Community Meeting (October 3, 2018): On Continuing Creativity and What Lies in the Path of the Revolution: Thinking through the hard problems of designing, using, and changing software in practice.

Description

Presenters: Colin Clark, Antranig Basman, Philip Tchernavskij

The session will engage you in a conversation about what sort of accessibility attributes we can document in this early design phase. We will work with sample wireframes and develop a common language to use to pass along to developers so that accessibility remains at the forefront of design and implementation.

Notes

PPIG - Psychology of Programming Interest Group
- Founded in 1987 by Thomas Green
- This years conference took place in the Art Guild
On Computing Creativity
- Inequality is Growing
  - 85% of post economic growth by the richest 1%
  - 1 of 8 Americans living in poverty
- Tyranny of change
  - more than 80% of the cost of software development is devoted to maintenance
    - mainly due to the need to evolve in the face of changing requirements
- Change is hard for designers
  - change has been treated as something that needs to avoid, minimize, control, or managed
    - Requirements management methods that focus on getting things right from the start see change as risk
    - In agile development teams have autonomy to respond to change. However it's inward looking and a choice that can only be wielded by expert designers and developers. It doesn't extend beyond the circle of trust.
- Change is intolerable for users
  - for users software tends to be "take it or leave it"
  - designers/developers of the software have the power to change it without notice
- Ownership of software
  - users don't own it, they just pay to access it
  - real ownership should give them power to change
- The failure of models
  - people are continually changing, models don't take this into account
  - a persona at best is a blur, at worst its a stereotype
  - see: The Danger of the single story Ted Talk
- Co-Design and Community
  - designing with not simply for
  - all participants have equal access to information
What Lies in the path of the revolusion
- Analogy that we are the grips of a digital feudalism
  - A group that has the power to change the software and large group who doesn't
- Ownable artifacts
  - (similar to continuing design above)
  - the ability to transplant, substitute, maintain, share, adapt
  - function, expression, data, installation, economies
- Things we can't own in practice or in theory
  - subscriptions (e.g. creative cloud)
  - cloud and web apps (e.g. google docs)