Geoffrey Litt on end user software for cooking

Geoffrey is doing a PhD at MIT on Human Computer Interaction and end user programming. He also does research projects with the independent R&D lab, Ink & Switch. He is working on helping more non-programmers build their own software tools.

We talked about:

• Potluck, Geoffrey’s latest experimental tool that lets a user start with a meaningful document (like a recipe) and progressively enhance it with computation (like automatically adjusting timings).
• Trade-offs between concrete use cases, building for others and giving research time to show results.
• Orienting thoughts around end user programming around the context the user is in, rather than who they are.
• The ways that different communities help foster research.

Links:

• Formality considered harmful
• Geoffrey’s website
• Geoffrey on Twitter
• Christopher Alexander
• This podcast is part of Mary Rose Cook’s research to build software quickly.