Computers and Creativity

By Molly Mielke

Project page • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 2 of 23

True creativity and invention, which are the seed

of innovation, come from people and they come
from the stories of people. They come from their
backgrounds, their passions, what moves them,
the things that worry them, the things that are
their dreams.
— Frank Moss,
The Sorcerers & Their Apprentices

Introduction
The value of computers is not inherent; it is what we are able to do with them that
makes them valuable. But what we can do with computers is often limited by the depth to
which we are able to think creatively, translate these thoughts into computationally
articulated work, and then share that work with others. For this reason, digital tools that
foster creativity and collaboration hold immeasurable power. So how can we push digital
creative tools to their full potential as co-creators, thus harnessing the full power of
creative thought and computational actualization to enable human innovation? Ultimately,
I will be arguing that to foster optimal human innovation, digital creative tools need to be
interoperable, moldable, efficient, and community-driven.

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 3 of 23

Early creative tools

Beginning with the early days of the workplace computer in the 1950s, computers
began as purely logical room-sized execution machines that operated on paper and
punch cards. A human would feed the computer tasks in the precise way the computer
understood, and the computer would perform a desired function for the operator. Usually,
those functions were basic mathematical operations. This was revolutionary for its time
and embodied a task-based relationship between computer and machine that continues
to define how we operate computers today.
However, a new way of thinking about these machines began to emerge in the late
1980s. From the punch card came the spreadsheet, which eliminated the need to provide
physical inputs and allowed us to utilize math in a new way. Meanwhile, creative
applications for computers began to emerge. As the Victoria and Albert Museum present
in “A History of Computer Art,” “In the 1950s, many artists and designers were working
with mechanical devices and analogue computers in a way that can be seen as a
precursor to the work of the early digital pioneers who followed. One of the earliest
electronic works in the V&A's collection is ‘Oscillon 40’ dating from 1952. The artist, Ben
Laposky, used an oscilloscope to manipulate electronic waves that appeared on the small
fluorescent screen.” Throughout the history of digital tools, a common theme is the
technological advancement spurred by artists pushing the limits of the existing tools and
creating their own adjacent tools to better serve their needs.
Historically, the primary strains of creative tools have been text editors,
spreadsheets, HyperText,1 and Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. For the purposes
of this essay, “digital creative tool” will refer to tools that foster creative thought in their
human users, whether that be a design, writing, or multimedia tool. With the introduction
of Superpaint,2 one of the first image editing programs in 1984, the concept of the digital
creative tool began to take its initial form—pioneering conventions that are still in use
today such as the digital canvas and the tooling menu. However, it is worth reconsidering
aspects of these historical conventions in the interest of fostering greater human
creativity using digital tools.

1
Hypertext was first coined by Ted Nelson and refers to text that links to other texts.

2
Superpaint was created by Xerox PARC employee Richard Shoup, among others.

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 4 of 23

The genesis of many original creative tools were inspired by the work of thinkers
such as Douglas Engelbart, who published a vision of tools empowering humans in his
pioneering 1962 paper Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. As could
be surmised, his goal was to use digital tools to augment human intelligence and thus
boost our collective intellect. Engelbart’s work, along with many other designers and
programmers such as Ivan Sutherland (Sketchpad3), J.C.R. Licklider (Intergalactic
Computer Network4) and Alan Kay (Dynabook5 and OOP6) clarified a new approach in
which computers weren’t merely executors, but “joyful” machines that could expand
human thought itself (Engelbart). As Engelbart put it, “tools… will serve as new media of
expression and inspiration to creativity.” Engelbart was not alone in this thinking and
inspired other computer scientists like Alan Kay to study how computers could amplify
imagination. While these early manifestations of creative tools unlocked pioneering ideas
on the relationship between humans and machines, they were largely conceptual in
nature. Engelbart and Kay’s work hinted at a future of creative tools built to serve the
human mind’s creativity, but were missing the financial support from technology
companies to invest further in the relationship between humans and machines as
opposed to investing primarily in machines themselves.

3
Sketchpad was the first CAD program to have a complete graphical user interface.

4
The Intergalactic Computer Network was a computer networking concept similar to today's
Internet that was imagined by J.C.R. Licklider as an “electronic commons open to all.”

5
Dynabook was Alan Kay’s vision of a "personal computer for children of all ages."
6
Object-oriented programming, or OOP, is a programming paradigm pioneered by Alan Kay using
the concept of "objects" containing data and code.

