Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

Software for Your Mom

Situated software isn't a technological strategy so much as an attitude about closeness of fit between software and its group of users, and a refusal to embrace scale, generality or completeness as unqualified virtues. Seen in this light, the obsession with personalization of Web School software is an apology for the obvious t... See more

All the other tinkerers were asking themselves the same question: how to make the computer something intimate, friendly, and accessible? Also, what might people want to do with a computer if they could carry it around? The problem, as Alan put it, was that programmers at the time “lived in this tiny world, full of phrases we learned when we were ta... See more

But this isn’t really about the software. It’s about what software promises us—that it will help us become who we want to be, living the lives we find most meaningful and fulfilling. The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and inter... See more