Tools That Change the Designer – An Introduction to how tools shape our thinking

1. INTRODUCTION

When we talk about “design tools,” we often mean software: Figma, Miro, prototyping platforms, and now AI-powered assistants. These tools promise efficiency and speed. But as Ivan Illich (1973) and Marshall McLuhan (1964) argue, tools are never neutral. They extend us — but also reshape us. They amplify capability –but can also amputate forms of thinking we no longer practice.

Modern designers sit inside a tool ecosystem that subtly determines how they think, not just what they produce. Recognizing this is the first step toward reclaiming agency and imagination.

A pencil on dark background.

2. ILlICH: WHEN TOOLS CROSS A THRESHOLD

Ivan Illich, in the essay book Tools for Conviviality (1973), makes a powerful distinction between tools that amplify human autonomy and tools that invert control — becoming systems that the user must adapt to. Illich argues tools have a threshold:

At that point, tools become radical monopolies: infrastructures you must use because opting out means professional or social exile. Illich’s concern was not convenience, but autonomy:

Today’s proprietary LLM services and closed design ecosystems exhibit the traits Illich warned about:

The speed is seductive, but Illich would say: “speed becomes a trap if it funnels us toward mediocrity.”

A convivial tool, in Illich’s language, is one that:

Pen and paper are convivial. A local sketching tool or a customizable design system may be convivial. A proprietary black-box AI? Mostly not.

3. McLUHAN: EVERY TOOL EXTENDS — AND AMPUTATES

Marshall McLuhan’s media theory (McLuhan, 1964) strengthens Illich’s warning. McLuhan famously wrote:

”Every technology is an extension of ourselves.”

The car extends the foot. The phone extends the voice. Figma extends the designer’s hand.

But less often quoted is McLuhan’s complement:

”Every extension also amputates part of ourselves.”

When we extend memory into cloud storage, we atrophy the ability to recall. When design tools automate layout, we risk dulling the intuition of composition. McLuhan invites us to ask:

• What capacities are extended?

• What capacities quietly shrink?

• What becomes unthinkable inside a given medium?

When a tool becomes ubiquitous, it becomes the environment. And when something becomes the environment, we stop noticing it — but it continues shaping us.

For today’s designers a number of questions need answering:

McLuhan’s insight:

”The logic of the medium becomes the logic of the mind.”

When LLM platforms set the default style, tone, and structure of design reasoning, the designer’s imagination risks becoming an echo of the system.

4. PALLASMAA: THINKING WITH THE HAND

Juhani Pallasmaa expands this in The Thinking Hand. He argues that embodied cognition — thinking through gesture, pressure, texture, speed — is not primitive but foundational:

Digital tools erase resistance. They flatten differences. They tidy too quickly.

Pallasmaa says that the hand “thinks” in ways the conscious mind cannot.

When design begins in high-fidelity tools:

This is why early-stage ideas should emerge from tools that introduce friction, not ones that algorithmically smooth it away.

5. NIGEL CROSS: DESIGN AS A WAY OF KNOWING

Nigel Cross (2001) reminds us that design is not just visual production — it is a mode of inquiry. Designers generate knowledge by:

But if the “material at hand” is a software environment that:

…then the mode of inquiry itself is altered.

Cross emphasizes that designers must maintain intentionality — choosing representations that allow them to think, not representations that tell them what to think.

6. SUMMARY

When Illich, McLuhan, Pallasmaa, and Cross are placed together, a clear picture emerges:

  1. Illich: Tools must remain within human scale and control — or they reshape us.

  2. McLuhan: Every tool subtly rewires our cognitio — extending and amputating.

  3. Pallasmaa: Embodied, physical making produces deeper imagination than screen-first workflows.

  4. Cross: Design knowledge emerges from intentional, exploratory representation — not templates.

Together, they form the intellectual backbone for the aware design professional:

Speed-driven tools funnel designers toward the average. Convivial, human-scale tools expand imagination and autonomy.

Choosing pen and paper, sketching, tangible prototyping, local tools, or open toolchains is not conservative nostalgia. It is convivial resistance — deliberately designing the conditions in which original thinking can occur.

As you reflect on your current tools, ask:

  1. What aspect of my thinking is this tool extending?

  2. What aspect is it amputating?

  3. What assumptions does it normalize?

  4. Does it encourage diversity or conformity?

  5. Does it amplify my competence — or replace it?

  6. Can I alter the tool — or must I adapt to it?

  7. Does using this tool make me feel more autonomous — or more dependent?

Your goal is of course not to abandon digital tools — but to see them clearly, and to choose intentionally rather than habitually.

References