all humans are information craftspeople

in response to my last blog entry, Boudewijn Rempt wrote about not writing software tools that (over-)anticipating the result. i would agree with his conclusions therein completely.

Boudewijn also noted that he didn't see the connection between the elegance of a cratsman's tools and people organizing their information. he said:

Nobody has much experience with organizing a small library-worth of information, unless they are trained librarians (are librarians craftsmen?). This is something completely new — and I guess that google-like interfaces on our own data, combined with some intelligent way of working with and organizing bookmarks are currently our best bet to allow people to handle all that information.

ok, i was too vague. mea culpa. let me try and make what i perceive the connection to be more evident, then.

all humans are naturally information craftspeople. language is our primary tool for this, though some of us are quite gifted with visual and abstract audio metaphore (e.g. painting and music). daily, every one of takes in a staggering wealth of information which we then sort through and process into concepts with "meaning" and "context".

now that one of the computer's primary functions is communication, it is probably the most potent (meta-)tool available for information craftspeople, aka "us".

now, look at our file manager, our file dialogs, the interaction between documents and applications and even the definition of a document itself. these are all tools that are designed to help us manage our information. they are also very highly instrumented and rife with assumptions of the desired results. these assumptions force us to work in a certain way while at the same time throwing out many possible means of working with our information. ways that are far more natural to human beings than typing in a URI or clicking around a folder hierarchy.