No magic IT formulas

Technology workers who don’t see themselves as passionate, creative professionals, and who lack commitment to their work, will inevitably occupy the lower strata of the future job market. I’ve said that before. My new corollary to that is that all working people are consumers even on company time. We need to feel impressed and inspired by the tools and materials we’re given.

A new brush that feels just right can create three new paintings for an artist, seemingly by itself. It channels her creativity not by making marks on canvas that match images already in her mind but by giving her new images that didn’t exist until she started moving the brush.

I want that magic brush for my work. I look for it constantly. I’ve had my hands on it a time or two, but it’s a slippery thing. I’m trained to see creativity and imagination as a process I have to complete before I sit down with my keyboard and mouse. But of course it doesn’t work that way. I want the tools I use — computers and software — not only to soak up the thoughts and images in my head but also to inspire me through their use.

While I have no trouble describing what I want, I can’t begin to describe how to get there. I’ve tried outline programs and sticky notes and graphics tablets and speech recognition and on and on. It’s always a metaphor for something in real life, but trying to mimic that thing sucks the life out of it. Sometimes I luck out. My brain and imagination mesh with my working environment and words just land on the page as though written by another, more articulate, more prolific writer. But often, the creative seeds, the tip-of-my-tongue thoughts, vanish in the time it takes me to turn them into something my computer can record. And then, reading or viewing it in recorded form does not put me back on that original track.

I’m fond of the Macintosh for the potential it has to bring this together, to make my PowerBook more of a partner than a passive participant in my creativity. When I’m writing, OS X doesn’t present itself as an operating system the way Windows does. I see Windows as a foundation for exposing Windows’ services. It exists for the computer’s benefit. The Mac GUI exists for the user’s benefit. It takes on the task of integration and consistency of presentation. It makes sure you can move effortlessly from app to app, and from window to window. OS X is a very natural fit, not because I’m more familiar with it — I know nothing so well as I know Windows — but because its operational metaphors seem to be molded around the way I’d work if I didn’t use computers at all.

OS X takes me where I want to go in a way that matches my stride, but it can’t help me out when I get there. That’s where it’s up to the app, and that’s where, too often, I get stuck. I spend a lot of time in Word which, like the rest of Office, is designed to record and stylize but not to create nor to noodle around with ideas. Can it? Yes, if you can mold your thought and imagination to conform to an application’s requirements. I can’t.

One of the things I learned at Macworld Conference & Expo is that I’m not alone in this frustration with applications that can only absorb the ideas that have already been translated, in a lossy fashion, from creative human to a confining paper and typewriter metaphor. I saw some promising tools at Macworld, not the least of which is Apple’s own Pages.

Maybe one of them is my magic brush.