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 5 of 23

Other visions of creating space for creativity and human thought can be found
within the bordering space of software development. It was the people that created
Apple’s OpenDoc7 (1997) that pioneered one of the first steps towards standardization
and collaboration between creative tools. As Kristi Coale states in “Closing OpenDoc-a
Great Leap Backward,” “In its heyday, OpenDoc was seen as the future of document
creation. No longer were users limited by the capabilities of an application in making a
document; they could include video, audio, and spreadsheet input created in other
applications and tie them into a single large document.” This approach to standardizing
digital files offered a new opportunity for far more people to use computers in creative
ways. OpenDoc did not necessitate the selection of a single media type and instead
allowed for mixtures of different kinds of media. While there was still far more work to be
done for OpenDoc to reach true interoperability, the software established the idea of
making digital creative work tool agnostic. However, it is worth noting that the structure of
OpenDoc was still adhering to replicating the formation practices of physical work. The
project as a whole was eventually discontinued by Apple due to an unsuccessful business
model.
However, another of Apple’s earlier projects called the Hypercard8 (1987) found
greater success and proved the potential of a moldable approach to software
development. As Samuel Arbesman states in “The forgotten software that inspired our
modern world,” “Bill Atkinson, its developer, described HyperCard as 'an erector set for
building applications. Simply put, you could build your own software using HyperCard,
with each program made up of ‘stacks’ of ‘cards’. Each card could contain text and images,
as well as interactive elements like buttons, with the ability to interconnect between other
cards.” HyperCard was a tool for making tools, and was unique in its focus on encouraging
open collaboration between users. This approach helped foster a powerful community of
people who contributed to the moldable tool’s development and evolution.

7
Apple's OpenDoc was a component-based framework standard for compound documents,
inspired by (and intended as an alternative to) Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)
technology.
8
Apple’s Hypercard was a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and
Apple IIGS computers, and was one of the first hypermedia systems predating the World Wide
Web. HyperCard pioneered the first wiki, which in turn served as the inspiration for Wikipedia.

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 6 of 23

Digging deeper into the history of creative tooling communities reveals the lasting
prevalence of the communities surrounding Flash9 and Actionscript10 in the early 2000s.
Flash and Actionscript were popular, easily manipulated, low-bandwidth tools that
created the first interactive experiences on the web. As Joshua Granick states in his
article on ActionScript 3.0, “In 2001, the popularity of Flash and ActionScript continued to
grow as artists and developers discovered the infinite possibilities of an expressive web
platform.” Before being acquired by Adobe, the tool itself was deeply embedded in its
community’s contributions, despite never going so far as to be open-source. This
relationship between Flash and its users was most clearly seen in the online discussion
forums, which pioneered the expectation that community members would frequently
share tips, feedback, and projects with one another. This culture, combined with the
abstracted and efficient nature of the scripting language, fueled Flash and Actionscript’s
widespread adoption and quickly reshaped the web to become interactive and animated.
Actionscript enabled projects like a map generator, a prebuilt ActionScript 3 library for
integrating Flash games, the Starling Extension Particle System, and many other projects
(Github, “Awesome Actionscript”). Powered by community, Flash serves as a proof point
that widespread ownership over an abstracted and moldable creative tool holds immense
potential to enable creativity in people at scale and spur organic user growth and
adoption as a byproduct.
More broadly, the role of collaboration in digital creative tools has been complex
and multifaceted. The shift to computing in a network has redefined how we think about
collaboration using digital tools. Beginning with the birth of the internet with the help of
those such as Ted Nelson,11 we quickly moved on to a period of mobile technology
proliferation. Collaborative software as we know it was born soon after in the form of
Google Sheets, the first simultaneous multiplayer software. The state of collaborative

9
Flash was an authoring program originally created by Macromedia and used to create vector
graphics-based animation programs, usually for the web.
10
ActionScript was an object-oriented programming language by Macromedia used primarily to
develop websites and software using the Adobe Flash Player platform.
11
Ted Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He
coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson also
introduced the term intertwingularity.

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 7 of 23

software today is a testament to the progression of tools for creativity, as well as the
room we still have left to help them reach their full potential.
The origins of digital creative tools show that the most boundary-pushing and
high-potential tools were often interoperable, moldable, community-driven, abstracted,
and efficient, thus actualizing creativity within the tool itself. Upon review, it is clear that
the fundamental human-computer interaction principles of the past have remained
unchanged, such as the direct manipulation of graphical objects, the mouse, and
windows. However, it is also evident that our expectations for a computer’s capacity to
understand and serve us has expanded considerably (Brad Myers, “A Brief History of
Human Computer Interaction Technology”). We will now examine this gap between our
historical-ideals-driven expectations and the contemporary reality of digital creative tools.

Creative tools today

Today, computers have become a melded version of both a task-based execution
machine (calculations, programming) and an intelligent creative co-creator (writing and
design tools). As João Miguel Cunha states in “Generation of Concept-Representative
Symbols,” we are in the process of “shift[ing] away from using computers as tools and
see[ing] them [instead] as partners, as well as mak[ing] computational co-creativity
applications available to the general public.” However, in recent decades, this shift has
been slow and undefined, only noticeable to the computer-using public in new consumer
softwares boasting mainly efficiency upgrades.
So if this shift to co-creation is happening (albeit slowly), where exactly is it taking
place and who is leading the charge? Despite their brief moment in the internet limelight,
creative computing communities have failed to maintain power over the software they
operate. A close examination of the digital creative tools landscape today reveals that
most innovation in this space has shifted away from the computer users (as seen through
Actionscript and Flash) to instead by owned by the heavily funded R&D departments of
the dominant Silicon Valley technology companies. As Alexis Madrigal states in “Silicon
Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World,” “Quantitative research
suggests that big companies do different kinds of R&D than their more modest
counterparts. Instead of coming up with new products, they come up with process
improvements. ‘If the nature of innovation is distorted toward selling to an incumbent,

