Kaleido : individualistic visual interfaces for software development environments

Abstract

Programming, especially programming in the context of art and design, is a process of reconciling and shifting between individual creative thought and rigid conceptual models of code. Despite advances of programming support tools, the discrepancy between the contextual specificity of the author's intent and the uniformity of program structure still causes people to find the software medium unwieldy. Taking inspiration from the way in which sketching supports the creative process, in this thesis I argue that incorporating individualistic visual elements into the interface of our programming environments can make the creative coding process more intuitive. I present Kaleido as one implementation of a programming environment that augments traditional textual representations of a program with user-generated graphical elements that act as an additional interface to the code. Kaleido enables users to create personally meaningful visuals for their code, thus allowing individuals to plan, organize, and navigate code in the idiosyncratic way we each think. This document presents the motivations, research, and design process that led to the creation of Kaleido, as well as a preliminary evaluation of a number of users' experience with using Kaleido, and finally a discussion of future and alternative possibilities.