Libre Designers and the Software Apocalypse (lgm2025)

So, is LGM all about libre tools that software developers make that designers and artists use to make creative work … ? At previous LGMs we’ve talked about open-source design feeding back into improving the look, feel and usability of creative software. But what about the tools used to write those tools? Can we link things back another step? Coding environments have barely changed in decades. Yet the complexity of software produced in them has risen exponentially. The disconnect from cause to effect has become ever greater. All software has bugs, most bugs involve software doing exactly what it was told to do. Sometimes they eat your work, sometimes they kill people. The title of this talk is partly “borrowed” from an article that appeared in The Atlantic in 2017. But is it all hyperbole? This talk was originally proposed for the cancelled LGM in 2020 - the landscape may have evolved since then, such as in the growth of AI, but has it improved? Let’s consider some of the issues. And ongoing experiments in user interaction, liveness and design in various open-source tools that are seeking to change coding for the better. This talk may cover some of the ideas in play. But it certainly won’t have the right answers. It probably hasn’t even found the right questions. But just maybe it’s time to help save the world from code. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://pretalx.c3voc.de/lgm25-upstream-2025/talk/2351779594/