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 8 of 23

you’re going to get more feature-driven innovation rather than systemic disruption.’” This
statement is directly reflected in digital creative tools' lack of concept-level innovation in
the past ten years. We see this further exemplified through tools looking and operating
very similarly to how they did at their founding.
However, it is worth noting the significant advancements that have been made
within the existing creative tooling structures. Integrating collaboration features into
creative tools has been a major development in the past decade and initiated the creation
of new spaces for cross-functional creative work. In part as a result, digital real-time
collaboration applications such as Figma have seen great success. The increasing
prevalence of these collaborative creative tools also means that functional interoperability
between them has become increasingly relevant to the work that we are all doing. Today’s
projects need to accommodate a multitude of different media types within
cross-functional spaces, yet editing each piece is still largely constrained to whichever
tool it was created in. This reality pinpoints an opportunity for both interoperability and
further innovation in the collaboration-between-tools space.
The lack of concept development in digital creative tools poses another question:
where have the technology industry’s resources been funneled? A mere cursory look at
technology news reveals the industry’s heightened focus on artificial intelligence
(AI)-fueled digital products. As Frederick Brooks explains in “The Computer Scientist as
Toolsmith II,” “A tremendous national investment has been made, over the course of more
than three decades. Indeed, a large amount of this country’s public investment in
computer science research has gone into AI, compared with other promising
opportunities. More serious even than the diversion of dollars was the diversion of the
very best computer science minds of a generation, and much of the efforts of the very
best academic laboratories.”
While the opportunity AI promises is immense, the benefits of its innovation fail to
articulate how they might be widespread enough to have a significant positive impact on
human needs or creativity, in the case of our line of inquiry. Instead, these innovations
seem to be solely in service of corporations. AI offers businesses the ability to make a
single investment in a machine, as opposed to paying human workers indefinitely. For
example, Alana Semuels of Time Magazine states in “Millions of Americans Have Lost
Jobs in the Pandemic—And Robots and AI Are Replacing Them Faster Than Ever,” “Now,

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 9 of 23

as automation lets companies do more with fewer people, successful companies don’t
need as many workers.” This business-driven innovation fails to invest in the creativity of
human beings themselves, instead seeking to streamline our capability to act as an
execution machine. Directionally, this thinking is clearly in contradiction with the ideas of
early digital creative tool pioneers such as Engelbart and Kay. Furthermore, this reality
proves the need for us to reconsider our priorities for progress if we truly wish to foster
greater human innovation.
Despite the technology industry’s widespread investment in recreating human
intelligence, the computer’s capacity to be creative is still entirely dependent upon the
human’s ability to program that prescriptive creativity step-by-step into a machine. As
Tony McCaffrey of “There Will Always Be Limits to How Creative a Computer Can Be
states,” “The fastest modern supercomputer couldn’t list or explore all the features of an
object/thing even if it had started working on the problem way back in the 1950s. When
considering the Obscure Features Hypothesis for Innovation,12 which states that every
innovative solution is built upon at least one new or commonly overlooked feature of a
problem, you can see how AI may never advance enough to take the jobs of Chief
Innovation Officers.” While there are situations in which computers are able to figure out
the steps needed to get from state A to state B, it is still within the limitations of
pre-human-mandated decomposition. This means that the actions we take with
computers are steps that we have already broken down in our head in order to achieve an
end result. This is often a highly repetitive process, and makes clear that there is room for
computers to become better co-creators in order to make space for human creativity.
Acknowledging that computers themselves are not inherently creative should not
come as a surprise. Instead, this truth identifies an opportunity for computers to more
fully assume the role of co-creator — not idea-generator, but actualizer. Furthermore, it is
worth acknowledging that human creativity and innovation is not a solitary sport. In fact,
most great digital innovations are the product of a commitment to collaboration and the
melding of many different perspectives.
Facilitating collaboration in a digital tool is a key multiplier for creativity. When you
bring people together to create in the same space (whether it be digital or physical), they
are able to learn from and build upon each other's work through the process of
12
The Obscure Features Hypothesis (OFH) states that all innovative solutions are built upon at
least one overlooked feature of the problem at hand.

