Malleable software

The aspiration, as given in Klokmose, C. N. (2021, October 19). Software as Computational Media. LIVE ’21, is that software eshould be…

• malleable: lets users appropriate and repurpose their tools and documents in personal and idiosyncratic ways. Software should be reprogrammable for those who have the skills, but also reconstructible from readymade parts.
• shareable: lets users seamlessly collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously on any kind of data in any kind of program
• distributable: allows tools, documents, data, and computation to span and move easily across different devices, platforms, and servers
• composable: allows users to combine tools and functionality beyond traditional application boundaries and incrementally add functionality to tools as needed
• interoperable: allows users to collaborate on shared data using their own tools
• computable: it should be possible to do computations with what you see on the screen

References

• Webstrates and related works (see index)
• Tchernavskij, P. (2019). Designing and Programming Malleable Software (Doctoral dissertation). Université Paris-Saclay
• Fox, A. R., Guo, P., Klokmose, C. N., Dalsgaard, P., Satyanarayan, A., Xia, H., & Hollan, J. D. (2020). Towards a dynamic multiscale personal information space: Beyond application and document centered views of information. Conference Companion of the 4th International Conference on Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming, 136–143
• Figma is a surprisingly general-purpose infinite canvas

Queue

• Harel, D., Marron, A., & Weiss, G. (2012). Behavioral programming. Communications of the ACM, 55(7), 90–100. https://doi.org/10.1145/2209249.2209270
• diSessa, A. A., & Abelson, H. (1986). Boxer: A reconstructible computational medium. Communications of the ACM, 29(9), 859–868. https://doi.org/10.1145/6592.6595
• Andrea diSessa, Changing Minds
• MacLean, A., Carter, K., Lövstrand, L., & Moran, T. (1990). User-tailorable systems: Pressing the issues with buttons. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 175–182. https://doi.org/10.1145/97243.97271
• Grønbæk, J. E. S., Borowski, M., Hoggan, E., Mackay, W. E., Beaudouin-Lafon, M., & Klokmose, C. N. (2023). Mirrorverse: Live Tailoring of Video Conferencing Interfaces. Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 1–14. ~https://doi.org/10.1145/3586183.3606767~