Rethinking Programming ”Environment” -- Technical and Social Environment Design toward Convivial Computing
Computers have become ubiquitous in our life and work, and the way they are programmed needs fundamental improvements. The prior effort often aims at improving programming experience for people with specific technical backgrounds (e.g., programmers, end-users, data scientists), respectively. In contrast, throughout this paper, we discuss how to make programming activities more inclusive and collaborative, involving people with diverse technical backgrounds. We rethink the programming environment from both technical and social perspectives. First, we briefly introduce our previous technical effort to share the programming environment between the developers and users of the programs, eliminating the distinction between programming and runtime environments and fostering communication between them. Second, we introduce our social effort to support people with visual impairment to implement customized smart glasses that read words with a camera and speakers. We design their programming environment to consist of a software/hardware toolkit and engineers with domain expertise called evangelists. Learning from these experiences, we discuss several perspectives on convivial computing. To conclude, we argue that both technical innovations on user interfaces for programming and understandings on the socio-technical aspect of domain-specific applications are critical for the future of programming environments, and accordingly, convivial computing.
Tue 5 MayDisplayed time zone: Belfast change
16:00 - 18:00 | Salon Tue May 5, 4-6 pm LondonConvivial Computing Salon | ||
16:00 60mTalk | Rethinking Programming ”Environment” -- Technical and Social Environment Design toward Convivial Computing Convivial Computing Salon Jun Kato National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan, Keisuke Shimakage OTON GLASS, Inc. | ||
17:00 60mTalk | Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications Convivial Computing Salon Pre-print |