Empowering designers with creativity support tools

When conceiving of and implementing interactive behaviors, most designers rely on professional software developers to prototype and implement their designs. They often use static drawings or animations to convey how their application should work. While these drawings are effective in conveying the look of an application, they do not effectively communicate its feel. In addition, other barriers prevent many interaction designers from taking full advantage of computational tools. We plan to address this by building a new development language and environment especially suited for creating and prototyping interactive applications. In this paper, several related studies and their implications for the design of such a language are discussed.