Before We Forget How to Make Things

It’s an amazing book. Buy it for yourself and get curious!

When I was young one of my favorite books was The Way Things Work by David Macaulay and Neil Ardley. For the curious mind it was an amazing journey into how things work the way they do. Everything from how an internal combustion engine operates to how a wing’s shape creates lift was held in its pages, and to 8 year old Dan it was truly a wonder to behold.

But what the glorious illustrations and simple, yet technical, explanations in that book stoked in me was a passion for understanding how things work. It’s an interest that I unfortunately don’t see much of in the world anymore.

There’s a series of thought experiments I’ve seen over the years that really boil down to “if there was an apocalypse how long would it take humanity to figure out how to build [insert any technical thing - car, computer, etc]?” It’s meant to help people become aware of just how much we take for granted, particularly in regard to technology. The reality of course is that most of us don’t know how to make the internal combustion engine for a car, let alone a computer. And certainly not from scratch! But the curious among us might know how to build one from parts. In the ’60s, car manuals explained how to set valve lash. In the ’90s, school computer clubs taught us to build PCs from components. We’re not that far removed from this information being (more) commonly known and used.

As we entered the digital age, we began to move faster - and we got further away from understanding how things are made. It’s fair to say that our ability to create has also greatly accelerated due to the nature of digital tools. But especially as we find our way to digital products produced by AI and no-code AI based tools we risk losing touch with how we’re building the things we’re using. And as we lean more on these tools we move faster and faster. I’d argue that we’re moving far faster than Zuckerberg's “move fast and break things” mentality would ever allow. By the time we see that something is broken we’re at the third iteration of that same thing and the flaw has been so deeply ingrained in the product it seems like that’s just the way things always were.

You can likely guess where I stand on this subject, and you’d be right. I think the fact that we’re losing, and in many cases completely lost, touch with how a thing works is a problem. Not knowing how a thing does what it does means that we’ve lost agency with our own creations. This is a place that I find myself personally uncomfortable. As someone who has made a career as a technologist and worked in marketing, product and product design for twenty years I feel like I should be with the masses beating the drum of progress. After all, I pushed, in my own small way, Web 2.0 forward. I helped convince companies of all shapes and sizes that they needed to engage with customers on social media. Nay, that customers wanted them to engage on social media.

But now I find myself tired of it all.

I’ll be clear though - I haven’t gone full luddite. I don’t have a cabin in the woods where I work on air-gapped IBM’s running on 386 processors. But I have disconnected a little bit in an effort to get a better handle on how things work for me. I’ve ditched my Garmin for a separate heart rate monitor that I only use to track bike rides and runs. I still use Spotify for podcasts, but I try to sit down and listen to full albums when I can whether it’s on Spotify or a turntable. And I still use AI tools to help with creativity and when trying to get past the empty page problem, but I try to understand what it is about the prompt that creates the result I’m seeing. Even in the world of AI it’s important to try to understand why. Try to slow down and think about how the thing you built came together.

If you’re on a product team, take the time to poke at what your users are asking for and take the time to understand why your AI tools are making the recommendations they do.

If you’re on a marketing team don’t rely simply on automated optimization, stop and explore the outcome you’re looking for and make sure you’re optimizing for what really matters - not just what’s easy to measure.

Too often our metrics aren’t aligned with the goal we really want to measure. If click through isn’t converting then take the time to identify what’s blocking the conversion, not on forcing more people through the funnel.

All of this to say, sometimes we need to slow down and make sure we’re building the product we want.