# Tools for thought as cultural practices · Canvases and tools for thought ### Read the phrase literally Maggie Appleton’s [Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects](https://maggieappleton.com/tools-for-thought) (2021, with talks in 2020 and 2022) starts with a phrase that had become “a new rallying point.” People from personal knowledge management, note-taking, networked thought, CSCW, or HCI were reframing their work as **tools for thought** (Maggie Appleton: 'tools that help humans think thoughts; potentially new, different, and better kinds of thoughts than we currently think.'). It is a category tag in venture databases and a landing-page promise of notes, connections, dynamic views, and “a kind of emergent wisdom. An enchanting promise.” She reads the words literally: “the phrase tool for thought doesn’t have the word ‘computer’ or ‘digital’ anywhere in it.” So what does any of this have to do with computers? ### Thinking before transistors Her list of 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 are not objects but **cultural practices** (Maggie Appleton: cultural practices and techniques are primary ways of doing; specific ways of thinking and acting that result in greater cognitive abilities, passed down through culture.) and techniques, “specific ways of thinking and acting that result in greater cognitive abilities,” passed down through culture and predating digital computers by centuries or millennia. One distinction to keep: mediums communicate 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 for written language, JavaScript for programming. ### The computational lineage She tells the computational history fairly. Kenneth Iverson used the phrase in work on programming notation through the 1950s and 60s; Notation as a Tool for Thought (1979) argued shared notation relieves working memory and compresses meaning. Vannevar Bush proposed the Memex in As We May Think (1945). Engelbart’s 1962 definition is about approaching complex problems, not amplifying intelligence in the abstract. Alan Kay in 1989 described a medium whose use “would change the thought patterns of an entire civilization,” and now says the personal computing revolution has not happened yet. Matuschak and Nielsen (2019): “a context in which the user can have new kinds of thought.” The New Media Reader is, several people told her, the bible of the field. All of them treat the computer as vital, and the canonical list (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 “is a community scene as much as it’s a concept.” Source Seven years before Rheingold’s Tools for Thought, the biologist and philosopher C.H. Waddington published a 1977 book of the same name about complex systems. Maggie uses it as evidence the idea was never only computational. Against that lineage she sets the cognitive scientists and philosophers the computer scientists rarely cite. Andy Clark’s 2003 Natural-born Cyborgs argues humans have “always been cyborgs”: the mind is a process between body and environment, so “intelligence emerges at the intersection of humans and tools.” Honest usage would rename the field computational mediums for thought, or “computational mediums for white-collar knowledge work.” The field’s own story casts the nineties and early oughts as fallow, then a second wave from the 2019 Matuschak and Nielsen essay and an inflection in mid-2020 when note-taking apps multiplied. Yet the guides for those apps “are only superficially about the application they’re presented in.” They teach Zettelkasten, spaced repetition, critical thinking. Practices, not software. ### What practice does this carry? For builders 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 it carries one: gives it a place, lowers its cost, lets it be taught. [Gathering Structures](https://maggieappleton.com/gathering-structures) (2024) applies the idea to rooms. “Inadvertently gathering people” for about fifteen years and running the London Future of Coding meetup, she catalogues structures that shape interaction: seven-minute demos (no minimum; the limit “isn’t enough time to waffle”), rotating hosts for groups under about 20, an unconference wall of post-its voted with sticker dots, the fishbowl with its one always-empty chair, positive exclusion. Start small, since people and problems scale linearly and her ideal is eight to twelve: “what you need is a time, a place, an intention, and some people.” Structures are the tool, the meetup the medium, the community the practice. Her last line: “No one else will organise the group you most want to be a part of.” Return to the canvas with that lens. tldraw’s SDK, Make Real, and perfect-freehand are computational objects, and good ones. But Steve Ruiz’s posts are about the practice they carry: how a drag feels, where the handles are by convention, what an eraser does before you let go. The hover-area survey is an ethnography of canvas software; the hope to “define the next conventions” is a hope about practice. Amelia’s proposals encode 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 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. Drawing is older than writing by tens of thousands of years on Maggie’s list; the software’s job is to be a surface the practice survives contact with. Build it with the care of the dead zone and the seeded wobble. Then remember the drawing was always the point.