Standard Research Grant: Beautiful Code: Aesthetic Discourse and Aesthetic Practice in a Software Organization

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The actions of hundreds of software developers must be precisely coordinated if the software systems and web technologies that people use every day are to work effectively. Ensuring common orientations towards the development process is therefore crucial for developing and deploying new software applications. This project examines how multidisciplinary teams collaborate and coordinate around software systems to effectively develop new software. In addition to using the instrumental language of function and effectiveness to coordinate their work, software developers also discuss software, algorithms, and solutions as being “beautiful” or “ugly” to help them coordinate their design methods and problem-solving strategies. This project examines aesthetics as a mechanism of social control, organizational alignment, and professional signaling among software development teams in video game development where issues of aesthetics are paramount and where groups graphic artists, designers, computer programmers, and other professions must collaborate to craft a common sense of aesthetic practice within engineering production work. Broader impacts include graduate student training, using research materials to develop new university courses, and engaging in public conversations about values and design considerations of automated systems.This project investigates how technical and nontechnical factors shape the outcomes of software engineering collaborations in a digital game studio in which software engineers and programmers work with artists and marketers in developing their products. The main goals are to understand how aesthetics emerge within the daily work practices of collaborative teams, how aesthetic evaluations act as mechanisms of social control and practices of categorization, and how different aesthetic schemas are brought into alignment across the various components of video game design work. Adopting an ethnographic approach, the investigators will engage in participant observation for eight months, four days a week, including formal meetings and informal interactions. Observations will be supplemented with informal conversations and ethnographic interviews focusing on career trajectory, aesthetics, and socializing practices among software developers. Overall, this project will contribute to basic social scientific understanding of engineering work and collaboration at the human-technology interface.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.