Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
These developments contributed to the creation of a new business model that we
call today “authoring software” - software that takes users by the hand in the pro-
cess of integrating multiple types of media with almost no programming, applica-
tions like
Hypercard, Hypermedia, Macromedia Director, Adobe Flash
, or the new
HTML5 editors. All these packages transfer knowledge from specialists to
nonspecialists in usable and comprehensible forms; hence all these authoring tools
belong to the creative technologies domain.
In 2007 the authors of this chapter released the application
Emotion Wizard,
a
prototype that allows users with no skills in the design of virtual worlds to very
quickly and easily set up the mood of 3d environments (Zagalo and Torres
2008
). In
the same year the MIT group, Lifelong Kindergarten, using the mantra “Showing
the Seeds for a More Creative Society”, delivered the visual programming language,
called
Scratch
. They wanted to permit nonskilled users, the children, to create “from
scratch” their “own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art”,
1
in syn-
thesis, to express themselves, giving external form to inner, private, and individual
imagined worlds.
Scratch visual metaphors have been so successful that in 2010 Google used it to
create
Google App Inventor
,
2
a tool allowing anyone to create their own software
applications for the Android OS. And again in 2011 another company created
StencylWorks
,
3
a game engine to permit anyone to create games, making use of a
programming layer based in Scratch and working upon Actionscript 3.0.
In parallel to the “authoring software” evolution, back in the 1980s appeared
another community movement, grounded in mass collaboration that came to be
defi ned as the GNU Project. Created by Richard Stallman from MIT in 1983, it was
a response to all corporate software. The goal was to liberate creativity by granting
free access to the code to improve software and free to redistribute it to anyone. Free
software emerged as a leading force for computer communities all over the world.
The concept created a movement, which opened the digital arena for totally free-
dom and creation - liberation from the “not do,” from the copyright infringements,
and from the corporations laws impeding consumers creativity. The free software
movement then merged in 1998 into the movement on open source.
In 2002 the open-source movement, typically restricted to the computer science
communities, expanded to receive creators with no digital skills, Web 2.0 emerged,
the term RIA (Rich Internet Applications) was coined,
4
and the fi rst Creative
Commons licenses were released.
5
This larger group was in the fi rst phase much
more concentrated on sharing activities; the creation was limited to productions
with text (e.g. blogs), maybe because most of the initial tools where not yet open to
other possibilities.
1
Scratch information can be gathered at
http://info.scratch.mit.edu/About_Scratch
2
For more information on the tool, visit
http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/
3
For more on StencylWorks, visit
http://www.stencyl.com/stencylworks/overview/
4
Jeremy Allaire, 2002, Macromedia Flash MX - A next-generation rich client, Macromedia White
Paper,
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/fl ash/whitepapers/richclient.pdf
5
On the history of Creative Commons, visit
http://creativecommons.org/about/history/
