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.