Tool Use

Roles: user, tool, task, skill, maintenance, extension, mastery

The relationship between a human agent and an instrument employed to accomplish work. Tool use involves selection, skill acquisition, ongoing maintenance, and the gradual extension of capability that comes with mastery. As a target domain, it is structured by metaphors that import social relationships (companionship, servitude, partnership) onto what is fundamentally a one-directional dependency between user and artifact.

As Source Frame (12)

• AI Is a Spell Checker → artificial-intelligence
• AI Is a Tool → artificial-intelligence
• Boat Anchor → software-programs
• Filesystem Mount → data-processing
• Golden Hammer → software-programs
• Hanlon's Razor
• Ladder → social-hierarchy, career, abstraction
• Man with a Hammer
• Network Socket → network-communication
• Occam's Razor
• Sharpening the Saw → professional-development, planning-and-preparation
• Struggle Switch → psychotherapy

Applied To This Frame (2)

• social-roles → An Instrument Is a Companion
• science-fiction → Waldo Is Remote Manipulation