Hey everyone, I’m Geert, an Interaction Designer, who is very interested in the future of programming/coding beyond current paradigms. For my master thesis I worked with Arduino on making a future way of coding using active learning and acting out scenarios as a starting point; Arduino Action (https://geertroumen.nl/portfolio/index.php?page=action ). For this thesis I did a variety of Bret Victorian prototypes and explorations to see where this could lead me. I have been working at Microsoft Research on the inclusive design for the future of work, with the team who created Project Torino (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-torino/) focussing on tools to help visually impaired children to be more socially aware (https://geertroumen.nl/portfolio/index.php?page=microsoft). Before that I’ve been doing an internship at LEGO working on the current generation Mindstorms products. Currently I’m working on experience prototyping for products within Accenture Industrial Design. Besides that I have been teaching teachers Arduino since begin of high school and are very interested in how we can expand the field of programming beyond the textual representations. Given that Excel might be the biggest programming environment created, us technologist might need to rethink what we see as programming. I’m very looking forward to have some conversations with people within this community on how to move forward, what it would take and what we think is forward to start with. I’m passionate about the view of Bret Victor, but see more problems with technology that his principle, and more problems with this world than that only can be solved with technology. (In my thesis on Arduino Action the lack of togetherness and transparency with the current tools seemed more pressing than direct manipulation for example). Feel free to write me a message if any of this resonates with you, or if you want to talk about anything. I would love to have some chats, but also preferably in person meeting where we can turn the world around in our imaginations; I’m living in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. So anywhere in the Netherlands is easy, outside might be online first.

‘Bret Victorian’. You really know you’ve arrived when you become an adjective.

Really epic to see visual programming as a way to see whats actually going on with Arduinos. I literally started an Arduino project today and as despite being a visual programming buff i never thought of combining these two. Awesome work!