performed task. An action space includes everything we can do, think, and use and
as such is beyond the tool itself. Yet, tools are of course central to how humans in-
teract with their world.
We use tools to expand our capacities, and these tools also become parts of us.
They become a form of prosthesis, an extension of our bodies, like the blind man’s
white stick, or a bicycle for the cyclist, a relation Merleau-Ponty exemplified as a
subject-object situation between body and tool (Merleau-Ponty 2002). This inti-
mate connection between body and tool, or between actants is what Bruno Latour
calls a “hybrid”, where the tool constitutes a distributed competence, adding to the
subjects possibilities to act upon the world (Latour 1993). In the study Design of
Everyday Life, Shove et al (2007) examines the scattered competence in DIY craft
projects. They emphasise the importance to recognize how technological tools and
materials supports everyday endeavours,
not as instruments of deskilling and dumbing down but as agents that rearrange the
distribution of competence within the entire network of entities that have to be
brought together to complete the job in hand. (Shove et al 2007: 59)The inventors of tools prepare them for specific situations and responses and opti-
mize or “sharpen” their use for specific foreseen tasks. But more often the users are
more creative than the innovators, and they apply them to more uses than what
was originally intended. A chair is used as a ladder, or a screwdriver temporarily
used as a hammer. The action space proves larger than first thought. However, the
opposite can be true. The user does not understand the full capacity of a tool. It is
common in computer programs where there are far more menus and functions
than used by most people, and the full potential of the tools is understood and re-
leased by very few. In this last case the offered action space is only partially used.
A common tool for expanding action spaces through skills often takes the form of
the manual. This consists of hands-on step-by-step processes, show-and-tell per-
formances, engaging in material or immaterial metamorphosis. To generalize a bit,
these instructions can take two forms. They can be commands, similar to mathe-
matical functions with units and elements transforming through various relations
and calculations. They can also be like a cooking session following the advice from
a cookbook. Ingredients are refined, mixed and moved in and out of the oven,
multiplied, added, divided. Unlike most mathematical symbols, the ingredients of
the cookbook are real; they have taste and consistency. It might be possible to say
that we learn more about ginger by working with it and we learn about its nature,
how it affects and operates as a part of a blended taste, than we learn the nature of
a number though a mathematical calculation.
In this way a cookbook helps to open new action spaces. Ginger may become a part
of our everyday kitchen, but we may also further our knowledge into a true con-
noisseurship. What was before a routine use of an ingredient might turn into an
adventure. After some time we can let go of the cookbook and experiment by our-
selves. The action space has grown and we continue on a journey on our own. New
inspiration took us further after the show-and-tell manual set us off.
Some manuals are made for very specific purposes. They both open action spaces
as well as limit them. Let us look at a plastic airplane model; one I built as a child.
This airplane model has a glossy covered box with a nice illustration on the cover,
the plane rages across the cloudy sky engaged in a daring dogfight. Opening the
box the parts came out together with the magic djinn of model-building – endless