Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

Summary

Environments matter. To do our best work and live our best lives, we need spaces that let us each express our unique potential. A guitar maker sets up their workshop with their saws, hammers, chisels and files arranged just so. They can also build new tools as needed to achieve the best result—a wooden block as a support, or a pair of pliers sanded down into the right shape. Over the years, a home cook gradually assembles a combination of knives, cutting boards, and pots and pans, finding the ones that work best for them. They can install hooks on the ceiling and move shelves around to support their workflow—whether that’s cooking weekday dinners or hosting elaborate weekend cookouts. These are everyday situations. In the physical world, the act of crafting our environments comes naturally, because physical reality is malleable. Many small tweaks—taping a post-it note to the wall, rearranging some drawers, moving a piece of furniture—can be done instantly without asking anyone’s permission. We can also take on larger changes that require more effort and skill, like building a workshop or renovating a kitchen. And should we lack those skills ourselves, we can recruit help from craftspeople in our local communities. When we work and live in a physical space that we control, we tend to evolve it to suit our own needs. As Stewart Brand writes in his book How Buildings Learn: “Age plus adaptivity is what makes a building come to be loved. The building learns from its occupants, and they learn from it.” These days, we spend more and more of our time in environments built from code, not atoms. We’ve gained many capabilities in this shift—we can collaborate instantly across continents and search thousands of files in an instant. But we’re also losing something important: the ability to adapt our environments and make them our own. Here’s an example. One of the authors worked on a software team that tracked its work with index cards taped to a wall. The team would constantly...