, because it seemed much more inclusive than we anticipated.

This surprise prompted us to consider formulations of “tool” available in the research literature, which constitutes our third formulation. This literature includes works about tools from sociology, education, architecture, art, critical theory, and information design. Tools are instruments we encounter and use to accomplish tasks. Art historian Howard Risatti (2007) defines tools as “something used directly by the hand with an intention to make something by doing something to material” (49-50, emphasis in original). They are instrumental and have a pragmatic function, since they are used to make other things. A tool to McCullough (1988) is “a moving entity whose use is initiated and actively guided by a human being, for whom it acts as an extension, toward a specific purpose” (68). Tools are manually operated and are in Risatti’s words, “kinetically dependent” in that they require us or something else to activate their function (2007, 51). When such an operation stops, tools cease to work; accordingly, a tool is “something with a ‘tooling’ potential and that a thing becomes a tool in the process of being put into action, of being put to ‘work’” (Risatti 2007, 43, emphasis in original). Synthesizing, these formulations suggest that tools are material objects that are put to work through intentional human action, and that their potential is latent except when they are used.

Such a description of tools reveals three additional characteristics about the relationship between tools and tool users: that tools direct our sensual engagement, that they require practice for mastery, and that identifying the right tools for the tasks at hand demands reasoned judgment. These activities are necessarily context and medium-dependent. As an example, consider a well-equipped shed and in exactly what ways it is conducive to gardening. Through practice, a gardener knows how to operate a single tool for a particular medium, and when necessary, can select appropriately a combination of different instruments (e.g., lopping shears, pole pruners, hedge shears, and pruning saws, etc.) to trim overgrown branches. For McCullough (1988), tools “come to stand for the processes. This symbolic aspect of tools may help you clarify your work…Holding a tool helps you inhabit a task” (61). There is a reciprocal relationship between work and the tools that are used to make it (Gelber 1997).

Tools are also prosthetic, because they extend and enhance human capabilities. Sennett (2008) makes a distinction between replicant and robot tools. Replicant tools mimic human abilities while supplementing and amplifying them in specific ways. A spatula is a replicant tool because it expands our capacity for heat tolerance, allowing us to handle food beyond the body’s natural ability, while nonetheless mimicking the manual behavior of flipping and arranging objects on a surface. A robot tool is “ourselves enlarged: It is stronger, works faster, and never tires” (Sennett 2008, 84-85). A car can be seen as a robot tool because its power moves us quickly, and we tire of riding in it far sooner than it tires of transporting us.

In addition to extending our physical capabilities, tools also position us in the social world. As Illich (1980) writes, “An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters…To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning” (22). Tools are thus future orienting, providing mechanisms for users to envision and then to bring about future worlds.

Summarizing this research, tools connect human understanding to the material world through the possibility of change; they extend or augment, sometimes radically, human capabilities; they require us to change our physical behaviors, skills of imagination, and judgment to learn how to use them well; and, if all of this happens, they empower us to envision and pursue new futures. We argue that the development of this kind of tool sensibility is an integral part of becoming a maker, as it has a profound impact on an individual’s perception of their abilities. Research on hacker’s and maker’s tool use can reveal much about how an individual develops such an identity, and because, as we will demonstrate, self-made tools are especially expressive of their makers, their creation and use is an especially fruitful area for empirical inquiry." (http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewed-articles/becoming-makers-hackerspace-member-habits-values-and-identities/)