A Radical Design Course: Leveraging APIs for Creativity and Innovation in Software

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A Radical Design CourseLeveraging APIs for
Creativity and Innovation in Software

• Fred Martin, Georges Grinstein, and Sarah Kuhn
• University of Massachusetts Lowell

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Premise

• Software design is too complex
• APIs are solution
• Design techniques to encourage creativity and
  innovation
• Domains to span software and other areas

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Micro-API Pyramid Model

• Apex is domain-specific and scriptable
• Base is diverse collection of computing
  environments
• Middle layers negotiate and provide defaults

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Ideas Developed in Univ Course

• 11 students, 3 faculty, 1 TA
• Students from CS, Engineering, Economics, and
  Education
• 1st half of semester concept projects to study
  creativity and process methodology
• 2nd half of semester implementation projects

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Radical Design

• Goldenberg-Mazursky a creative idea is an idea
  about which field experts agree that is is
  creative
• What about experiential process?
• Our definition Radical Design combines creative
  process and innovative outcome

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Creativity Methods
IDEO cards
Also organizational culture norms (W iki)
Template Methods
de Bonos Thinking Hats
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3 Concept Projects

• Toilet group
• Hearing Devices group
• Workstation group

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Course Wiki for Process Sharing
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Implementation Focus on APIs

• Joshua Bloch An API should do one thing and do
  it well
• OpenGL, Lucene, OpenHaptics, Google Maps, Google
  Calendar, TivO HME, Player/Stage, AppleScript
• Rapid API mashups
• What is an API? Language? App framework?

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API Groups

• GraphicsHapticsSound
• SlangMapper
• Student Tracker
• Sound Alert for Robots
• EmailFile Merged Search/Vocalization

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GraHapSo

• Enable the learning and experimentation of
  Physics via interactive environments that are
  easy to set up.

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SlangMapper

• Linguistics website for tracking slang words,
  their origin and their usage. Our goal is to
  track, verify and record slang across the United
  States.

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Results Discussion

• Integration of creativity-focusing techniques
  with software design
• APIs becoming centrally important orientation
  helpful outside of course
• Micro-API needs to be scriptable better if kept
  as top-level design goal