Compose & conquer: modularity for end-users

Users have vast amounts of information at their disposal and access to many tools that can compute on that data. Often, no particular program can fulfill a user´s needs; or, when such a program exists, it may be too obscure for the user to find. When users encounter this problem, they resort to ad-hoc approaches, such as importing and exporting data to different file formats, as a way to piece together disparate features from several different programs. As a result, users end up manually entering and manipulating data, defeating the purpose of automatic computing machines. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Creativity Engine, which is like a search engine over the possible links between software libraries. A Creativity Engine can be used to bring together libraries that were never intended to work together, in way that can bring within users´ reach the almost infinite flexibility their machines have to transform data.