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 10 of 23

collaborative knowledge creation. This reality again highlights the pertinence of functional
interoperability since the cross-pollination of digital work between different tools is
necessary for collaboration to function as smoothly as possible. Fostering both creativity
and collaboration in a co-creation tool harnesses the power of computation and the
potential of multiple human perspectives.
As Steve Jobs once explained during an interview in “Memory & Imagination: New
Pathways to the Library of Congress,” “that’s what a computer is to me… it’s the most
remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our
minds.” This framing steers our attention away from automating digital tools to become
creators themselves. Instead, we can reconfigure our goal towards aiming to construct
software intelligent enough to figure out the steps needed to produce a desired outcome
in service of the human or group's broader creative vision. As Shan Carter and Michael
Nielsen explain succinctly in “Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence,”
“Intelligence Augmentation (IA), is all about empowering humans with tools that make
them more capable and more intelligent, while Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been about
removing humans fully from the loop.” Using this perspective, my argument will propose
several ways that we can refocus on Engelbart, Carter, Nielsen, and Job’s shared vision of
augmenting human intelligence using digital creative tools.

Significance
By reviewing the history of digital creative tools and the ways computers foster
creativity and collaboration today, we can begin to synthesize the requirements for
co-creation tools. Focusing on enabling creativity optimizes for the type of innovation only
humans are able to perform using a computer, which in turn offers the potential to
reshape humanity in new, and hopefully better, ways. While I am not asserting that
technology holds all the solutions, I am arguing that when appropriately applied,
technology can solve large problems, enable creativity, and change lives. So we return to
our question: how can digital co-creation tools augment human creativity and

collaboration?

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 11 of 23

Standardization
Taking a step back, we might consider the fundamental form in which creative
work is created, recorded, and stored. Today, there is next to no standardization between
digital creative tool files. While there are sometimes ways to convert one tool's file type to
another, the process is tedious at best, unusable at worst. The lack of interoperability13
between creative tools means that all work created within a tool is confined to the
limitations of that tool itself, posing a hindrance to collaboration and limiting creative
possibility. If tools are meant to amplify the power of our brains and take over the
mechanical aspects of human thought, limiting creation to a single piece of software’s
capabilities is clearly antithetical to creativity.
Returning to our comparison between the development and design communities,
the development community’s prioritization of functional standardization has led to far
greater leaps in collaboration and wider scale public ownership over innovation. A culture
of building things with the express purpose to be shared and built upon has created a
baseline standard of interoperability within these communities. This has enabled scaled
contributions on Github projects such as Microsoft’s open-source VS Code text editing
software (Nick Kolakowski, “Top 10 Most Popular Open Source Projects on GitHub”).
Interoperability has been key to sufficiently building upon each other's innovations and
contributions, while spurring the field of development’s speed of innovation.
The ongoing efforts of companies such as GitHub to incentivize the creation and
maintenance of open source software and programming languages is worth
contextualizing. As Sidney Fussell explains in “The Schism at the Heart of the
Open-Source Movement,” “technology firms rely on open-source licensing, a legal
framework that lets users borrow ideas and pool together the insights and labor of
volunteer developers. GitHub is itself built on open-source tools, and sometimes uses
code hosted on the platform to improve itself.” However, the reality of open-source
projects themselves begs reexamination. As Nadia Eghbal writes in her book Working in
Public, “One study found that in more than 85% of the open source projects the
researchers examined on GitHub, less than 5% of developers were responsible for over
95% of code and social interactions.” While there is impressive work being done to

13
In this context, interoperability refers to the ability for different computers to connect and
exchange information.

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 12 of 23

standardize computing and make development more interoperable and accessible, it still
lacks the distributed ownership that incentivizes widespread interoperability.
Nonetheless, programming languages themselves have seen moderate success in
standardization. The partnership between R, a free software environment for statistical
computing and graphics, and Python, an interpreted, widely-used programming language,
serves as a poignant example of the global value derived by interoperability. As Dan Kopf
states in “R and Python are joining forces in the most ambitious crossover event of the
year for programmers,” “[Python] will partner with RStudio [R]... The main goals…are to
make it easier for data scientists working in different programming languages to
collaborate, and avoid redundant work by developers across languages.” Increased
collaboration and efficiency directly exemplify the benefits of interoperability at scale.
However, it is also worth examining the issues associated with interoperability.
Interoperability can often slow down improvements and lead to inconsistent adoption of
open standards. A poignant example of this can be found in the lack of universal browser
compatibility for HTML/CSS features, which adds unnecessary complexity to web
development work. Another consideration is the risk that standardization may
commoditize a set of tools, thus diminishing the innovation made possible by healthy
competition. An example of this can be seen in the state of web browsers today. When
web developers do not properly support all the different web browsers, they inadvertently
drive adoption towards their own tools of choice. This is exemplified through the
contrasting support and usage of Google’s Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox. However, these
considerations are largely the result of building upon a highly functional but extremely
fragmented structure of programming that only implemented consistency and standards
after much of the architecture of the web had already been built. Digital creative tools,
however, are at a different place in their evolution. Defining interoperable standards
between these tools would be altogether new and informed by learnings from similar
implementations in other industries. Standardization would amplify the power of each tool
and vastly expand the possibilities of digital creation.
Taking further inspiration from the development example, we can begin to visualize
the possibilities of standardization if employed for digital media. We might imagine
interoperable source files being stored in a repository structure that could then be
opened and modified by any creative tool of choice. This would require standardization of

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 13 of 23

file types, metadata, and a single substrate. Source files might take inspiration from
Extensible Markup Language, or XML files today. XML files are unique in their being both
human and machine-readable, lightweight, and widely recognized by almost any software
tool.
This concept would not only open doors to further collaboration at scale—it would
also effectively turn the computer into a breeding ground for human innovation.
Standardization would fundamentally change the tide of digital creative tools for the
better by allowing in more collaborators, making space for greater tooling innovation, and
expanding a project’s creative constraints beyond any one tool itself.

