Situated Software

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

In a class called Social Software, which I taught last fall, the students worked in small groups to design and launch software to support some form of group interaction. To anchor the class, I required that whatever project they came up with be used by other ITP students. This first order benefits of this strategy were simple: the designers came fr... See more

We've always had a tension between enterprise design practices and a "small pieces, loosely joined" way of making software, to use David Weinberger's felicitous phrase. The advantages to the latter are in part described in Worse is Better and The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Situated software is in the small pieces category, with the following additio... See more

Part of the future I believe I'm seeing is a change in the software ecosystem which, for the moment, I'm calling situated software. This is software designed in and for a particular social situation or context.