The article Toolkits and interface creativity talks about the importance of developing and having toolkits, particularly, in developing creative groupware.
The points of this article are highly educational. It cast one word to me: sustainability, which is often used in environment protection. Researchers tend to develop 'one-off' systems: systems that appear in one paper and then disappear for good. Driven by internal motivation or external pressure of publishing papers, some or most researchers have to make the implementation as fast as possible. So the 'one-off' way seems to be the optimal idea. However, as pointed out in the article (the Active Hydra example), doing in a 'one-off' way will only result in a breakdown in a possibly continuable project or research topic. On the other hand, starting from building the most fundamental, even though inevitably slows down the shipping at the very beginning, will contribute significantly to later projects or research, reducing the effort and shortening the time spent. It is similar to sustainable development where we consider more about the benefits for the future, not exclusively for now.
Another idea from this article is that toolkits conform to the BRETAM model of technology development. Most of us believe research is about creative ideas - continuously producing something new - while building toolkits sounds like engineering stuff. This article raises some interesting thoughts that while you build the toolkit, you at the meantime are forming some 'design rule' and 'design theory' and regulating 'automation and maturity'. It reminds me of the development of OOP (Object-Oriented Programming). The OO theory and the programming language evolved reciprocally. And today when we develop a system in an OO way and using OOP language, we almost take it for granted. I guess that is also what we should perceive when we are developing toolkits.
