This project is now fully staffed — thanks for your interest but we are not currently looking for additional project members. The posting is retained for reference.
We're ramping up to explore tablet-based programming at Ink & Switch!
We're an industrial research lab working on digital tools for creativity and productivity.
We strongly believe that there's something special about the tablet form-factor. These devices allow you to take your projects away from the desktop computer, from relaxed ruminating on the reclining chair, to focused posture while sketching to think through a problem.
Unfortunately, tablets are currently consumption-oriented appliances. We think this could be different, and with projects like Capstone and Muse we've explored how to make a tablet part of the creative process.
We want to look at how a tablet could work with data, automations, algorithms, and computation in general. We've written a little bit about this before in our early End-User Programming research, and now we're returning to the problem with greater focus.
We want to give people a workbench for solving problems, not an "IDE". We want to have directly manipulable interfaces that don't feel like programming. We want to allow creative professionals to build their own workflows inside our environment, whether that's supporting artistic pursuits or analyzing data collected in the field.
We're looking for someone with strong opinions about the user interfaces of spreadsheets, HyperCard, Smalltalk, and related environments. Perhaps you have thought about why structured/projectional editors have failed in the past, or you have a vision for how block-based programming languages could be more useful. Bonus points if you worked on end-user programming tools in the past.
We're looking for both design and engineering skills, and both junior and senior folk.
Here are some of the things you'd tackle as a: