[EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > Bonnie Nardi's very nice "A Small Matter of Programming," show that > there are end-user programmers in industry, and they tend to > stratify.
More seriously, since Bonnie wrote that book, we are seeing an increasing number of end-user programmers in homes (refs below). My experience of working with product designers is that they have difficulty conceiving of users who can carry out programming-like tasks, but without having CS educations. As a result, many such products are scarcely usable. There are two things that may help. First (main focus of my research) is to present programmable features in a way that does not presume the user shares CS graduates' mental models. Second (this discussion) is to make sure that we educate children to deal with future technology trends, by providing them with a model that helps them understand what the CS-trained designers are trying to achieve. Refs: Rode, J.A., Toye, E.F. and Blackwell, A.F. (2004). The Fuzzy Felt Ethnography - understanding the programming patterns of domestic appliances. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Appliance Design, pp. 10-22. Blackwell, A.F. (2002). First steps in programming: A rationale for Attention Investment models. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposia on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments, pp. 2-10. -- Alan Blackwell Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/afb21/ Phone: +44 (0) 1223 334418 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
