Orion Reed
Making software as easy to change as to use
Orion Reed is a researcher at Ink & Switch working to make software more malleable. Software today is not soft — it is hard and brittle. Malleable software aims to make software as easy to change as to use, and in doing so, shift agency into the hands of everyday people.
An applied researcher, he investigates the intersection of computing, human-system interfaces, and the political economy of software, with a deep curiosity about computing as a medium for thinking and as a tool for collective intelligence. He is a member of Tentpole, folkjs and the nascent Liberatory Computing collective.
Upcoming conference sessions featuring Orion Reed
Software Is Not Soft
"Users don't want to change their software. They want it to work."
I hear this a lot, and it's a strange thing to believe about a medium whose whole promise was that it could be changed.
Software today is not soft. Most of it can't be altered by the people using it, and we've built a set of habits around accepting that: feature requests, copy-paste workarounds, and an ever-growing assortment of folk practices.
It didn't have to go this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way. This talk will explore what else is possible, and how we might get there.
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