Rethinking programming “environment”: technical and social environment design toward convivial computing

Abstract

Computers have become ubiquitous in our life and work, and the way that they are built and used needs to be fundamentally improved. Most of the prior effort has been aimed at improving the programming experience for people with specific technical backgrounds (e.g., programmers, end-users, data scientists). 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 in which the programming environment is shared between the developers and users of programs, eliminating the distinction between programming and runtime environments and fostering communication between them. Second, we introduce our social effort to support people who are visually impaired in implementing customized smart glasses that read words with a camera and speakers. We design their programming environment to consist of a softwarehardware 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 made on user interfaces for programming and understanding on the socio-technical aspect of domain-specific applications are critical for the future of programming environments, and accordingly, convivial computing.