Moldability
Beyond standardization, there is still more to be done within the confines of the
digital tool to make it a better co-creator with its human counterpart. Today, the way that
we use creative tools is relegated to the boundaries drawn by the software company who
created the tool. However, when considering the ingredients needed to facilitate
creativity, a common theme that arises is the need for software moldability, or the ability
for the user to tailor their software to better address the problem they are trying to solve.
I will argue that making tools moldable to their users’ preferences while cultivating
communities that inspire and help members shape their own tools is the next logical step
for computers to become better co-creators.
Returning to Engelbart’s guiding principle, computers have the power to change
and expand human thought. But to do so, the software must adapt to suit the user's
unique thought process. This idea shines a light on the importance of a tool’s moldability,
as measured by how easily the software can be customized to the average
non-programmer’s needs. As Mohamed Fayad and Marshall P. Cline state in “Aspects of
Software Adaptability,” “Flexibility means it is easy to change the system’s capabilities in
kind. For example, taking something that was a graphical system and making it
sensory-or sound based. Flexibility is often harder than extensibility, especially when
on-the-fly changes are desired.” Fayad and Cline highlight that there is a clear correlation
between how flexible the software's codebase is and the user's experience of how
moldable the tool is to their creative process.

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 14 of 23

A moldable development environment called “GToolkit” exemplifies a similar

correlation within the field of development. As Tudor Girba states in his presentation
about GToolkit called “Molding Objects with Moldable Tools:” “these tools can be
customized live with very little effort. The low moldability cost, and we often talk about
minutes to adapt the tools, opens new ways to approach understanding code and runtime
through live objects.” In this context, moldability refers to the tool’s readiness to
accommodate many different tasks in many different ways, without forcing the user to
conform to any set processes defined by the software.
A common argument against moldability is the increased cost of maintaining
integrations or modifications that exist on top of a perpetually changing piece of
software. This is a real issue, as evidenced by the fragility of plugin ecosystems such as
those of the free content management system, Wordpress. However, this points to the
fact that there are many different types of moldability to consider. Moving beyond
building on top of existing software, we can begin to imagine what a piece of software
could look like if it itself was moldable, or built to be modified by the user. As the Victoria
and Albert Museum explain, an interesting example of this can be seen in the early 1960s:
“by writing their own programs, artists and computer scientists were able to experiment
more freely with the creative potential of the computer.” However, the evolution and
global spread of personal computing since then has meant that this capability is no longer
limited just to programmers. By simplifying and contextualizing the process of shaping the
tool to their needs, the user is able to make the tool exactly what they need to foster their
unique creativity.
No tool exemplifies moldability better than music digital audio workstations, or
DAWs. DAWs such as Apple’s Logic Pro and Ableton Live are unique in their extensive
ability to be customized and accommodate plugins, hardware, and files of all types. In
part for these reasons, DAWs are widely loved by their users and serve as a shining
example of software making very little assumptions about the user’s creative workflows.
Instead, DAWs accommodate numerous paths to reach a desired outcome, in addition to
providing the resources and community to teach the user how to create any missing
feature themself. Similarly within creative tooling, Robofont also comes to mind when
thinking of moldability. The “fully featured font editor with all the tools required for

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 15 of 23

drawing typefaces” was designed to be built on top of, with customization options and
integrations for a multitude of different scripting languages at its core.
Moldability as seen through scripting languages can also be seen exemplified
through Actionscript in its early years. Interjectable scripting languages effectively
removed the steep learning curve that users would need to climb to fully understand how
to build their own tools themself. Actionscript provided users with abstracted,
easy-to-understand coding building blocks, accompanied by a community of other users
sharing their creations, learning, and pushing the bounds of the tool itself. Within the
broader context of the community as a whole, the object-oriented programming language
inspired a sense of play and experimentation in the user that served as a potent incentive
to create. As Bill Gaver wrote in Designing for Homo Ludens: “The designer’s role in this is
not like that of a doctor, prescribing cures for people’s ills; nor is the designer a kind of
servant, developing technologies that people know they want. Instead, designers should
be provocateurs, seeking out new possibilities for play and crafting technologies that
entice people to explore them.”
ActionScript and Flash attest that the success of a moldable tool often comes
down to the tool’s ability to inspire exploration and spur a vibrant tooling community.
Pioneering users that share their creations and anecdotally attest to the tool’s viability
and promise can be seen as toolmakers. Toolmakers are essential to bringing moldable
software building blocks to the average user—the toolmaker’s shared creations serve as
invitations for the average user to join and create something themself. However, it is also
vital that the tool’s moldability is abstracted enough to be widely accessible—usually
meaning that the interface should be controlled visually and require no technical
knowledge. Positioning a tool in this way allows toolmakers to lead the way and inspire
average users to mold the tool themself.
Making tools adaptable to their user's thought process is the first step in
facilitating more human creativity with computers. Baking flexibility into software is also in
some ways advantageous for the software’s business. Moldable tools allow the user to
build for their own needs as opposed to relying solely on the software company to deliver.
This process also fosters a sustained sense of personal ownership and loyalty to the tool.
Furthermore, the communities that emerge out of moldable tools demonstrate the
creativity and collaboration that come as a result of ownership being shared between the

