What We Can Learn From Visual Artists About Software Development
This work addresses the integration of end-user programming and creativity support in systems engineering, offering insights for artists as collaborators in software development.
The paper investigates how visual artists engage with software development, finding they learn it for intellectual growth and community access, prioritize efficient manual workflows over automation, and experience conflicts with developer priorities that shape their use of computational aesthetics.
This paper explores software's role in visual art production by examining how artists use and develop software. We conducted interviews with professional artists who were collaborating with software developers, learning software development, and building and maintaining software. We found artists were motivated to learn software development for intellectual growth and access to technical communities. Artists valued efficient workflows through skilled manual execution and personal software development, but avoided high-level forms of software automation. Artists identified conflicts between their priorities and those of professional developers and computational art communities, which influenced how they used computational aesthetics in their work. These findings contribute to efforts in systems engineering research to integrate end-user programming and creativity support across software and physical media, suggesting opportunities for artists as collaborators. Artists' experiences writing software can guide technical implementations of domain-specific representations, and their experiences in interdisciplinary production can aid inclusive community building around computational tools.