Malleable software

Geoffrey Litt

Welcome! I work on malleable software: computing environments where anyone can adapt their software to meet their needs with minimal friction. To see what that means to me, read this essay or listen to this interview.

Perfect Software - Software for an Audience of One

We have many names to describe personal tools. Malleable software speaks to how it behaves. Home-cooked software speaks to who makes it.

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.

Malleable Systems Collective

The Malleable Systems Collective catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power in computing

malleable computing

By Devine Lu Linvega

Malleable software in the age of LLMs

All computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?

Malleable software in the age of LLMs

All computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?

Malleable software in the age of LLMs

All computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?

psf (@psf@oldbytes.space)

In their article ["Malleable Software"](https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software), Ink & Switch list various ways that modern software applications fail to serve the user: - Software is too rigid: users can’t tailor it to suit their workflow, except by entering the role of programmers. - Software applications are overspecialized "avocado slicers", not general tools like "knives", so their lack of tailorability is keenly felt. - Software doesn’t provide a reasonable learning curve from beginner to expert; in other words, time spent learning an application doesn’t unlock tailorability, instead the end user must learn an unrelated skill like a markup/scripting language or even the tool’s implementation language. - Software applications are increasingly siloed, so sharing data between apps, let alone orchestrating cross-app workflows, is overly difficult. These are real problems. From what I can tell, Ink & Switch are software researchers, and view the problems from a highly technical perspective, focusing on novel infrastructure that enables end-user programmability. They pose questions such as "how do we ease users into programming?" and "instead of shipping a dead, static binary, can we ship a living image containing programming tools allowing it to be modified in arbitrary ways while still running?" These ideas are technologically exquisite, but they fail to provide a gentle learning curve. (cont'd) 🧵

Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies

On coding agents, malleable software, and the future of interface invention

Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies

On coding agents, malleable software, and the future of interface invention

Designing and Programming Malleable Software

User needs for software features and interfaces are diverse and changing, motivating the goal of making it as easy as possible for users themselves to change software, or to have it changed on their behalf in response to their developing needs. However, in my opinion, current approaches do not address this issue adequately: software engineering promotes flexible code, but in practice this does not help end-users effect change in their software. End-user and live programming systems help users customize their interfaces by accessing and modifying the underlying source code. I take a different approach, seeking to maximize the kinds of modifications that can take place through regular interactions, e.g. direct manipulation of interface elements. I call this approach malleable software. To understand contemporary needs for and barriers to modifying software, I study how it is produced, maintained, adopted, and appropriated in a network of communities working with biodiversity data. I find that the mode of software production, i.e. the technologies and economic relations that produce software, is biased towards centralized, one-size-fits-all systems. This leads me to propose a long-term, interdisciplinary research program in reforming the tools of software development to create infrastructures for plurality. These tools should help multiple communities collaborate without forcing them to consolidate around identical interfaces or data representations. Malleable software is one such infrastructure, in which interactive systems are dynamic constellations of interfaces, devices, and programs assembled at the site of use. My technological contribution is a reconstruction of the programming mechanisms used to create interactive behavior. I generalize existing control structures for interaction as entanglements, and develop a higher-order control structure, entanglers, which produces entanglements when particular pre-conditions, called co-occurrences, are met. Entanglers cause interactions to be assembled dynamically as system components come and go. I develop these mechanisms in Tangler, a prototype environment for building malleable interactive software. I demonstrate how Tangler supports malleability through a set of benchmark cases illustrating how users can modify systems by themselves or with programmer assistance. This thesis is an early step towards a paradigm for programming and designing malleable software that can keep up with human diversity.

<i>Webstrates</i>: Shareable Dynamic Media

Shareable Dynamic Media is our vision for an interactive computing environment that blurs the distinction between documents and applications, characterized by three key properties: malleability, so that users can appropriate and repurpose media in ...