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 16 of 23

software creators and the software users. Allowing the tool to be customized and built
within a collaborative community serves as a powerful example of how we might facilitate
greater creativity with these tools. This concept also suggests that we consider
alternative ways in which digital tools could abstract inefficient areas of the creative
process.

Abstraction
In considering how computers might become better co-creators and actualizers,
we can begin to identify more granular ways that these machines might become more
classically “efficient” in facilitating and keeping pace with human creativity. However, it is
important that we first acknowledge the tension between efficiency and creativity. While
on the surface the two dimensions may seem at odds with one another, this does not
have to be the case. The computer’s execution skill set lends itself to minimizing the need
for any sort of repetitive or monotonous work that might hinder the creative process. This
truth refocuses our attention on fostering creative thought (such as ideation) as opposed
to linear thought (such as creating a functional architecture), seeing as the computer is
already highly adept at accommodating the latter. As Tom Vanderbilt of Nautilus explains
in “The Pleasure and Pain of Speed,” “As we have shifted from manual typewriters to
electric to, finally, digital tools… that technological speed bump has been eroding. He
cites the research of Stanford University literary scholar Andrea Lunsford, who has
examined freshmen entrance essays from 1917 until the present. While grammatical error
rates have stayed the same, the length and complexity of the essays have dramatically
increased. ‘It’s not that the kids of 1917 were stupider,’ says Thompson ‘It’s just that their
tools were getting in the way of their thought.’”
The challenge lies in training the computer to understand and execute a user’s
specific and often unique intent, with the goal of diminishing repetitive work and instead
inspiring creativity and play. A simple example of this concept can be seen today in the
form of predictive text editors. But we might also imagine how the same repetitive,
logic-based principles could be applied to visual creative tools. Through this lens, the first
step in computers becoming better co-creators would be to simplify repetitive workflows
and accommodate logic in order to increase the efficiency of assembling in the creative
tool.

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 17 of 23

Beginning with simplification, it becomes clear that this situation calls for
abstraction, or the dumbing down of something technical in order to reduce complexity
and omit unnecessary information. In abstracting repetition in the tool, we quickly realize
that doing so requires accommodating a diversity of creative processes. While creative
tools today offer components and other efficiency features, the contrast between the
efficiency of creative tools and engineering tools is stark. Concepts such as abstract
classes in development allow the programmer to apply objectified attributes while hiding
the irrelevant details. In contrast, creative tools often require the construction of applied
properties and details from scratch every time.
This repetition is a reflection of the constructive building model of canvas-based
creative tools. The “elements-on-a-canvas” convention that we see at the core of creative
tools such as Adobe Creative Suite products, Figma, and Sketch replicates the physical
process of assembly that the digital tool has replaced. This approach has proven its
worth: it allows for exploration and spatial orientation in a seemingly endless way.
Replicating this process physically would require drawing possibly hundreds of screens by
hand and then attempting to find the right one in a mess of papers. Despite the digitized
version of this process being a significant improvement, iteration in digital tools today is
still repetitive, time-consuming, and may deter potential creative contributors—especially
in the simplest of use-cases. The scenario in which human-generated iterations mimic
logical/data states proves particularly inefficient. While iteration on the digital canvas
provides a broadly understood medium for creativity, it also necessitates humans act as
machines to produce versions in the precise way the tool allows, which requires time and
creative energy.
Considering how digital tools can be more efficient throughout the creative
process from exploration to production, it becomes clear that moldability is key to
accommodating the different stages’ needs. Beginning with the exploration stage within
the example of interface design, a simple solution to abstract complexity and increase
efficiency is to temporarily minimize options. Providing a simple, scalable interface with
existing primitive elements and safe guides would help the user feel that making
contributions is easy, simple, and reversible. This simplified tool would function like a
lightweight scratchpad, providing both inexperienced and experienced users with
predefined components and allowing them both to experiment rapidly. Offering

