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.

• http://www.ppig.org/node/1088
• What Lies in the Path of the Revolution paper
• On Continuing Creativity slides

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)