Name: Computers as theatre
ISBN: 9780201550603

What Hacker News says

AfterHIAOct 2025

A few more that young developers need to read:

Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. This used to be the, "Bible" before Nelson fell into relative obscurity. Ted Nelson was the first to coin the term, "Hypertext" in the 1960s after reading a famous article by Vannevar Bush

https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib,_Dr...

Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. Introduction to, "interfaces as pedagogy." This lays a foundation for, "what computer interfaces look like when you can use human intuition to work through them."

https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed...

Jef Raskin was the original head of the Macintosh team. This treatise on humane design is invaluable and has been largely ignored. Any person that takes these ideas and makes them work will be a proverbial father of, "the next generation of computing."

https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask

Douglas Engelbart who is often regard as, "the inventor of the mouse" founded his working philosophy by describing an operation paradigm for continued exponential improvement in groups. In some sense it's a masterwork in, "computer ethics."

https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engel...

Early article describing Hyperlinking and aspects of the Internet some of which haven't been or have been under-realized. Imagine what, "social histories for extending research" would look like if taken seriously.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

Computers As Theatre by Brenda Laurel; "think of the computer not as a tool but a medium." Brenda is an actress that applied Aristotle's Poetics to computer design. An absolute foundational classic.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsThe...

Worthy mention: Alan Kay's Quora. This is a literal goldmine of insights into the history of programming languages and computing paradigms. He'll answer your question if it's meaningful.

https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11

Remember: computer paradigms have changed every few decades. We started with pontifications by philosophers about the foundations of mathematics to mechanical machines to vacuum tube machines to (skipping some things) huge mainframes to mini-computers to linked personal computers (Engelbart) to the Xerox Alto. We now live in a world of castrated, linked post-Altos and a failed realization of portable computers in the form of b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶w̶a̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶-̶o̶u̶t̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ smartphones. Ask yourself-- what comes next? How can we significantly improve computers for human beings?

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pvgNov 2023

This is used in usability and UX design a lot.

It's the fundamental thing that makes UI work. I've always liked the title of Brenda Laurel's book - Computers as Theatre

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carapaceJan 2020

If I had more time I would write a better comment, apologies.

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I doubt it requires big research to make good tools. Inventing "zero" wasn't done by committee. In any event, the research has been done. It is steadfastly ignored. E.g. something as simple and straightforward as Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface" applied uncreatively would measurably improve the majority of user interfaces out there. There's a near total disconnect between good UI design and what gets inflicted on IRL users. Evidence: every change ever made to every app or web app that made the users scream. Heck, "Google backtracks on search results design (techcrunch.com)" is on HN front page as I type this. At best people are fucking UI/UX to make a buck, but most of them do it because they suck at their jobs.

This isn't limited to UI design. E.g. MLs have had type algebra for decades and yet it's only just barely gaining traction among "professional" programmers today in A.D. 2020. Instead of flying cars we have Rube Goldberg machines made out of other Rube Goldberg machines.

That's why "When small groups of motivated people [try] they make rapid progress." Because what we're using now is refried merde.

It doesn't scale either because people are stubborn about giving up crap[1] -or- it just hasn't been let.

Canon killed the Cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

Dynamicland may be fantastic but you can't buy it for money.

([1] This might be the real problem: People just don't give a fuck. Thinking takes energy- calories -and so, as an evolved animal, if you can get by w/o it, you will. "The Internet is for porn.")

I've known what I wanted to make ever since reading Ted Nelson's "Dream Machines" and that was twenty-odd years ago (it was published way earlier, that's just when I got ahold of it.) Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" was even earlier.

(I've been playing with a very simple UI demo that incorporates elements from Raskin and from Wirth's Oberon OS. Its backing store is a git repo and all changes are autosaved. It's dreamy. Raskin warns that excellent UIs are addictive in the sense that once you get used to them it's like withdrawal if you have to go back, and he's right. Mac, Windows, X et. al., it's all so painful and clunky now.)

