Here are some quotes from Bret Victor:
Quotes
This is not computer-supported collaborative work. This is not Google Docs. Those things are still about using words and pictures, just more efficiently. I'm talking about pushing words aside and making dynamic models be the content of the conversation.
What the author sends to the reader is not a pile of words, it's a working thing that the reader actively explores. I'd like authors to be surprised by what readers learn, because what the author sends out isn't static, it's capable of emergent behavior.
Our models live in a flat space -- the computer screen -- because that's the only way we can make them dynamic, and dynamism trumps everything. Now we need to infuse the physical world with that dynamism, so we can think with our hands again.
I'm figuring this out as I go. One's ability to articulate an idea always lags behind the understanding of the idea, and the understanding of an idea often lags behind the embodiment in which it is first given life. It can take a surprising amount of time to come to understand what a prototype is trying to "say", and longer still to say it oneself.
These ideas do not just belong to the digital age - they relate to Samplers and Apprentice Pieces that are used in making of furniture, sewing, knitting and coding.
More Quotes
The wrong way to understand a system is to talk about it. The right way is to model it and explore it. You can't do that it words. People use old tools, they are explaining and convincing with reasoning and rhetoric, instead of evidence and explorable models.
Representations draw on latent capabilities. The famous Playfair example, which was the first data graphic, repurposes map cognition from geography to data.
I'm talking about improvising and sketching dynamic models in seconds, not hours or weeks, as part of the real-time give and take of a conversation.
Representations live in media. If we go all in with a medium, like print, then latent capabilities not well supported in that medium are neglected.
Representations draw on latent capabilities. The famous Playfair example, which was the first data graphic, repurposes map cognition from geography to data.
When you consider the great ideas of history, really it's great representations that enabled people to think those ideas.
Representations live in media. If we go all in with a medium, like print, then latent capabilities not well supported in that medium are neglected.
When you consider the great ideas of history, really it's great representations that enabled people to think those ideas.
.