Tools for thought as cultural practices

Maggie Appleton’s essay Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects (2021, with talk versions in 2020 and 2022) starts with a phrase that had become “a new rallying point.” People who used to gather around personal knowledge management, note-taking, networked thought, CSCW, or HCI were reframing their work as tools for thought. The phrase is a category tag in venture databases and appears on the landing page of every hot new knowledge app, where it seems to mean writing notes, connecting them, exploring dynamic views, and then “experiencing a kind of emergent wisdom. An enchanting promise.” Her opening move is to read the words literally. Taken at face value, “the phrase tool for thought doesn’t have the word ‘computer’ or ‘digital’ anywhere in it.” So what, she asks, does any of this have to do with computers?

She then lists tools that helped humans think before a single transistor: written language (3200 BCE), drawing (around 73,000 years ago), maps (700 BCE), Hindu-Arabic numerals (400 BCE), epic poetry as oral history, the Socratic method (500 BCE), the scientific method, Cartesian coordinates (1637), Zettelkastens (1500s), Aboriginal songlines (around 60,000 years ago), spreadsheets, and data visualisation (1785). “Each of these examples profoundly transformed the kinds of thoughts humans can think.” Most of them, she observes, are not objects. They are cultural practices and techniques, “specific ways of thinking and acting that result in greater cognitive abilities,” passed from generation to generation through culture, and every one predates digital computers by centuries or millennia. She offers a distinction worth keeping: mediums are a means of communicating a thought, tools are a means of working in a medium, and “tools and mediums require each other.” Cameras are a tool for photography, blogs a tool for written language, JavaScript a tool for programming.

The computational history is real, and she tells it fairly. The phrase was first used by Kenneth Iverson in his work on programming notation through the 1950s and 60s; his public paper Notation as a Tool for Thought appeared in 1979, arguing that shared notation can relieve working memory and compress complex meanings. Vannevar Bush proposed the Memex in As We May Think in 1945. Engelbart’s 1962 definition concerns increasing a person’s capability to approach a complex problem, and she notes he cared about complex problems rather than amplifying intelligence in the abstract. Alan Kay in 1989 described a truly new medium whose use “would change the thought patterns of an entire civilization,” and is lately fond of saying the personal computing revolution has not happened yet. Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen’s 2019 definition is “a context in which the user can have new kinds of thought.” The New Media Reader is called, by several people she has heard, the bible of the field. Her point is not that these thinkers were wrong but that they all treat the computer as vital, and that the list of commonly cited major thinkers (Iverson, Licklider, Bush, Kay, Taylor, Engelbart, Papert, Victor, Rheingold) is male, white, North American, and tied to a few prestigious technical universities. Tools for thought, she writes, “is a community scene as much as it’s a concept,” and the scene gives the term a particular flavour.

Against that lineage she sets the cognitive scientists and philosophers who have studied cognition, tools, and environments for centuries and are rarely cited by the computer scientists. Andy Clark is the most significant for her: his 2003 Natural-born Cyborgs argues humans have “always been cyborgs,” and that the mind is not a set of functions in the brain but a process between our bodies and the environment, so that “intelligence emerges at the intersection of humans and tools.” If we were honest about current usage, she says, we would rename the field computational mediums for thought, or, more honestly still, “computational mediums for white-collar knowledge work.” She also describes the field’s own story about itself: a loss-of-progress narrative in which the nineties and early oughts are the fallow times, then a second wave kicked off by the 2019 Matuschak and Nielsen essay, with an inflection in mid-2020 when the number and diversity of note-taking apps jumped. And she notices something about the guides written for those apps: “many of these guides are only superficially about the application they’re presented in.” They teach Zettelkasten, spaced repetition, critical thinking. The practices, not the software.

For people who build software, the conclusion lands on the product page. “This question of developing better tools for thought can and should cover a much wider scope than developing novel note-taking software.” An app does not make anyone think better by existing. A practice does, and an app is good to the degree that it carries a practice: gives it a place, lowers its cost, and lets it be taught. Maggie’s own note on Gathering Structures (2024) is the same idea applied to rooms rather than screens. She has been “inadvertently gathering people” for about fifteen years, and runs the London Future of Coding meetup, and the note is a catalogue of structures that shape how people interact: seven-minute demos (no minimum, and the limit “isn’t enough time to waffle”), rotating hosts for groups under about 20, an unconference wall of post-its voted on with sticker dots, the fishbowl with its one always-empty chair, positive exclusion. Her advice is to start small (people and problems scale linearly; her ideal size is eight to twelve) and that “what you need is a time, a place, an intention, and some people.” The structures are the tool; the meetup is the medium; the community is the practice.

Now return to the canvas with that lens. tldraw’s SDK, Make Real, perfect-freehand, and the MCP canvas are computational objects, and very good ones. But what Steve Ruiz actually spent his posts on was the practice the objects carry: how a drag should feel, where the resize handles are by convention, what a laser pointer does in a meeting, what an eraser should do before you let go. His hover-area survey is an ethnography of canvas software, a record of how a community of tools interprets a shared set of conventions, and his hope that the SDK might “define the next conventions” is a hope about practice, not code. Amelia’s proposals for the infinite canvas are about encoding what people already do by hand. Maggie’s warning about Gas Town is that generating faster than you can think is a practice too, just a bad one.

So the thing to carry into your own work is a question to ask of every canvas, editor, or tool you build: what practice does this carry, and who is it for? If the honest answer is a demo, the work is not done. The canvas matters because drawing is one of the oldest tools for thought there is, older than writing by tens of thousands of years on Maggie’s list, and the job of the software is to be a good enough surface that the practice survives contact with it. Build the surface with the care of the dead zone and the seeded wobble. Then remember that the drawing was always the point.