One of the major barriers designers and artists encounter when programming digital media is the difficulty of translating the mental models of their interactive creations into a format and language that can be interpreted by computers. This arises from current software development environments demanding a sequential format for code. In contrast, today digital media is characterized by dynamism and interactivity, and creative individuals conceptualize these computational processes with a wide variety of mental models. MIDE proposes a new interface for visualizing, editing, and manipulating code. It seeks to enable a user-defined conceptual visiospatial representation of computation that complements the traditional text-based perspective, and by maintaining continuous relationships between them, allow users to navigate code in multiple perspectives synchronously. Further, MIDE allows fluid transitions between different modes of computational representation and different levels of representational detail by enabling zooming and information abstraction mechanisms.

David Small and Agnes Chang