I want to try and sort / rearrange / explore some of my thoughts on why I make creative tools.

Sometimes I wonder why (or feel bad?) I don't use the tools more myself. Or I wonder what it means that I don't.

If I want to make it pointed I ask 'do I make tools because I want to be close to creativity but myself don't have something to say'?

I don't think that's true (or maybe a piece of it is). I think in general I like to make systems. I also get frustrated with existing tools - I want a portal into a place where tools look differently, work differently. I think that's worth something in itself, just to have alternate, considered tools - alternate coherent ones.

Coherency seems like a big thing here - I want to take a little branch off from where things are and build a little ways out on it ('slowly going out on a limb') into something a little new. But why I build it into something small and self-contained - not just a thought-experiment but a working tool - is I like the journey of building the rest of the system off those first branch assumptions. And also feeling what are essential divergences and what are distractions - because I do want to position it within our current world of interactions - usually.

I also enjoy the dialog with the material. I often start from an API or a capability, and I extend or frame that capability a certain way. In my favorites, I think I succeed at framing and hooking in a way that makes a capability feel different - or reveals that capability to the user - makes them think about that capability differently, grasp it more fully, and that echoes the discoveries I had in the making of the tool.

There's connections there to art - I think about James Turrell using windows to frame the sky. That's directing your attention. To say this experience can be as rich as anything else if you direct your attention to it - and the frame there helps you so much - if you try and pay attention overall to how the sky is changing you get caught up, overwhelmed, or - it washes out somehow - it's still something pretty, but it's this big category of sunset... With the frame, you can say, how does the light in this corner change over time. And you can look at the whole thing at once and let it wash over you in a good way - have a feeling for the whole, but feel like the whole is not overwhelming - it's framed for you, narrowed for you. Who knows how much of this feeling comes from us training ourselves to look at other things in frames...

So (stretching) I want to do things like frame how parts of a computer work, how our computers work, or more how media works on a computer. I do think about pixels all the time, and about re-stranging the fact that our screen is made of pixels, that all of the wondrous things we see on screens is always just this gridded row of pixels - how strange that is. What other possibilities are in that?