Colin McDonnell
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2017–2025
56:22 · 58K views · Jun 17, 2015
Bret Victor's closing keynote at UIST and SPLASH 2014 argues that our tools for thinking ignore most of human sensory and motor capability. He sketches representations that engage more modalities beyond screens and keyboards.
HN treats it as a foundational Bret Victor talk that reshaped how people think about software and interfaces, often cited alongside Dynamicland.
11 comments from Hacker News
Really excited to go through all the other talks listed here I'm not familiar with! Three talks that I tend to reference a lot and have had a huge impact on the way I think about software: The Soul of Software: Avdi Grimm - [LINK] The Humane Representation of Thought: Bret Victor - this video How to Program Independent Games: Jonathan Blow - [LINK]
One of the goals of Dynamicland is to foster the creation of new representations that take advantage of + live across more sensory modalities. Bret calls them modes of representation, but there are similar phrases in learning & psychology literature. Most representations are haphazardly created (math notation, periodic table of elements, etc) by (often) singular experimentation. Representations are poorly researched and understood (there's no branch of science dedicated to them). If representations were studied more closely, we could get much better at deliberately creating representations that are more humane. When the scientific method is applied, we can then apply the engineering method to create new things from those principles. Bret's talk is a great, accessible overview of these ideas from his context ( this video ). To vastly oversimplify things, one way to improve accessibility is to parallelize representations that live in just 1 or 2 sensory modalities to all of our sensory modalities. This way, math notation could be made accessible to & equally powerful to the blind (as it is to those who can see). I empathize (a little, it would be naive for me to assume I can 100% empathize) with your reaction along the axis of accessibility. What Dynamicland looks like right now isn't what it's going to look like later. Right now, you may see Dynamicland as text boxes but now distributed in a room. In 50 or 100 years, there may be no text AT ALL and you can use the senses availabl
It just so happens I was thinking about spatial org just yesterday, that it would be so nice if I can have 'villages' of tabs on a (geographical) Map. Amazing co-incidence that I woke up to bonsai browser notification! You might find The Humane Representation of Thought[1] by Bret Victor[2] useful, where he demonstrates by example, how existing tools/software (generally speaking) doesn't utilize all the 'superpowers' that we acquired via evolution. --- [1]: this video [2]: [LINK] Edit - grammatical fixes
For the people asking who is Bret Victor: When "What are your favourite tech talks of all time?" is asked on HN, he gets more mentions than anyone else, usually. Some of his talks: Inventing on Principle [LINK] The Future of Programming [LINK] The Humane Representation of Thought this video Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [LINK] Seeing Spaces [LINK] Drawing Dynamic Visualizations [LINK] [LINK]
It's going to be entirely different I feel. Instead of manipulating graphics on a flat screen, focus will probably be on manipulating physical objects on a table / in a room. Watch his 2 talks that highlight the thinking and inspiration behind the RealTalk project: [LINK] this video