Software as art

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes joined by the cofounders of thirty seven Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinner, Mara Hansen. This week, we are knocking out a customer question. This is a video question from Luke. Hi, guys. I'm building a tool that's not just about making a broken process better and trying to help people see the whole situation differently. And I keep coming back to this idea of thinking about software as art rather than design in the way that art can change how you actually see or think about the world, not just how you do things. So design helps you do things better, but art can actually change your perspective entirely. So what I wanted to ask is, have you guys ever approached software development in that way as something that can actually change a user's perspective fundamentally, not just help them solve a problem? And then if so, like, how do you hold on to that ideal in the mess of actually shipping features, making it usable, and selling it so that people get, okay. I wanna pay for that thing because it helps me. Whereas you might have a higher objective of, like, trying to help change their point of view at the same time. We'd love to hear David and Jason talk about that, software as art. So this is an interesting premise, thinking about software changing someone's perspective versus just solving a problem. Have you guys thought about it in that way at all? I think the art framing is interesting. I hadn't thought about it in that term, but I certainly have thought about changing people's minds with the software that we built. And that has been true right from the get go. When we first launched Basecamp, we thought, do you know what? This is a system that has a point of view. It has a certain approach to project management that's not completely open ended. We have a premise that is project management is primarily communication. It's not charts and graphs. It's not burned down mechanisms. It's not all of these other tools that are common in the project management space. We're not gonna do any of them. We're not even gonna do them if a thousand customers ask for it. In fact, perhaps the most rejected feature in the history of Basecamp is the Gantt chart. We got probably dozens of requests for the Gantt charts the first week Basecamp launched. And in the twenty years since, we have probably gotten thousands at this point, and we've refused to do it. It does not fit within that initial premise of project management is primarily communication. And that's a way of taking a stance and saying this product is for these things. It has this mission, vision, point of view, and sets of principles. And the other side of it is then …