Understanding Version Control as Material Interaction with Quickpose

Title of the Paper

Understanding Version Control as Material Interaction with Quickpose

Bibliographic Information

• Field of Study: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Version Control Systems, Creative Coding
• Keywords: End-User Programming, Version Control Systems (VCS), Materiality, Variations, Creative Coding

Research Background and Problem Statement

• Identified Problems or Challenges:

  • Current version control tools have limitations in supporting creative coding practices, particularly in enabling users to engage in "material interaction" with code and its historical versions.
  • These tools are typically focused on collaboration and retrospective support in software engineering, lacking features that support exploratory, annotative, and comparative practices essential for creative work.

• Significance:

  • Understanding "material interaction" is crucial for optimizing design tools, enabling creative coders to better explore diversity and iterative processes.
  • Providing version control tools that support creative thinking could impact workflows, knowledge construction, and goal development in creative coding.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • The HCI field has extensively explored theories of "material interaction" in contexts such as education, creative practices, and cognition. However, these theories are rarely applied to specific domains.
  • Existing version control tools (e.g., Git) are widely used but are not designed to support creative behaviors and material interaction.
  • This paper aims to demonstrate Quickpose as a system that translates theory into a practical tool while exploring how to measure and support user behaviors.

Proposed Solution

• Proposed Solution:

  • Design and implement Quickpose, a version control system tailored for creative coding.
  • Quickpose centers around an interactive canvas, allowing users to directly manipulate code versions, annotate version relationships, and support comparison and reflection through intuitive visualization.

• Innovative Features:

  • Interactive canvas for version management: Users can explore and edit versions by clicking and dragging thumbnails.
  • Annotations linked to version states: Annotations not only analyze individual versions but also support the study of relationships between versions.
  • Support for depth (multiple iterations) and breadth (multi-branch exploration) in knowledge construction: Designed to accommodate varying levels of exploratory needs.

• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:

  • Developed a two-part system architecture:
    • Backend service integrated with the Processing IDE, providing version management and real-time status updates.
    • Frontend built on the Tldraw canvas library, offering an interactive version control interface for users.
  • System functionalities include:
    • Navigation between versions and branch creation (click/Shift+click).
    • Canvas annotations, version grouping, and arrangement.
    • Autosave and checkpoint creation to prevent data loss.
    • Color-coded export functionality, linking multiple versions via specific colors for export.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Outcomes:

  1. Proposed three themes and action indicators for measuring "material interaction," including continuous goal redefinition, contextual exploration, and holistic linked annotations.
  2. Implemented Quickpose as a version control tool for creative coding, preliminarily validating these indicators.
  3. Qualitative and quantitative analyses indicate that Quickpose users can manage versions more effectively, highlighting material interaction behaviors.

• Advantages:

  • Users can easily manage diverse exploration paths and goals during the coding process.
  • Annotations and visualizations enhance the organization and interpretability of version history.
  • Compared to existing tools, Quickpose is better suited to support creative practices and exploratory iteration.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • The experiment collected data from 10 projects, totaling 192 hours of usage, 115 versions, and 178 annotations.
  • Data showed extensive use of version rollback and branch creation features. For instance, depth analysis of rollbacks revealed frequent user access to earlier versions.
  • Users expressed emotions and intentions regarding different versions through annotations, such as marking "final" versions or noting exploration directions.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations: The study's scale was small, involving only four users over a 3-5 week period, making it difficult to capture long-term behaviors.
  • Future Directions:
    • Extend the study duration and include long-term tracking to explore the impact of version control on material interaction.
    • Expand Quickpose to other creative domains and non-visual applications, such as traditional software engineering or educational contexts.
    • Enhance support for broad exploration (e.g., better support for design galleries or automatic variable generation) to address current tool limitations.