Situated Software | devonzuegel.com

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Situated Software | devonzuegel.com

Devon Zuegel

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Situated Software<br>--><br>I did not write this! This is an annotated clipping!<br>Go to source ↝

Situated Software

clipping

March 14th, 2020

Written by Clay Shirky<br>First published March 30, 2004 on the "Networks, Economics, and Culture"<br>mailing list. Subscribe<br>to the mailing list.

I teach at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where the student population is about evenly divided between technologists who care about aesthetics and artists who aren't afraid of machines, which makes it a pretty good place to see the future.

Part of the future I believe I'm seeing is a change in the software ecosystem which, for the moment, I'm calling annotation start situated software. This is software designed in and for a particular social situation or context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I'll call the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in), where scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues.<br>annotation end

I see my students cheerfully ignoring Web School practices and yet making interesting work, a fact that has given me persistent cognitive dissonance for a year, so I want to describe the pattern here, even in its nascent stages, to see if other people are seeing the same thing elsewhere.

Users By The Dozens

We've always had a tension between enterprise design practices<br>and a annotation start "small pieces, loosely joined" way of making software annotation end , to use<br>David Weinberger's felicitous phrase. The advantages to the latter are<br>in part described in Worse is<br>Better and The<br>Cathedral and the Bazaar. annotation start Situated software is in the small pieces<br>category, with the following additional characteristic --<br>it is<br>designed for use by a specific social group, rather than for a generic<br>set of "users" annotation end .

The biggest difference this creates relative to classic web applications is that it becomes easy to build annotation start applications to be used by dozens of users, an absurd target population in current design practice annotation end . Making form-fit software for a small group of users has typically been the province of banks and research labs -- because of the costs involved, Web School applications have concentrated on getting large-scale audiences. And annotation start by...