Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
June 16, 2025
The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable material that users could reshape at will. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. When your tools don’t work the way you need them to, you submit feedback and hope for the best. You’re forced to adapt your workflow to fit your software, when it should be the other way around.
In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs. Modification becomes routine, not exceptional. Adaptation happens at the point of use, not through engineering teams at distant corporations.
Source: Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
From being ‘bicycles for the mind‘ and tools we can tinker with an adapt, computers have become black box appliances over which we have little control, and we the servants of the software we use.
The folks at Ink and Switch here reimagine the way we might work with our software, making it more malleable.