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 18 of 23

predefined elements (shapes, text, symbols) directly exemplifies how a digital tool can
augment human intelligence by allowing the user to get into the creative flow faster and
minimize unnecessary construction work.
However, this brings up a common objection by creative people against increased
abstraction. Many believe that in minimizing options, you are effectively killing the
creativity that would come from exploring during the process of assembly. While this
argument is true, it is influenced by a comfortability with the processes of the past. The
goal of increasing abstraction is to keep pace with human thought and provide the user
with everything they need to articulate that thought without interruption. By simplifying
the experience of using the tool, it invites in far more people than previously had access
to the creative process. This fosters greater collaboration at the ideation stage, which is
arguably the most important in order to accommodate a diverse range of perspectives.
Moving further along in the creative process to assembly, it becomes clear that the
computer’s execution skillset uniquely lends itself to generating a multitude of options for
the human user to choose from. The process of assembly offers ample opportunity to tap
into the power of human + computer co-creation by enabling the user to assign
conditional logic14 and dictate numerous variations at once. Returning to our example of
interface design, we can imagine that as opposed to constructing surface-level properties
that simulate how each state of an interface would appear, each state could be visually
defined using conditional logic. Compositions would then be built from the sum of
universal parameters. Logic would form an abstracted rendition of the digital output
(code), thus providing a bridge between the creative and computational thought
processes. Both variation generation and the accommodation of logic afford the human
user greater time and mental capacity to focus on the creative choices that they are
uniquely skilled to make.
Practically, incorporating variation generation and conditional logic in interface
design is the difference between designing numerous different states of the same UI
button versus designing one state and the corresponding logic buttons should follow.
Logic shifts much of the needless production work back on the computer to follow
linearly, as opposed to the human user working as a linear machine. As Frederick G.

14
Conditional logic = { if/else made visual }

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 19 of 23

Linnemann and Carl Minichof state in “Logic Design System,” “The Logic Design System
has been constructed to avoid built in hardware obsolescence."
The creation and widespread adoption of interface design systems can be seen as
a first step towards streamlining ideation and increasing efficiency. As Clancy Stark of
Figma found in his research on “Measuring the Value of Design Systems,” “when
participants had access to a design system they completed their objective 34% faster
than without a design system.” Incorporating logic into a digital tool is the next step in
fully actualizing the computer’s potential as an execution-focused co-creator. This shift
would also allow the user to spend less time on menial production work and more time on
larger creative problems.
One level beyond logic in a creative tool can be seen exemplified in the concept of
“programming by demonstration,” as coined by Bret Victor in his piece, “Magic Ink.”
Returning to our example of interface design, the design process currently forces you to
choose between two options: either learn a programming language (intimidating) or
create mockups and have an engineer implement them (inefficient). Presently, the
mockup process is the most common. However, Victor proposes another approach
altogether called programming by demonstration; this technique involves teaching a
computer what to do by exemplifying exactly what you want to have happen. This method
means that the computer effectively infers and creates the logic needed to reproduce
your demonstration. While yet to be fully realized within creative tools, this concept holds
immense potential for further efficiency, while solidly situating the computer as
co-creator.
Extreme examples of more fully abstracting logic and inputs can be seen in rare
experimental applications of AI for creative tooling production generation. As Cade Metz
of The New York Times reported on Jordan Singer’s explorations using the machine
learning model GPT3 to generate specified code, “He fed the system a simple description
of a smartphone app, and the computer code needed to create the app. The description
was in plain English. The code was built inside Figma, a specialized design tool used by
professionals like Mr. Singer. He did this a few more times, feeding the system several
more English-language descriptions alongside the matching Figma code. And when he
was done, GPT-3 could write such code on its own” (“Meet GPT-3. It Has Learned to Code
(and Blog and Argue)”). This example demonstrates the purest form of co-creation

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 20 of 23

between human and machine. Abstraction and logic highlight how computers could take
full ownership over execution and leave the human user to focus on the creative thinking
that forms the whole.
Combining the concepts we’ve covered thus far brings us to the following
conclusion: Computers have, since their inception, been a rigid tool that the human user
has had to adapt to use. This limits what can be done with the tool because not everyone
knows how to operate the machine in the precise way it requires, nor how to go about
changing it to fit their needs. However, through standardization, moldability, and
abstraction, we can dramatically expand the utility of computers while broadening their
capacity to help more people solve their problems creatively.

Conclusion
But why does this matter? It matters because innovation is largely dependent on
the human capacity to think creatively, and there is a strong argument to be made that
technology’s primary role is to speed up the creative process and catalyze innovation at a
global scale. And yet as Lucien von Schomberg states in “Technology in the Age of
Innovation,” “in the current age… the concept of innovation is predominantly presupposed
as technological innovation.” This commonly-held viewpoint fails to capture the human
creativity that presupposes innovation of any kind, even technological innovation. As the
pioneering mathematician Richard Hamming put it in his book, The Art of Doing Science
and Engineering, “The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.”
Interoperable, moldable, efficient, and community-driven digital creative tools hold
immeasurable potential as co-creators with human beings. Tools of this type would lower
the barrier to entry and make all users toolmakers and owners in an expanded definition
of technological innovation. As Ted Nelson puts it in Computer Lib/Dream Machines,
“everything is deeply intertwingled.”

