Creativity support in authoring and backtracking

The “Natural Programming” group has been working for 15 years on making it easier for all kinds of programmers to be creative when writing software. Recently, one focus has been enabling “end-user programmers” (EUPs) such as interaction designers to more easily author interactive behaviors for the web. In a separate project, we are adding features to a code editor to support “backtracking” — undoing operations to partially or fully restore the code to a previous state — since creative exploration usually involves both moving forward to new designs and going backwards to retract some or all of the design that is not desired. In all of these projects, we seek to measure both the usability of our tools, and their effectiveness at fostering creativity. Author

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