{"id":649,"date":"2006-04-09T10:03:36","date_gmt":"2006-04-09T14:03:36","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2006-05-22T10:55:47","modified_gmt":"2006-05-22T14:55:47","slug":"i_am_neither_a_painter_nor_a_writer_i_am","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/2006\/04\/09\/i_am_neither_a_painter_nor_a_writer_i_am\/","title":{"rendered":"I am neither a painter nor a writer: I am a software designer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will software design and development ever will be part of art schools?<\/strong> I doubt it, but why not? After all designing pieces of software is not only technique… it’s art<\/strong>. Like a writer, a painter or a sculptor, software designers use tools to make their ideas real: to share them with other people.<\/p>\n

Right now I am prototyping ideas I have for enhancing Talk Digger. My creation process is much more like that of a writer than that of a software developer, an uber-geek.<\/p>\n

Ideas<\/strong> pass through my mind; I muse about their utility; I prototype them; I test them; I use them; I play with them; I talk about them with other people; I get feedbacks I integrate these feedbacks into my idea; I change my ideas; I change my works; I delete some prototypes; I go with the flow of my ideas and their evolution<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This is my work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sure there are rigid procedures in software development. Yeah there are procedures to design, develop, debug and support software development. Yeah you have to write specifications; yeah you have to perform test cases; yeah you have to do all that … and much more.<\/p>\n

However, what I am talking about is the first process, the creative process<\/strong>, the one wherein the technical knowledge does not really matter, the one that will make your software usable; the one that will be so intuitive to use that nobody will think about it but will only think about what they have to do; the one that will help users save time when performing their work. No one needs technical knowledge to develop such software. What he needs is creativity: he needs to be an artist.<\/p>\n

It is what I am doing right now. It is the reason why I am not writing that much. I am in a sort of creative mood where I prototype my ideas to make Talk Digger bigger, better and more useful. I try to do these things to achieve Talk Digger’s goal: (1) gathering the best information, (2) archiving it in the best way, (3) displaying it in a most meaningful way, (4) thinking about the best ways users could interact together, (5) having fun doing it.<\/p>\n

What is Talk Digger’s goal: finding, tracking and entering conversations evolving on the Internet.<\/p>\n

When I am prototyping some of my ideas<\/strong>, most of the time the “final” prototype, the one that has some real potential, is not what I was thinking about when I started developing it. Most of the time it is something that evolved during my development. It evolved with new ideas I had while writing it, using it, contemplating it. This step was crucial, otherwise I would never had these ideas that make a first good idea, a final really good one (it is what I think and what I hope, however it is up to the users to confirm or not whether my final really good idea was in fact that good).<\/p>\n

It is certain that when I will have finished these prototypes, when I will start developing the real system, that I will use all the techniques I know to make that application scalable: it is more than essential. However, I think that some developers, and many of their bosses, forget the importance of the creativity process in software development: how the first steps are so important to create an application that will reach the tipping point with users.<\/p>\n

I hope that computer sciences degrees add an “art and creativity” course into their courses corpus.<\/p>\n

Technorati: Development<\/a> | software<\/a> | art<\/a> | imagination<\/a> | creativity<\/a> | technique<\/a> | system<\/a> | talkdigger<\/a> | artist<\/a> | prototype<\/a> | test<\/a> | <\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will software design and development ever will be part of art schools? I doubt it, but why not? After all designing pieces of software is not only technique… it’s art. Like a writer, a painter or a sculptor, software designers use tools to make their ideas real: to share them with other people. Right now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}