The Dynamic Medium Group

Bret Victor has been working towards Dynamicland his entire life. He started in electrical engineering, enthralled by bringing magic into the real world, and created a line of bestselling and award-winning electronic musical instruments. He then turned to UI design, to invent tools for understanding. His work twice won the Apple Design Award, including an e-book on climate change with Al Gore that “transforms the act of reading into something totally new” (HuffPo).

Upon joining Apple, Bret’s work established the “HID Proto” future-interfaces prototyping group, whose inventions have shaped the last decade of Apple products. Leaving Apple in order to work in the public domain, his research into dynamic media for understanding systems yielded a series of talks, including Inventing on Principle and Media For Thinking The Unthinkable, which received wide industry acclaim and spawned numerous products and companies. Design legend Edward Tufte recognized Bret as a “design theory wizard, at the cutting edge of interface designs for programming, seeing, reasoning.”

Driven by the need for a new medium to understand and address the world's critical problems, Bret co-founded the CDG research lab with computing pioneer Alan Kay, and finally discovered how to close the loop and bring dynamic media into the real world. After three years inventing and prototyping the foundations of Dynamicland, he and his team are making it a reality.

Luke Iannini believes we're at the very beginning of human potential, and that there are 7.5 billion living geniuses awaiting a chance to demonstrate theirs. He focuses on synesthetic representations to help convey ideas as holographically as they appear in our minds. Luke's work includes Creatura, a centerpiece exhibit at the Children’s Creativity Museum where kids create musical creatures together in a shared world, Rumpus, a live-programming environment for rapid prototyping of VR worlds, and Pattern, a language for composing music and visual representations of music simultaneously.

Josh Horowitz believes that new kinds of mathematical literacy will enrich countless lives and give humanity the tools to address global challenges. He is building Dynamicland to incubate the medium that will make this possible. His work is informed by experiences teaching at MIT and Stanford, wrestling with computers at Google, and wrestling with data at Coursera. He has degrees in math and physics from MIT.

Omar Rizwan is fascinated by systems, the secrets they contain, and the interfaces between them – along with the political and cultural content of all of those. He believes in a future where we preserve the freedom of the real world and add computation on top, instead of forcing people into the computer's mold. Omar is also the creator of Screenotate, a tool for taking screenshots which carry their text and context. At the Recurse Center in New York, he made Cruncher, a scrubbing calculator; he has also built educational software at Khan Academy and programmable data visualization tools at Stripe. Omar studied math and computer science at Stanford, where he focused on computer operating systems; while there, he did research on new languages for hardware design and interactive document authoring.

Paula Te thinks and makes with her hands, and is building Dynamicland because education and learning should value the whole human body. Moreover, she is driven to make technology accessible in the widest possible sense—across cultures, abilities, and socio-economic statuses. Her research on tangible interfaces for digital fabrication has been featured at SIGCHI IDC and Prix Ars Electronica. Previously, Paula worked as an interaction designer at Xerox PARC, and in design education in Kathmandu at Karkhana and in Boston at MIT. She studied at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and MIT.

Toby Schachman noticed that in the best learning environments, students make more eye contact with each other than with their screens. He wants to live in a world where we learn programming the way we learn cooking, dancing, woodworking, or singing: practicing and playing together; supporting, challenging, watching, and learning from each other. He builds programming environments that support spatial reasoning, such as Apparatus, a dynamic canvas for drawing interactive diagrams, and Shadershop, which Edward Tufte described as “visual reasoning about symbolic functions. So rich, so elegant, so clear.” He holds degrees from MIT and NYU’s ITP.

Virginia McArthur is building Dynamicland so our kids will have a place to play, learn and collaborate without having to hide behind a screen to solve tomorrow’s problems. Virginia is all about getting stuff done. Before Dynamicland, she was an executive producer at EA, Hasbro and Zynga, creating games that promoted sharing and creativity, most notably the Sims. She also cofounded the nonprofit Zynga.org, which raised over $15 million for charitable causes.