This week's community meeting: Part 1 of Case Studies of User Creativity in Computing

[Ayotte, Dana]

Thanks Colin, sound great!

> On Oct 19, 2015, at 12:36 PM, Clark, Colin <cclark at ocadu.ca> wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Over the next few months at the weekly Fluid community meetings, we're going to feature a special topic dedicated to examining the history of user creativity and "end-user" development. The goal is to situate our own work on personalization technologies within a broader culture of design that aims to offer users the power to adapt, redesign, and develop software in situ, without having to be expert programmers in (today's) programming languages. In our case, this involves the creation of frameworks (such as Infusion), configuration tools (such as UI Options and the GPII autopersonalization system), and authoring tools that support the user to fully participate in the software design process. 
> 
> This idea, of course, is not new. During this series of community meetings, we will explore and discuss a number of current and historical creative software tools and environments such as HyperCard, Smalltalk, Self, Logo, game engines such as Super Mario Maker, and perhaps even familiar productivity software such as Microsoft Excel.
> 
> For our first case study, we will be reading and discussing Bret Victor's article, "Learnable Programming: Designing a programming system for understanding programs" (http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/). As you read it, you'll quickly see that the very idea of what programming is (as the manipulation of text symbols by expert software development) is challenged, broadening it to include design considerations of how environments can support end-user creativity. The article is also useful because it covers a number of key historical systems such as Hypercard, Logo, and others.
> 
> Please take some time to read the article before our meeting on Wednesday. I look forward to chatting with you about it then!
> 
> http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
> 
> Colin
> 
> 
> ---
> Colin Clark
> Lead Software Architect,
> Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University
> http://inclusivedesign.ca
> 
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