Crafting Kind Tools

Abstract:

We are all tool-makers. If you are an educator, your lessons are tools. You make them to be used by students. Students use your lessons to build mental models piece-by-piece, and learn processes step-by-step. If you are a researcher, you design experiments as tools to be used by participants. As a scientist, your analyses are tools used by other researchers to replicate and extend what you did. And finally, if you use software for making any of these tools, you are also using a tool that was crafted by someone else. Is it kind? What makes a tool kind? In this talk, I’ll share ideas and insights I’ve gained while working to make tools for everyday data science communication kinder for users. I’ll discuss some case studies from my work on free and open-source software at RStudio over the past 2.5 years.