You might have seen Bret Victor’s 55-minute Inventing On Principle talk soon after he gave it in 2012. If not, you should check it out. If you did, you should check it out again and see how it makes you feel today:

It is about interactions but in the service of something grander, which (if I’m doing my job well) you might recognize as Unsung’s core theme.

Victor – a designer, researcher, and computing historian – gave a few other talks in the few years since, and I thought a little guide might be helpful:

• Media For Thinking The Unthinkable (40 mins) is the continuation, with slightly more academic examples.
• Drawing Dynamic Visualizations (35 mins) is specifically about information visualization, chiefly a demo of the “Illustrator, but programmatic” tool showed briefly in the above talk. There’s also a bit more theory.
• Similarly, Stop Drawing Dead Fish (53 mins) is a demonstration of a different programmatic tool to make animations.
• The Humane Representation of Thought (56 mins) presents more theoretical underpinnings to the Inventing On Principle talk.
• The Future of Programming (32 mins) is a – mostly static/​traditional – history lesson about what programming could be.

There are some wonderful repeating themes in there:

• We can do and expect better from computing and interactions.
• You have to know your history to march confidently toward the future.
• Ideas need an environment that nurtures them.
• Playful environments leads to more discoveries.
• Feedback doesn’t just have to happen. It has to happen immediately and comprehensively.
• There are no left-brained and right-brained people, but our brains have two different modalities: language (algebra) vs. spatial (geometry).
• A big emphasis on two-handed operation (kind of like Fontificator just yesterday).

I love this blend of theory and practice, inspiration and pragmatism, high- and low-level. The tools look surprisingly professional for research projects, but underlying their microinteractions is a deep philosophical stance. It all reminds me a bit of Jef Raskin and Doug Engelbart.

Victor’s last talk of this era is Seeing Spaces (15 mins) from 2015, serving as a sort of introduction of him moving toward computing in physical spaces. As far as I understand, Victor has been spending time on Dynamicland since, which is definitely more physical computing, but also a lot more academic and scrappy, and as such out of range for this blog.

(His website is worth checking out, especially if you’re not in the mood for talks and would like to get to know his work in a different way.)