This paper discusses findings from studies of the role of programmers in art-technology collaborations (both social and technical). It considers the role of programming in the digital art domain. The authors note that it is unclear how software development methodologies vary from methodologies for generating interactive art (excluding HCI techniques for evaluating interactive art).
Collaboration is within two types of community:
COP (Communities of Practice) - People from similar backgrounds
COI (communities of Interests) - Where people from different backgrounds contribute to the same project.
The latter come with different languages and knowledge systems which makes building a shared understanding of the task a difficult and slow incremental process. Boundary objects allow for a shared reference within systems.
The collaboration was investigated using grounded-theory (and the approach is nicely summarised). The data was taken from semi-structured qualitative interviews.
This produced a theory that ``The programmers role is to attune the computer to the artist, through either `Intimate Iteration' [small iterations to system] or `Toy-Making' [program as `toy' for the artist to work with].''
The data showed that there are different types of collaboration between artists and programmers (programmer as assistant, full-partnership with artist control, and full partnership. (For further details on these groupings see Maeda and Burns 2004.)
They also noted that vague artistic description needed to be understood by the programmer as there is a dichotomy between analysis and synthesis.
In all cases studied, bottom up development was used to aid the attuning process, and in all but one an agile development methodology was applied.
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