Change the world, one interface at a time

Conor Farrington, Department of Public Health <cjtf2@medschl.cam.ac.uk>

Better project title may be The Adaptive Web

Newly drafted:

Most websites are designed on the basis that “one size fits all” - for any kind of user or context of use. Your task is to create a tool that allows users to author their own policies for customised appearance and behaviour, for example dark-mode viewing, text subsets, or controls suited to elderly users or those with disabilities. It should also be possible to apply data from one user-selected site (e.g. a weather forecast) to customise the appearance of another. The configuration process should be easily accessible to a wide range of users - so rather than vendor-specific browser plug-ins, a more universal solution might be a configurable online translation service that substitutes alternative CSS and JavaScript through recipes that can be shared with others. Such a powerful tool would also require security provision to guard against misuse.

Original suggestion:

Every time Twitter changes its look or adds new functions there is an outcry amongst users who are dismayed by yet another top-down change. What if users had the power to transform their own digital environments and create personalised interfaces to suit their personality and priorities? Your goal is to design a suite of meta-design tools to give users the capacity to redesign the appearance and functionality of social media sites. The tools should exhibit high liveness and directness affordances, and should also allow users to create their own tools for further meta-design possibilities. Finally, the new meta-design interface should offer data mining capacities to allow for psychometric analysis of users’ redesigning activities, and to enable future machine learning applications to assist users with smart redesign.

Feedback:

Thanks for this Conor. We could do something along these lines, for sure.

Undergrads would probably struggle to get the intentions of meta-design, so I wouldn’t emphasise this. But the basic idea is fine.

Technically, this would have to be implemented either as a Chrome extension, or perhaps as a JavaScript preprocessor/translator.

I doubt that Twitter itself could be modified (but could consult with some experts in my group). However, the same ideas could be applied to a more straightforward kind of website - anything that uses a static layout of interaction elements would be appropriate.

Alan