“Ease, comfort, and control”: Ideologies of design in software coding

This paper provides an explorative investigation into how the development of software (front- and backends) is framed by reflexive assumptions, ascriptions, and expectations as to how software should be ‘designed’ to provide the user with ‘good’, ‘transparent’ and ‘controllable’ handling of applications or software environments. Drawing on metapragmatic theory, the notions of ideologies of communication, ideologies of communification, and particularly ideologies of design, the paper unfolds how software designers draw on, and struggle upon, specific notions of graphic transparency, simplicity, and elegance which are densely linked with language and media ideologies about ‘effective communication’ as well as with specific ideas and ideals of community building and maintenance (e.g., drawing on ‘empowerment’ and ‘inclusiveness’) that are envisioned to be bound to specific forms of (‘open’, ‘inviting’, and fully user- ‘controllable’) design and communication. The case in point is a major free and open-source software project that aims to provide a comprehensive free desktop environment including software libraries and a comprehensive software ecosystem, the GNOME project that is currently among the most prominent desktop environments on the Linux operation system. In theoretical terms, the paper contributes to the current discussion in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and media studies about design as a social value and semiotic device and the opening of metapragmatics towards non-linguistic semiotic resources.