Sonja Heinen

Rumor has it that software engineers hold the power to build the things of our future. Now, the world is filling up with technologies and devices – who knows what all of them are for? With power comes responsibility, or in this case the chance to build and write better things.

Here is where strategies and concepts from the social design practice apply. They offer ideas for a holistic approach to programming, while yielding the prospect to establish a connection with your work that goes beyond the purely technical side of things.

A picture says more than …how many lines of code?
Firstly this talk offers an introduction to a variety of established as well as experimental visual documentation methods. Subsequently, it explores the question whether or not these approaches can be applied to software documentation in a reasonable way.
In this regard it takes a closer look at individual methods and estimates their corresponding affordances in terms of time, skill, resources and potential automatization. Eventually, this talk presents an initial attempt to translate existing docs into visual languages and discusses the according outcomes.
Primarily, the objective of reading and writing the docs serves the purpose to convey clear, unambiguous information, at the same time, the experience should be as engaging and pleasant as possible. Building a Visual Documentation Language serves to reach this goal.