In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Lévi-Strauss Redefined Workflow

The idea of workflows supported by "simple, atomic tools they can understand independently and also provide them with affordances to combine together" resonates with the Unix philosophy of tools that "do one thing, and do it well".

To me it seems that developers understand the value in that proposition, but are unable to incorporate it at the application level when they build tools for others. We are able to do it at the platform level, but using platforms requires understanding programming languages.

I miss the concept of components that end-users can recombine to define their own workflows. Some time ago there was this craze about widgets on the desktop and web, but it didn't materialize beyond some mostly read-only or single-action components that didn't really combine well with each other.