Bret Victor
26 Jun 2022 - 27 Jun 2022
- Inventing on Principle by Bret Victor (2012 talk)
- Principles to guide work
- Creators need an immediate connection, they need to see the effect of changes
- Show differences
- Q: immediate feedback seems wonderful. Yet most human endeavors don't have it, how have we survived so long?
- Q: compare Christopher Alexander hands-on generativity
- Punch cards, and the whole pre-intereactive era
- The millions of pieces (ideas) locked in people's heads. They need an environment in which they can grow.
- Motivation: not opportunity, a moral wrong that needs to be fixed.
- Technologists can have an activist stance (lifestyle)
- Others
- Larry Tesler
- Richard Stallman
- Your principle?
- "the world will try to define you by a skill"
- the path of the craftsman vs the path of the problem solver.
- "keep it simple" is too simple to be a principle.
- A principle has to guide action: you see something wrong and have to do something about that.
- Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface (2006 paper)
- Interactivity is bad? Seems on the surface to actively contradict Inventing on Principle!
the larger intent is to introduce a “unified theory” of information software design, and provide inspiration and direction for progressive designers who suspect that the world of software isn’t as flat as they’ve been told.
Unless it is enjoyable or educational in and of itself, interaction is an essentiallynegativeaspect of information software.
Much current software is interaction-heavy and information-weak.
- This seems no longer true, even if it was true at the time
Two centuries ago, Playfair invented statistical graphics and changed the world. The time is ripe for another designer to invent the fundamental context-sensitive graphical forms, and change the world again.