Ken Tompkins writes concerning getting one’s head around Tinderbox: I have owned Tinderbox for some years; I was a beta tester for the first version which was called Ceres. Tinderbox (TB) has always fascinated me; at the same time it has always seemed distant and hard to get my mind around beyond the most basic level.
Still, it has simply not become a part of my daily workflow. Remember when you first saw a word processor? You probably understood instantly — as I did with MSWord — that here was a computer program that was going to change my life. Tinderbox — through no fault of its own — has never risen to that white heat for me.
I had planned to write some commentary on Ken’s post; Ken and I have corresponded a bit and I think he’s on to something here. Before I had a chance, James Vornov wrote about his experience in shifting paradigms around how Tinderbox works, and captured something I’ve been at a loss to describe for some time:
Tinderbox is now where I write most frequently. Its hyperlinked, short text style suits me well. As I’ve become more familiar with the program, I’ve appreciated where it can help in my workflow. Now that I’ve got a website built, I’m actively exploring new use. But it didn’t start out that way. Out of the box, Tinderbox was a puzzle to me. Now, in retrospect I see that the problem is that the central metaphor of the program is novel. The program doesn’t present it to a new user graphically. However, once I adopted the Web as my metaphor, I understood Tinderbox.
It was only when I saw Tinderbox in the context of the Web that I got it. Notes were like web pages or parts of web pages. Agents are like Google. Links went outside my pages (weblinks) or between my pages. Tinderbox was a self contained website that I could translate into HTML via templates. Word presents itself as a typewriter metaphor. Excel is a spreadsheet. We have appointment book and address book metaphors. The internet has been around long enough that a program can use it as a metaphor.
Now as I work on projects, my Tinderbox document is like a private Internet that maps my knowledge and my plans. I don’t think about it as being hard anymore. There are a few ways that I think the user interface might be improved to present the program’s central metaphor more clearly at first. As far as I know, there is no other program who’s central metaphor so clearly maps onto how we manage knowledge today. I think we’re ready for it.
When I first started using Tinderbox, it drew me in because of a superficial resemblance it has to some other software I’ve used. I spent several weeks trying to make it work like that software, with very mixed results. The breakthrough came for me when I started using other views than Map View, and the true nature of the program became clear. For the first time ever, I had a true hypertext writing and filing system on my hands.
Like James, my early metaphor for Tinderbox was the Web. Soon though, I began to realize that the Web was a poor stepchild compared to what I could do with Tinderbox. Tinderbox is closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush’s Memex or Ted Nelson’s Xanadu than it is to the Web. Like the Web, Tinderbox presents a whole new canvas, a new landscape of thought space. Unlike the Web, which is primarily public and collaborative, the Tinderbox landscape is primarily private and maps to my own internal thought processes.
Here, I think, is where the learning curve comes in: to learn to use Tinderbox effectively you must make the leap in your own thought processes to see it for what it really is, to grasp it as a metaphor for your own “internal web” of knowledge and thought. Ken and James outline this metaphorical leap beautifully when Ken remarks:
Remember when you first saw a word processor? You probably understood instantly — as I did with MSWord — that here was a computer program that was going to change my life.
contrasted with James’ thoughts:
Word presents itself as a typewriter metaphor. Excel is a spreadsheet. We have appointment book and address book metaphors. The internet has been around long enough that a program can use it as a metaphor.
and then finally Ken again:
It is probably due to the habits of my mind. I know people who see relationships among all of the material of their lives (just like I know people who use a Palm Pilot exactly the way it was designed to be used — calendars, reminders, contact lists, birthdays. I have had two Palm Pilots and never turn them on except during a semester when I use them for class attendance). If challenged, I can see how email links to assignments which link to calendars which link to texts. But somehow I don’t see these — or need to retrieve these — naturally and easily. I wish I did.
Therein, I think, lies the challenge for the new Tinderbox user: it’s a true hypertext writing and thinking space, and hypertext, real hypertext, not the subset of it we have on the Web, requires a different, non-linear thought process. People who naturally and commonly see interconnections among all the data they deal with daily are probably more inclined to quickly grasp the fundamental nature of what Tinderbox is. Those who don’t are more likely to cling to less useful metaphors for how the program functions, and as such, see less utility in it.
I should note here that this discussion applies more broadly to nearly all information and knowledge management technology, and not just Tinderbox. I’m surrounded by friends, family members, and colleagues who see no connection between their computers, mobile phones, the InterWeb, databases they access, e-mail, and their own internal thought-space. To them, all these things are more or less separate and distinct entities, and connections between them are seen as difficult and occasional. They are mired in metaphors that aren’t wholly appropriate for the technologies they use. Computers are typewriters and calculators. Mobile phones are just that - phones. E-mail is like a paper letter or card. Networks are, well, just plain black magic. Their thought space is analog, not digital.
In terms of Tinderbox, I think part of the reason it takes some time to make the metaphorical leap to understand it has to do with the idea that the more information contained within a Tinderbox document, the more useful that document becomes. More information, more notes, yields more opportunities for interconnections, more serendipitous discovery of those connections, and more results returned by the program’s agents as they look for those connections. Early on, the new user has little data entered into the program, and what data they have entered most likely conforms to an existing metaphor for how the program works - as a pure outliner, for example. Hours are spent then, attempting to make the program conform to this expectation at a time when the data in the document is sparse. Functionality at that point isn’t perhaps as obvious as it will be later when there’s more data to work with, and the user doesn’t (or can’t) see how things really work - because they aren’t at that point looking for it. Certainly, this is the sort of trap I fell into early on with Tinderbox, and it took me some time to climb out of the hole.
I’m desperately interested in how we can better help people make the mental leap to better understand the interconnected nature of thought, data, and technology. IT professionals have for years struggled to do this by explaining things from a technical perspective, and have generally failed miserably. Skilled designers and engineers have had some better success by producing devices and some software that is intuitive enough that many people can grasp the fundamental principles behind a particular technology and make immediate use of it - the iPod and Tivo spring to mind - so clearly design is important. As the technology becomes more powerful and ubiquitous I suspect all this will become easier, but at the same time I think there is a fundamental mindset required that we’re not very skilled at helping people develop. As I read the weblogs of teachers and academics who increasingly make use of technology in their teaching, I hope to glean some pointers for the methods they’re developing to help their students gain these skills.
