In my workshop design, I structured the session to begin with a slideshow presentation where I introduced participants to the history of creative coding IDEs, various navigation systems, and their relationships to code. This was to establish conceptual foundations for participants. Next was a free writing activity, where I asked them 4 sections of questions to encourage creativity when the making part of the workshop came along.
Th four questions were as follows:
- What IDEs have you used in the past and what do you currently use?
- What is your current relationship with your chosen editor? How does it limit you? What does it enable for you?
- Including and BEYOND being a helper, what role do you wish your editor played in development? What do you want your editor to enable for you?
- What role do you wish your editor played in development if it could only be changed via text?
I gathered all the answers together, so that I can look at them more carefully after the workshop to inform my thesis work. To do that I employed Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) visualizations to better grasp the dataset. I like to use UMAP visualizations to get a better grasp of a corpus that can include longer sentences and sentiments because it can reveal surprising patterns when you can see the data from a birds-eye-view. Although this dataset is small enough I can read through all the comments, I wanted to explore the comments dispersed from the linear nature of reading though them person by person. I wanted to grasp the general gestalt of the sentiments from the workshop participants. I used this technique before in an earlier project where I analyzed comments on the Shadertoy website.
What emerged as particularly noteworthy was that the freewriting activity, originally conceived merely as a preparatory exercise to enhance creative output during IDE development, ultimately generated some of the most inspiring content produced throughout the entire workshop session!