watch bret victor's inventing on principle on vimeo (opens in a new tab).
i saw bret victor's inventing on principle when it came out in 2012. i can still picture the tree changing as he drags a number in the code beside it. later he rewinds a jump in a small game, changes the bounce, and watches the character's path change. i was used to editing, running, and waiting. this made code feel like a sketchbook. his principle was that creators should see what they are making as they make it. i wanted that freedom in my own work: to follow an odd thought, break a rule, and see what it revealed.
in up and down the ladder of abstraction (opens in a new tab), victor uses a car following a road to explain how abstraction helps us understand unpredictable systems. you can control time, the turning rule, and the shape of the road. one run becomes a trajectory; linked views compare many rules and roads. they let you climb up to notice a pattern and step back down to one run to understand its cause.
in the future of programming (opens in a new tab), he speaks as though the year were 1973, when people were already exploring direct manipulation, spatial representations, and concurrent systems. many conventions we still use grew out of the machines and problems of that time. some of those constraints have changed, but the conventions remain. the talk makes me wonder what we could design if we started with today's needs and treated those old decisions as choices again.
the our choice demo (opens in a new tab) made me rethink books for screens. mike matas (opens in a new tab), one of my favorite designers, designed its touch interface; victor made its interactive graphics. on an ipad or iphone, you could browse photographs, video, and data within the story, even blow into the microphone to turn a windmill. it showed me what a book can do when it is designed for the medium in your hands.
bret victor remains one of the people who most inspires me in technology. his apple work (opens in a new tab) included early ipad interface concepts and iphone interface prototyping (opens in a new tab). today, at dynamicland (opens in a new tab), he and his team are building a shared computing environment with paper, cameras, and projectors.
his work stays with me when i am working through an idea. it reminds me to ask what i am really trying to understand, and which assumptions i brought with me before i even began.