Design and computational flexibility

This article discusses three levels of computer use—literacy, fluency and flexibility. Literacy is about the use of particular tools to satisfy well-defined tasks while fluency is a deeper form of knowledge that allows people to adapt to the uncertainties of computing and keep up with new, technological trends. Computational flexibility suggests the further capacity to invent software when existing applications fail to solve new problems. I will suggest a need for designers to become computationally flexible to achieve goals that often begin as ideas that are difficult, if not impossible, to articulate and hand off to expert software engineers for further