Saul Greenberg: Enhancing Creativity Through Toolkits
[note: I'm probably going to start writing rather more concise talk summaries, but more of them, because I need to be more thorough to satisfy course requirements in absentia]
Today I went to a CSE talk at the University of Washington: Saul Greenberg on Enhancing Creativity through Toolkits
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The talk used several examples to illustrate a point that while not exactly groundbreaking, is all too often forgotten: that software designers are a lot more productive and inventive when they don't need to spend too much time worrying about software engineering. We tend to see the same ideas rehashed (and often not implemented very well) in interface design, because too much programming effort has to be directed to simply making the system work, and once it's basically working a discouraging amount of work is needed to make changes in response to user feedback.
Greenberg's solution is to emphasise the building of toolkits; a similar concept to the game engines popular with computer game developers. The idea is that the legwork can't be ignored altogether, but if it's done in a way that can be piggybacked onto by multiple software projects then that frees up developer resources to think about the design of the software, and produce multiple iterations of the interface in response to feedback from initial user testing.
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