Decomposing Interactive Systems

International audienceI argue that systems-oriented HCI should explore software engineering principles and architectures that emphasize user interaction over designer control. Many researchers have argued that user-empowering interaction should decouple tools from the objects they act on. Implementing this decoupling requires actively subverting the traditional architectures of interactive systems, including the encapsulation of interactive systems into closed applications, and the overly coupled event-driven programming model. I present a sketch of an architecture where interaction instruments are a first-class object to address these issues