In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss Redefined Workflow

Re:In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss ... by js8 on Saturday February 03, 2018 @03:34AM (#16296796)

Very interesting insight.

I wish we made more allowance for bricolage in software. There are some great systems that enable bricolage, like Lisp or Unix or Emacs or Forth or Excel. They are toolboxes that you can use to cobble together some solution, perhaps not the best engineering solution, but it's quick and solves the problem.

Today, it seems, bricolage is out of fashion. All applications (and all devices in fact) must be made to be "perfect" and "easy to use", not to be combined and remixed as pieces of some "erector set".

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Re:In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss ... by SuperPaintMan on Saturday February 03, 2018 @08:14AM (#16297484)

The Share pane in iOS actually does a decent job of this in a roundabout way.

Forever and a year ago I had to edit some photos and lay text on them. From the Camera Roll I was able to share it to another app and each of these apps did one little thing like change levels, apply filters, overlay text, cropping/aspect warping. But because each of these apps allowed me to use the share pane they could be chained together without storing it on the device in some intermediate form.

The first time I used it it clicked. It was just like pipes but for data types.

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Re:In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss ... by Pamar on Saturday February 03, 2018 @03:46AM (#16296835)

I would add OSX Automator to your list. Is there anything similar fir Windows, btw?

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Re:In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss ... by maxerickson on Saturday February 03, 2018 @11:07AM (#16298119)

There's third party tools that are at least similar. AutoIt and AutoHotkey are two that are popular.

To a significant extent they expose built in apis to a basic style language. There's various programming language libraries that do similar for other languages.

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Re:In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss ... by L0stLink on Saturday February 03, 2018 @07:30AM (#16297364)

'Task Scheduler' perhaps?

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Re:In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss ... by nikofeyn on Saturday February 03, 2018 @11:27AM (#16298216)

automator is really cool. i haven't used it for years, as i don't really use a mac for anything other than browsing the web these days. on windows, it seems someone could build an automator-like app pretty easily using the powershell api.

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