So yeah, with a little work, and standing on the shoulders of giants and not on their toes, you can make something fantastically better than current tools/OSs. It's not hard.

It might even make money in the marketplace, eh?

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> What's needed is the development of a powerful praxis, a set of core ideas which are explicit and powerful enough that new people can rapidly assimilate them, and begin to develop their own practice. We're not yet at that stage with tools for thought.

Speak for yourselves, eh?

Here's where I think they fall into the same trap as so many people do (philosophers, psychologists, designers-of-tools-for-thought, etc.) when talking about thought: They do not define the term.

What is thought?

(As an aside the only place I've seen that can begin to claim to have a concrete mathematical theory of intelligence amplification is "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby.)

Anyhow, the folks who have the goods on the structure of subjective experience work under the rubric of "Neurolinguistic Programming" (the other NLP). Unfortunately the school of thought is still seen as pseudoscience! Oh well, what a world...

Anyway, the "machine code" of thought is called "submodalities" in NLP jargon, an (outmoded) model of "microcode" is called "strategies" but that's deprecated (I don't know how to succinctly describe the replacement models, and many of them don't have names), etc. Using the patterns and algorithms discovered or reified by the NLP folks you can rapidly and easily reprogram your mind. [2] At that point you don't really need external "tools of thought" but if that's your thing you're in a much better place to make them. (I.e. if you want to make mind-machine interfaces and such like, or design audio/visual/kinesthetic UIs and UX flows.) Here you're going to want to pick up a copy of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" to get a handle on the finer points of cognition and storytelling. See also Brenda Laurel's "Computers as Theatre".

[2] For example there's a spelling "strategy" that involve using visual memory to recall the word (as a picture) and a kinethestic check for correctness. In other words, remember the word, feel that it's right, then read it off from the picture in your mind. Most good spellers use that strategy, most bad spellers do something else. You can take someone who is bad at spelling, teach them to use the proper "strategy", and suddenly they are good spellers. It's analogous to replacing a buggy spellcheck subroutine with a correct one. Spelling isn't hard, we have just been teaching badly. We are in a transition time in psychology similar to when alchemy became chemistry.

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carapaceAug 2018

If you're interested in good UI design read Jef Raskin, "Humane Interface"[1].

You should also study the Oberon OS. You would have to read up[2] on it to use it[3], but it's a high point of UI elegance that has never been equaled since. (Specifically the base system plus the "Gadgets" UI extensions.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface

[2] http://www.projectoberon.com/

[3] Live in-browser Oberon system from original source code, via JS emulator for the underlying RISC CPU: https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/

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edit:

And if you want to read a book that fell through a wormhole from thirty years in the future read: "Computers as Theatre" by Brenda Laurel.

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carapaceApr 2020

Been thinking about VR workspaces since sometime in the '80's. Broadly, they suck. It seems so cool but in practice VR adds pointless overhead to efficient UI. Windows with affine transformations suck at their one job. Very few people use Second Life as an IDE.

The big win, as far as I can tell, would be to engage the user's spacial memory. (There is a small but non-zero niche for 3D visualization of complex systems: weather, large molecule, etc.) You're going to want to combine "memory palace" with "zooming" UI in a kind of pseudo-3D (I think of it as 2.618...D but the exact fractal dimension isn't important I don't think.) Then infuse with Brenda Laurel's "Computers as Theatre"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Laurel - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/239018.Computers_as_Thea...

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johnzabroskiFeb 2011

There is a thing in HCI called the End-User Model Fallacy, where engineers try to create an interface based on a prototypical end-user, and then the real end-user spends time trying to figure out how they think the interface works, and it becomes a vicious cycle where the engineers think they are improving the interface, but in reality are just causing the real end-users to come up with a new model of the interface that they can use to get their work done.

This Fallacy was first described to me in Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BrendaLaurel

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