Paper Thoughts

Bret Victor is interviewed by John Pavlus, and discusses why computers have failed to live up to their potential. At the core, the problem is that we continue to follow outmoded print paradigms that hinder our ability to thrive in a digital age. article

He sees himself less as a designer/developer/engineer than as a researcher of computer-augmented creativity, much like his mentor Alan Kay (who pioneered graphical user interfaces and object-oriented programming) and his hero Douglas Engelbart (of “The Mother of All Demos” fame).

In other words, Victor practices what he preaches: he doesn’t use computers to build better mousetraps, but to explore and communicate ideas in a way that uniquely exploits the properties and possibilities of a programmable, dynamic, interactive medium.

These projects, Victor says, are just “nibbles around the edges” of his larger obsession: how the media in which we choose to represent our ideas shape (and too often, limit) what ideas we can have.

..."Now we’re staring at computer screens and moving our hands on a keyboard, but it’s basically the same thing. We’re computer users thinking paper thoughts.”

... “One of the big barriers with computers today is certainly the physical interface, but this isn’t a technology problem,” he says. “The bigger part of it is just in finding the right ways of thinking, finding the right representations of abstractions, so people can think thoughts that they couldn’t think before.

The article or book is the paradigm of the print age, where connection and reuse is difficult. Current web forms like blogging add small augmentations to traditional writing: citations become hyperlinks, for example. But the form is unchanged. You write an end-to-end article, you publish, you never return.

Maybe the larger question is to ask "how can we promote more of those 'nibbles around the edges'" when teaching computer users?

Bret Victor has called federated wiki one of the most important projects currently going on, presumably because it subverts our paper-based notions of what information is and how we should deal with it.

Perhaps there really isn't a subversion at work at all, but rather a new medium which promotes a different style of thinking. There's very little scrolling. No flipping. Linking outside of the fedwiki is discouraged. The very action of clicking "Recent Changes" forces the writer to return, and thus another kind of recursivity is formed.

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For some more advanced Paper Thoughts, see Textus Inclusus and Aristotelian Notes