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Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps (2025)
Environments matter. To do our best work and live our best lives, we need spaces that let us each express our unique potential.
A guitar maker sets up their workshop with their saws, hammers, chisels and files arranged just so. They can also build new tools as needed to achieve the best result—a wooden block as a support, or a pair of pliers sanded down into the right shape.
Over the years, a home cook gradually assembles a combination of knives, cutting boards, and pots and pans, finding the ones that work best for them. They can install hooks on the ceiling and move shelves around to support their workflow—whether that’s cooking weekday dinners or hosting elaborate weekend cookouts.
These are everyday situations. In the physical world, the act of crafting our environments comes naturally, because physical reality is malleable.
Many small tweaks—taping a post-it note to the wall, rearranging some drawers, moving a piece of furniture—can be done instantly without asking anyone’s permission. We can also take on larger changes that require more effort and skill, like building a workshop or renovating a kitchen. And should we lack those skills ourselves, we can recruit help from craftspeople in our local communities.
When we work and live in a physical space that we control, we tend to evolve it to suit our own needs. As Stewart Brand writes in his book How Buildings Learn: “Age plus adaptivity is what makes a building come to be loved. The building learns from its occupants, and they learn from it.”
These days, we spend more and more of our time in environments built from code, not atoms. We’ve gained many capabilities in this shift—we can collaborate instantly across continents and search thousands of files in an instant. But we’re also losing something important: the ability to adapt our environments and make them our own.
Here’s an example. One of the authors worked on a software team that tracked its work with index cards taped to a wall. The team would constantly evolve the tracker—tape lines moved; checklists appeared; special zones of cards emerged around the main grid. The fluidity of the tool encouraged fluidity of process.
Later, the team switched to a web-based issue tracker to support remote collaborators. Now there wasn’t a way to model or display a special zone of cards, so the team abandoned that part of their process. Further process changes also ground to a halt. Before, new ideas took minutes to try; now they could take hours of wrangling configurations, if they were possible at all. Computerizing work led to a loss of agency.
The rigidity of software isn’t just a minor inconvenience. It can seriously impede people doing important work. The doctor and writer Atul Gawande has written about how computerization in the medical profession is leading to record levels of burnout. For instance, doctors would once skip irrelevant fields when filling out paper forms; now the software forces them to fill in those fields, and they have no power to edit those software rules. As Gawande says of one doctor: “Spending the extra time didn’t anger her. The pointlessness of it did.”