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 21 of 23

Bibliography
Arbesman, Samuel. “The Forgotten Software That Inspired Our Modern World.” BBC
Future, BBC,
www.bbc.com/future/article/20190722-the-apple-software-that-inspired-the-inter
net.
Austin, Robert D., and Lee Devin. “Research Commentary: Weighing the Benefits and
Costs of Flexibility in Making Software: Toward a Contingency Theory of the
Determinants of Development Process Design.” Information Systems Research, vol.
20, no. 3, 2009, pp. 462–477. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23015475. Accessed 1
Jan. 2021.
Brad A. Myers. "A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology." ACM
interactions. Vol. 5, no. 2, March, 1998. pp. 44-54.
Carter & Nielsen, "Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence", Distill,
2017.
Coale, Kristi. “Closing OpenDoc - a Great Leap Backward?” Wired, Conde Nast, 14 Dec.
2017, www.wired.com/1997/03/closing-opendoc-a-great-leap-backward/.
Eghbal, Nadia. Working in Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software.
Stripe Press, 2020.
Fayad, Mohamed & Cline, Marshall. (1996). Aspects of Software Adaptability. Commun.
ACM. 39. 58-59. 10.1145/236156.236170.
Fussell, Sidney. “The Schism at the Heart of the Open-Source Movement.” The Atlantic,
Atlantic Media Company, 5 Jan. 2020,
www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/ice-contract-github-sparks-dev
eloper-protests/604339/.
Gamezpedia. “Gamezpedia/Awesome-Actionscript.” GitHub,
github.com/Gamezpedia/awesome-actionscript.
Gaver, William w. “Designing for Homo Ludens.” Computer Related Design, 21 Oct. 2014.
Kopf, Dan. “R And Python Are Joining Forces, in the Crossover Event of the Year.” Quartz,
Quartz,
qz.com/1270139/r-and-python-are-joining-forces-in-the-most-ambitious-crossove
r-event-of-the-year-for-programmers/.
Hanson, Chris, and Gerald Jay Sussman. Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 22 of 23

Programming Yourself into a Corner. The MIT Press, 2021.

Jobs, Steve, Interviewee. Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of
Congress. 6 Oct. 2011,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kalMB8jDnY&feature=emb_title.
Moss, Frank. The Sorcerers & Their Apprentices: The Untold Story of MIT Media Lab.
Crown Business, 2011.
Nick Kolakowski. “Top 10 Most Popular Open Source Projects on GitHub.” Dice Insights,
8 Nov. 2019,
insights.dice.com/2019/11/08/10-popular-open-source-projects-github/.
Linnemann, Frederick G., and Carl E. Minich. “Logic Design System.” Proceedings of the
June 1971 Design Automation Workshop on Design Automation - DAC '71, 1971,
doi:10.1145/800158.805090.
Stark, Clancy. “Measuring the Value of Design Systems.” Figma,
www.figma.com/blog/measuring-the-value-of-design-systems/.
Semuels, Alana. “Machines and AI Are Taking Over Jobs Lost to Coronavirus.” Time, Time,
6 Aug. 2020, time.com/5876604/machines-jobs-coronavirus/.
Purcell, Kristen, et al. “The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing Is
Taught in Schools.” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, Pew
Research Center, 30 May 2020,
www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/07/16/the-impact-of-digital-tools-on-student
-writing-and-how-writing-is-taught-in-schools/.
Wessner, Charles W. “Stanford and Silicon Valley.” Best Practices in State and Regional
Innovation Initiatives: Competing in the 21st Century., U.S. National Library of
Medicine, 1 Jan. 1970, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK158815/.
Vanderbilt, Tom. “The Pleasure and Pain of Speed - Issue 9: Time.” Nautilus, 23 Jan. 2014,
nautil.us/issue/9/time/the-pleasure-and-pain-of-speed.
Victor, Bret. “Magic Ink.” Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface, 15
Mar. 2005, worrydream.com/MagicInk/#designing_a_design_tool.
Victoria and Albert Museum, Online Museum. “The Pioneers (1950-1970).” A History of
Computer Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, South Kensington,
London SW7 2RL. Telephone +44 (0)20 7942 2000. Email [email protected], 17
July 2013, www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/computer-art-history/.

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021
 23 of 23

Von Schomberg, L., Blok, V. Technology in the Age of Innovation: Responsible Innovation
as a New Subdomain Within the Philosophy of Technology. Philos. Technol. (2019).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-019-00386-3
Zuegel, Devon. “Episode 03 Ted Nelson.” Tools & Craft, Notion,
www.notion.so/tools-and-craft/03-ted-nelson.

Molly Mielke • UCLA Digital Media Undergrad Thesis • Last updated March 27, 2021