<https://tashian.com/articles/dynamicland/>
# thinking-togetheri
Ivan Reese
09/18/2019, 5:11 PM
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carl
09/18/2019, 5:34 PMThanks Ivan for sharing! I learned so much from writing this over the past year—including from conversations with people here in the FoC community. ❤️
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Ivan Reese
09/18/2019, 6:29 PM
I just finished reading it. This was a wonderful article, giving a perspective into Dynamicland and the people behind it that I've been missing. Some people (here and elsewhere) are critical of what they see as hero worship of Victor, but I think they're missing out. Reading about this helps me to know the meaningful story behind the work and people I admire and respect, so that I can better understand and format my own research process. Thank you for making the effort to investigate and write this, and I'm glad you're here in this community.
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carl
09/18/2019, 7:05 PMThanks Ivan!
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Edward de Jong / Beads Project
09/18/2019, 7:30 PMI visited Dynamicland. It imagines a future where humans and computers are more intertwined. In that sense it is like the original Negroponte Architecture Machine, which produced a prototype of Google Street view in 1970 when everyone was still on punchcards and terminals. Unfortunately with today's technology the interaction model that users are offered is incredibly clumsy. The colored dots on their sheets of paper are basically a bar code, and not a well designed one at that, referring to code stored on a server. I think they would prefer to have MS' AR goggles, but that would take 100x the programming and at least 20x the budget. The realities of current programming make it effectively a lonely outpost in man-machine evolution.
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wtaysom
09/19/2019, 1:22 AMThere is a clunkiness to it. It took me a little while understand and appreciate the attempt to jump so far from present-day conventions so as to avoid being sucked back into local optima.
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curious_reader
09/19/2019, 7:54 AM@carl Thank you Carl for writing this! So many good details that are easily overlooked.
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curious_reader
09/19/2019, 7:55 AM"As a result, most professional programmers today spend their days editing text files inside an 80-column-wide command line interface first designed in the mid-1960s. And most people don’t even question it. But there is a subculture of programmers — with Victor as its natural center — who believe that programming is in a Dark Age because of this near-universal commitment to the trinity."
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 7:57 AM"They could follow intuitive hunches that were unlikely to lead to anything. They could spend long, quiet days reading and doing uninterrupted deep work in a direction of their choosing" <== this should be a human right, to really think, to engage in sensemaking you really DO need quiet days and uniterrupted work...
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:09 AMeven more interestign this story!
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:09 AMcurious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:12 AMIts really interesting to see how these things blend and interact with each other. I would argue that every programmer aka human beeing things about this:
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:12 AMhow is my work meaningful to me and in relationship with society
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:14 AMFor example dijkstra hints at this when speaking about the relationship between computer industry and computing science
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:14 AMcurious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:16 AMwe shape technology and technology shapes us in return
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:19 AMI think its a good thing to approach this from a multi diverse perspective, alan kay mentions this sometimes too when he tells stories from the beginning of the field of computing, that because there was no field prior to that, people from different fields came to it to contribute ( biology, math, physics but also psychology)
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:20 AMFor example, If you read up on Seymour Papert you can really see how important the influence of Psychology was on his work
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:42 AMSome more gems from the dynamicland article:
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:43 AMIn a talk he gave last year at Harvard, Victor laid out three major design principles from the research that were incorporated into Realtalk:
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:43 AM1. The medium should be communal and accessible. People should learn and collaborate through awareness, with no assumption of a single, isolated user sitting at a laptop with a keyboard and mouse. (the humane medium , I love it!)
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:44 AM2. The medium should allow people to think with their bodies, because we are more than fingers and hands. (cognitive science!)
curious_reader
09/19/2019, 8:46 AM3. The medium should expand people’s agency and liberate their creativity; rather than being an app with a limited set of features defined by a corporation and imposed on people (agency and creativity - what is the relationship with corporations)
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Greg Jarmiolowski
09/23/2019, 8:38 PMGreat article. I really like the end piece about infinity minus x. My own take on this for years has been "science can barely imagine what is".
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