OOPSLA, 2004

I am writing this in Vancouver airport, on my way home from OOPSLA conference. It seemed to me that the nature of the creative process was a recurring thread through the program. The most thought provoking session I attended was a workshop run by Dick Gabriel - Extravagaria II. The subject of the workshop was the creative process followed by artists and scientists. Explore; Discover; Understand. The general process has some commonalities. We externalize our ideas and interact with them, as a result we develop an understanding that we can communicate to others in our community. As our mental models evolve, we are changed by our interactions with our work in a yin-yang way. In both inspiration can come about via methodical approaches although there is an unconscious element to the mental gear shifts we make - immersion followed by defocussed attention. During the workshop we were challenged to write a sestrina - to see how applying constraints can boost creativity. It was funny to observe how satisfied the group was with a superficial delivery - on-time, loosely conformation to the sestrina format but truly terrible as poetry. A little like a software delivery that conforms to the written requirements without satisfying the customers needs. The second exercise was to write a simple program using StarLogo. Attending the workshop was a last minute choice for me so I had not familiarized myself with this interactive programming environment (which by the way is really cool). Again interesting to observe that recognizing the task was tough in the time, we dropped our principles and made little attempt to work together as a group. Ivan Moore and I had great fun running our workshop on Gumption Traps and how to uncover root causes of demotivation using techniques from systems thinking. Other highpoints were the Turing lecture delivered by Alan Kay in which he demonstrated OpenCroquet, Ward Cunningham's talk on System of Names and wiki and working with Gerard Mezaros on patterns for Heartbeat Retrospectives. Low point was the Keynote that turned into into a demo of their latest tool (a certain Chief Scientist sitting near me was heard muttering "I can't take any more of this" as he walked out).